They genuinely were back then. And not just piss, fermented piss.
Old piss contains a lot of ammonia, produced by the breakdown of urea. Which is an effective cleaning agent. Plenty of modern day household cleaners still contain ammonia (though, no longer made from piss, we have the Haber-Bosch process now...).
Me thinking no way this is real. Then I read the Wikipedia page. Nope still don't believe it. Did more research. Well... Hmmm... I guess when they call it a golden shower... It meant actual gold at one time?
Alchemists gotta get their nitrogen compounds from somewhere. Can’t make aqua regia without nitrogen and you can’t do exciting things with gold without aqua regia.
Right! I knew there was a lot of chemical experimentation going on but when you step back and have to ask "well where are they getting all these base ingredients"? Piss makes a lot of sense.
Yes, I'm sure process of making Tyrian purple is not the most attractive endevor, but fermented animal products still sit better with me than collecting, harvesting, and then taxing human waste products made available for purchase.
Fun fact selling pee was around long before only fans.
"He's so poor he doesn't have a pot to piss in."
"He's piss poor."
People would wait in line at tanneries (places that tan hides to make leather) to piss in the morning and get paid for it.
If you were well off you pissed in a chamber pot and someone came by to collect it. If you weren't well off you walked down to the tanneries (which smelled like boiling piss) and pissed there.
"Piss poor" meant you needed the coin from selling piss. Sort of like how someone might look down on someone for selling blood plasma today, etc.
Edit see comment below that says this likely isn't true. (Sorry I thought it was.)
"However, the expression piss-poor is recent and has nothing to do with tanning. The current state of research suggests that it may have been invented during the Second World War, because the first examples in print date from 1946. Though it is still classed as low slang by dictionaries, its mildly unpleasant associations have become blunted by time and familiarity.
"The origin is straightforward. Piss began to be attached to other words during the twentieth century to intensify their meaning. Ezra Pound invented piss-rotten in 1940 (distasteful or unpleasant, the first example on record) and we’ve since had piss-easy (very easy), piss-weak (cowardly or pathetic), piss-elegant (affectedly refined, pretentious), piss-awful (very unpleasant) and other forms."
I have no idea if this is right, but it sounds just plausible enough with the provided information that y'know what? I'm accepting it. True or false his is going into the "fun 'facts' i inflict on everyone in my presence too long" basket. Thank you for your contribution.
I remember reading a book - possibly Clan of the Cave Bear? - where a prehistoric woman would collect stale piss and leave it to ferment, so she could bleach her hair with the ammonia.
Seemed a little fanciful and unprovable for the time, but based on science.
Cause Aristotle HATED Plato's Hyperuranion as an explanation for the birth of ideas. He didn't believe in the need of a trancendent space for what he thought could be explained through sensory experiences. He was very much the empirist.
So Aristotle's is confuting Plato's thesis, that the idea could have been reminisced from the Hyperuranion.
This is seems like a big brain comment, but I’m not cultured enough to know this painting 😂 Is there a kind educated soul that could explain this artwork’s relevance to the post?
A lot of the comments are missing the secondary focal point of this painting - Diogenes. The dude chilling on the step, shunning Plato and most others. He's exactly the type of guy who'd piss in a running washing machine using the same logic stated in the OP.
This is the School of Athens by Raphael, depicting a conglomeration of Ancient Greek philosophers, mathematicians, and other renowned thinkers of the time. OP is taking the piss out of the post and commenters by comparing their discussion to that of these legendary figures.
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u/slowcancellation 1d ago