Abstract
Abstract. The process of copper cementation has already been known since the period of antiquity in Europe. Nevertheless, the first historically relevant reports come from the 14th century from the mining town of Smolník in Upper Hungary (present-day Slovakia), which makes this site the oldest place of the commercial production of copper using cementation in Europe. It is one of the oldest known sites in the world after China, where this process has been used since the 11th century. The cementation copper from Smolník was considered to be a high-quality copper in the period between the 14th and 19th century and was an important export product of Hungary. The study processes the history of cementation and discusses the production process of the artificial cementation water, as well as its subsequent mining and sedimentation. A detailed description of the technological progress of cementation from the earliest times up to the first half of the 19th century is given. The study is based upon the historical works of medieval alchemists and the first miners and naturalists, which were published as early scientific books in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century. These findings are complemented by original archival research.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to process the history of cementation in Upper Hungary for the example of the historical Upper Hungarian royal mining town of Smolník
Cementation water was captured at the end of the process in a drain well on the main horizon, from where it was pumped to the cementation facility using shafts, as it was a common practice in the past
At the time of the above cementation process in Smolník, we can observe the origins of scientific mining tourism in the territory of present-day Slovakia
Summary
The aim of this paper is to process the history of cementation in Upper Hungary (present-day Slovakia) for the example of the historical Upper Hungarian royal mining town of Smolník. A simple procedure in which an iron object immersed in a solution of blue vitriol (copper sulfate) begins to change its colour to red as it covers itself with the excreted copper was already known in antiquity It is technically feasible, even though its nature was not known until the formation of phys-. “The excretion of copper on iron, today a simple textbook example, has been a very serious process over the centuries, which is based on alchemists’ argument,” according to Karpenko (2002), while two important features of the reduction–oxidation reaction led medieval alchemists to the following idea: first, it was the feasibility of the reaction because, due to the big difference in electrochemical potential, the described chemical process never fails. Jakob Tollius (1700), who wrote about this process at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries in his work Epistolae itenerariae, describes the cementation in Smolník on page 214 in the text called Descripcio, qualiter Ferrum mutetir in Cuprum in Smolnock
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