I’ve been spending Passover at the lowest point on the earth’s surface not covered by water, viz. on the shore of the Dead Sea, or what these days (as will be explained below) is more properly referred to as “drying pool no. 5”. This week I’ve learned a few things that are interesting to chemists, to Zionists, and to a lesser extent to IP professionals.
I’ll start with our visit to the Dead Sea Works’ visitors’ center, which is located at the site of the original southern Dead Sea mineral production facility. The Dead Sea isn’t so much a sea as a saline lake, which until the 20th century was fed by water flowing from the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) via the Jordan River. As there’s no outflow of water but only water loss by evaporation, the water in the Dead Sea is extremely salty. Already in the early 1900’s, the Siberian-born and Zionistically-oriented Moshe Novomeysky recognized the potential to obtain valuable minerals from the water. It took 10 years to get the British bureaucracy to grant permission to establish a plant to harvest the minerals, but permission was granted in 1929 and the first plant on the northern end of the Dead Sea was operational by 1930. A few years later, a second plant was established on the southern part of the lake after much effort by a group of kibbutznikim. The plants’ products were Mandatory Palestine’s most profitable export. (When the Jordanians captured the northern plant in 1948, they destroyed it rather than use it to produce materials. Today the eastern half of the southern park of the Dead Sea is used by Jordan to produce minerals.)
Before building the facilities, Novomeysky needed proof of concept for his idea for production of the minerals, but once proven feasible, it was implemented and remains in use until today. Basically, the water is put into relatively shallow drying pools having a large surface area. As the water evaporates, sodium chloride precipitates out. The water is then moved to the next pool, where the process is repeated to collect the next mineral, and so on. The result is that today Israel produces large amounts of potassium chloride, magnesium chloride, phosphorus, and bromine (of which it produces 40% of the world’s supply). The NaCl, evidently, is of little commercial value. The hotels of the Dead Sea area are all located along the shore of the southern part of the lake, specifically along drying pool no. 5.
As a patent attorney, I find it interesting that the same process has been in use for over 90 years, and – the flip side of that – that there are few if any patents related to the production process. Typically, with chemical processes, companies look for a new process or an improvement in an existing process, because any little bit of increase efficiency translates into reductions in cost and thus increases in profitability. But sometimes you just can’t beat the older process - the Wacker process for production of acetaldehyde from ethylene (by palladium-catalyzed oxidation) has been used since the 1950’s and remains the primary method for production of acetaldehyde. Additionally, you need the raw materials, and the facilities, and there aren’t many if any other places in the world that have the combination of these minerals in sufficient concentration in aqueous solution, with the area, sunshine and temperatures to facilitate efficient drying. In short, you don’t need to a patent a process (or improvements on that process) if there’s no chance of someone copying what you’re doing.
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I learned this week that the medieval rabbi Levi ben Gershon, aka Ralbag, who is probably best know for his commentaries on the Bible, also published a book of mathematics, Maaseh Khoshev, in which he made use of induction proofs (one my favorite things in high school math), and that he invented a tool referred to as Jacob’s Staff that was used for centuries by sailors. There is a crater on the moon named after him.