Bone mill
A bone grinder is a grinder that usually grinds or tampers animal bones . Bone meal was used as an organic fertilizer in agriculture .
history
Bone mills have existed since early modern times, but it wasn't until the beginning of the 19th century, when traditional three-field farming was replaced by modern agricultural management using fertilizers, that bone meal was produced on an industrial scale. Due to its mineral content and chemical composition, bone meal is well suited as a plant fertilizer. Around 1828 there were 29 bone mills in the entire Rhineland , most of them in the Bergisches Land . Usually these were powered by water power.
From 1900 the bone meal was replaced by the Thomas meal , which was obtained from the Thomasstahl process .
Some of the bones were transported over hundreds of kilometers by carts (e.g. from East Prussia to the Bücheler bone mill near Kürten ) and then stored to dry for up to two years. The bones so deposited and then ground were partly used as chicken feed, the bone oil was very popular in precision mechanics .
The bone mills experienced a brief second boom in the time of National Socialism , when the rulers promoted self -produced fertilizers in the interests of self - sufficiency . Bone mills were also used in special campaign 1005 when the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories removed traces of the Jews murdered during the Reinhardt campaign in 1942–1944 .
After the Second World War , almost all bone mills closed. In Westphalia few bone mills have been preserved, including the bone mill in Fretter in Finnentrop that Knochenmühle Meinerzhagen-Mühlhofe and bone mill in Ising home .
England
The Narborough Bone Mill was a watermill on the River Nar in the west of the English county of Norfolk . The excavated remains of cemeteries and graves from Hamburg were processed into agricultural fertilizer in the Kings Lynn mill. The text of an entry in an economic lexicon of the 19th century sounds similarly macabre:
“… In England, Belgium and France fertilizing with bone meal is the most common and until recently the English have brought whole shiploads of bones from Germany, even from the battlefield near Waterloo in 1816, to be made into bone meal in England process and sell dearly "
Funeral services
After the cremation of bodies partially remain lumpy remains. After large metallic components (e.g. artificial joints) have been separated out, the remaining remains are crushed in a drum by large steel balls into dead ash, which can then be filled into urns .
medicine
If the body's own bone material is to be crushed and reused during an operation, surgical bone mills are used.
Conceptual transfer
- The contemporary description of the extremely costly Battle of Verdun (1916) as a “bone mill” has been used in the language to this day.
- The vernacular occasionally uses the term "bone mill" for places where very strenuous work is done.
- Popularly known as Knochemiehl (bone mill) also were railcars of the first commercial German tram - line the Frankfurt-Offenbach Tramway Society (FOTG), respectively. The drive via gears , the track width of 1000 mm, the wheels made of wood with wheel tires made of steel and the lack of suspension led to uneven running properties and the name Knochemiehl .
literature
- Herbert Nicke : " Bergische Mühlen ", Martina Galunder Verlag, Wiehl, 1998, ISBN 3-931251-36-5
Individual evidence
- ^ Elisabeth Vaupel: Valuable bones. A topic in school lessons during the Nazi era. In: Kultur & Technik 3/2017, pp. 54–59 ( PDF )
- ^ Wilhelm Hoffmann (Ed.): General encyclopedia for Kaufleite, factory owners ... Leipzig 1853. Keyword "Bones"
- ↑ Duden online: Bone mill , see meaning 2.
