Chapter Two The White Pigeon Sugar Manufactory
The sugarbeet first gained recognition in its present form in the mid-18th century as a cultivar of a plant included in the Amaranth family that consists of around 2,500 species distributed worldwide. Among them is the beta vulgaris, the same species that contains the red beet (the common garden beet,) the mangel-wurzel (a fodder crop for feeding livestock) and Swiss chard. It was Andreas Marggraf, a German chemist, who first, in 1747, identified sucrose in the beetroot. Yet, for the next fifty years, Marggraf’s discovery was little more than a factoid that drew mild interest until one of Marggraf’s former students, Franz Achard, took it to the next step in 1801 by constructing a beet processing factory in Silesia, Germany (now in present-day Poland) funded by King Frederick William III of Prussia. Within a few years, all of …show more content…
It became the nucleus for a sugar factory he organized in partnership with others. Child visited Europe in 1836 to study the sugarbeet industry. He came away from the experience filled with enthusiasm that led to the founding of the factory in partnership with Edward Church and Maximin Isnard, an early developer of the beet sugar industry in France. Child, however, was handicapped in his effort to persuade prospective investors of the promise he had seen in the European sugarbeet factories because he had acquired a reputation for personal improvidence.
For an income, Childs relied upon his wife, Lydia Maria Child, at the time the country's foremost woman author, noted for penning, in addition to more serious works, the still popular poem entitled A Boy's Thanksgiving Day that begins “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.” Equally troubling was his altruistic preference for defending clients who could not pay a fee--not to mention a six-month stint once spent in jail on a charge of
The sugarbeet first gained recognition in its present form in the mid-18th century as a cultivar of a plant included in the Amaranth family that consists of around 2,500 species distributed worldwide. Among them is the beta vulgaris, the same species that contains the red beet (the common garden beet,) the mangel-wurzel (a fodder crop for feeding livestock) and Swiss chard. It was Andreas Marggraf, a German chemist, who first, in 1747, identified sucrose in the beetroot. Yet, for the next fifty years, Marggraf’s discovery was little more than a factoid that drew mild interest until one of Marggraf’s former students, Franz Achard, took it to the next step in 1801 by constructing a beet processing factory in Silesia, Germany (now in present-day Poland) funded by King Frederick William III of Prussia. Within a few years, all of …show more content…
It became the nucleus for a sugar factory he organized in partnership with others. Child visited Europe in 1836 to study the sugarbeet industry. He came away from the experience filled with enthusiasm that led to the founding of the factory in partnership with Edward Church and Maximin Isnard, an early developer of the beet sugar industry in France. Child, however, was handicapped in his effort to persuade prospective investors of the promise he had seen in the European sugarbeet factories because he had acquired a reputation for personal improvidence.
For an income, Childs relied upon his wife, Lydia Maria Child, at the time the country's foremost woman author, noted for penning, in addition to more serious works, the still popular poem entitled A Boy's Thanksgiving Day that begins “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.” Equally troubling was his altruistic preference for defending clients who could not pay a fee--not to mention a six-month stint once spent in jail on a charge of