If someone in 2023 has ever had much call to use turpentine, chances are good it was something to do with paint or other wood finishes, like varnish. Natural turpentine is the traditional solvent of choice for oil paints, which have decreased in popularity with the rise of easy-to-clean polymer-based paints and coating. Oh sure, there are still those who prefer oil paint, especially for trim work — it lays up so nice — but by and large, turpentine seems like a relic from days gone by, like goose grease and castor oil.
It wasn’t always so, though. Turpentine used to be a very big deal indeed, as shown by this circa 1940 documentary on the turpentine harvesting and processing industry. Even then it was only a shadow of its former glory, when it was a vital part of a globe-spanning naval empire and a material of the utmost strategic importance. “Suwanee Pine” shows the methods used in the southern United States, where fast-growing pines offer up a resinous organic gloop in response to wounds in their bark. The process shown looks a lot like the harvesting process for natural latex, with slanting gashes or “catfaces” carved into the trunks of young trees, forming channels to guide the exudate down into a clay collecting cup.
Crews visit the tapped trees over a few weeks, collecting the sticky goo in wooden casks and bringing it back to a wood-fired still. There the resin is boiled, with the vapors containing mostly turpentine and water condensed and collected. The oily turpentine floats and is skimmed off the water, while the molten rosin left behind is a valuable industrial product in its own right; there’s probably a fair amount of it on your bench right now. The storage and grading process for the rosin is pretty fascinating; a small cube of solidified rosin is extracted from each drum using a special plug placed in a bung and compared against a standard color scale to determine the rosin’s purity. One imagines it varied a lot by season and species of source tree, and by how much the crude resin is boiled.
The last third of the film is a look at all the varied uses of turpentine back in the day. Paint thinning is there, of course, but it was also used as a natural solvent in a huge array of products, from pharmaceuticals to floor waxes. Turpentine was also considered a “naval store,” a term that came about when wooden ships ruled the waves and encompassed just about everything that could be used to build or maintain a ship — wood for masts, spars, and planks, hemp for cordage, and resin and solvents like turpentine to glue things together and keep them waterproof.
These days, the petroleum industry provides solvents that do the same job as turpentine that are easier and cheaper to obtain, and most of the natural turpentine needed is harvested not from tapping trees but by distilling the ground remains of stumps pulled up after a tree is harvested for lumber, or as a byproduct of the paper pulping process. Seeing how it was done not all that long ago is still a fascinating glimpse into our technological past.
It’s wild how what would presently require a billion-dollar industrial facility, was once accomplished by a few guys with some barrels, a horse, and a still. There’s a lesson to be learned there, I think. Also, white lead paint sure is pretty when it’s fresh.
I doubt the two guys, horse and still scaled very well, hence the billion dollar facility.
I remember my father pointing out a turpentine tree plantation we were driving through in the 60’s in the Carolinas or Georgia and how it was made. Was even more labor intensive than maple sugaring, and a lot less tasty!
Forgot to mention the ” medical” use. A 100 year old woman i used to look in on from time to time once told me about her father ‘dosing’ the kids with turpentine and sugar on a spoon for the “croup”.
Not sure why you put it in quotes. Turpentine is a potent antihelminthic when taken internally, and the fumes help treat coughing (see: Vicks Vapor Rub). The medicinal uses are completely valid.
I can’t reply to the anonymous down below, but let me just say there are no valid reasons to use turpentine medically. Ingesting it is dangerous and so are the fumes. Vicks Vapo Rub is also no more effective than placebo.
See:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-turpentine-medicine
“But the problem with turpentine oil was not simply some harsh side effects. Ingestion is often toxic, causing kidney damage and bleeding in the lungs. “
@Menno, many old medicines were only better than the problems they were meant to treat, especially if the patient isn’t likely to live long enough for the long term effects to become a problem. For instance, if you’re full of parasites and aren’t going to live till you’re 80 anyway, then if smoking tobacco drives them off that’s a success.
I think it would scale just fine. You just need more guys, horses, and stills. Centralization is unnecessary.
Doubling the amount of resources needed whilst doubling the amount of product per time is the opposite of “scaling fine”
The opposite? Is it? If that’s the way it’s done, and you can charge what you want for the product it seems to me that it scales just fine. Not brilliantly, but it’s pretty much the kind of scaling that most businesses encounter.
Bingo. Industrialization is about work amplification and these scaling problems. If I can turn a building into a giant processing stage that replaces one of those two guys running the still, and my big central location produces the equivalent of 100 guys with a still but doesn’t take 100 people to run.
So you have a thousand guys and horses – and all the guys who need to take care of the horses – making turpentine rather than doing, literally, anything else more productive.
At one time something like 80% of the population was involved in agriculture production – now its like 2%. We wouldn’t be better off going back to the old way.
Making turpentine is very productive. It’s a renewable solvent, fuel, and chemical feedstock. Also, 80% of the population being involved in agriculture is preferable to (and more resilient than) 78% of the population being involved in the circular-back-scratching service economy. It’s generally good if people’s jobs involve making things rather than shuffling papers around.
There weren’t just “a few guys with some barrels, a horse, and a still.” There were thousands if not tens of thousands of such teams scattered across the southern states of the USA.
At what point does it cost approximately the same as the giant “billion dollar” refinery?
Does the refinery create more output than the same cost worth of people with horses?
There is a reason companies build huge refineries instead of lots of small stills (it’s called profit).
The profit motive creates fragile systems with centralized points of failure, though. Very efficient, but fragile.
WTF are you on about?
Central planning creates centralized points of failure, it’s right in the name. Historically the ‘planning’ part is the most common point of failure.
Competition creates robust redundant systems.
Kick you ‘labor econ’ teacher square in the crotch.
They belong in a zoo in Poland, shouting Marxist slogans at the crowd to beg mini vodka bottles. But only getting bottles refilled with water.
And a 5,000 acre pine tree plantation – not a forest, a plantation.
Let’s not forget that part.
Another extensive use for turpentine was metal finishing. That black of old model T’s was paint made from a mix of asphaltum, “boiled” linseed oil, and turpentine. I got to restore an Edison wind-up victrola a while back and had to learn how to make asphaltum paint, which is kinda neat: it doesn’t run like bitumen imitations, and if you follow the kinda slow and irritating curing schedule, you get a very durable, hard, but not brittle, metal coating. It was often called japanning and was used on endless amounts of outdoor-exposed iron from the late 1600’s until the 1920’s.
whewie does turpentine stink, though, and with a very particular chemical smell that males you think you’re about to experience liver failure.
I’ve used boiled linseed oil (modern kind potentially) for oilcloth. That mix sounds like the intent is for turpentine to be a solvent, the linseed oil to polymerize and hold everything together while blocking water, and the asphaltum I guess would just be a slightly hard wearing tar if you don’t heat it? And might help it dry faster, I guess, which you don’t get with linseed alone if you don’t heat it, and even then it takes time and oxygen to polymerize fully. It can remain tacky for quite awhile. I’d expect it to be heated, though.
I believe ” japaning” also used small amounts of “japan dryer” to speed up polymerizing. Iirc it contained cobalt salts as opposed to the lead type dryers in old oil paints.
This has bene done in eastern germany until the wall came down in 1989. There are still many trees with those marks the local woods. Some info in german: https://www.moz.de/lokales/neuruppin/handwerk-spuren-der-harzgewinnung-auch-nach-30_jahren-zu-sehen-49057074.html
Thx for mentioning this. I remember to have seen this in some pine woods at the Baltic sea north-east of Rostock, Germany (I think it was near Graal-MΓΌritz) around year 2000. Those were also left-overs from the GDR’s economy of scarcity.
In Australia we can by a mineral turpentine and a natural one that is said to come from eucalyptus, I’m not sure that the initial extraction process is the same as for pine but the result has that distinct smell which is so much more pleasant when compared to the mineral turpentine.
All this advancement in technology and we still can’t smell the turps over the Internet. Shame. I’ll just have to use my childhood memory. A summer day, painting the barn. Wait a minute… I have a can in the garage… back in a minute…
You are not romanticizing laquer sniffing, are you?
What isn’t mentioned, because it is an “industry” film, is that this method killed the tree over a few years time and destroyed forests much faster than new seedlings could replace them. It was essentially something that was ecologically unsound, but profitable.
Those aren’t forests, they’re tree plantations. Trees would be replaced periodically – same as happens for wood plantations/orchards today.
The film mentioned that trees that had been tapped twice would be cut down. The cut trees were used for wood, and new trees were planted.
The thing is, you could only tap a tree twice. That’s two harvest seasons. After that, you have to replant.
You have to have enough acreage in trees to have fresh trees ready to replace the tapped out ones.
Depending on how fast the trees grow, you are looking at anywhere from ten to twenty times as much acreage growing as you can harvest.
Say you can harvest 1000 acres a year. You’ll need ten to twenty thousand acres in trees in order to continually harvest and regrow.
From what I’ve read, that’s not what happened.
As the need expanded, the regrowth wasn’t keeping up so the harvest crews would move to new areas. They pretty much stripped each area of useable trees, then left for new forests. The turpentine trade pretty much died when all the trees from the east coast all the way to east Texas were stripped.
American SE never got below 200 million acres of forested land.
Random cite from search.
https://www.thoughtco.com/us-forest-facts-on-forestland-1343034
That’s 312,500 square miles (freedom!). Roughly France plus the UK of forest. In the SE part of America.
1. Note the tool called a “hack!”
2. Note the music as the white boss in a jacket and tie rides up to the mostly Black workers and they stand in deference: the minstrel song “I Wish I Was in Dixie Land.”
Ouch, I didn’t know that. Exemple of how cultural knowledge can help understanding nuances of what se see.
The first French rocket to send a satellite into space, the Diamant A rocket, was (in part) powered by turpentine