Superphosphate is a chemical fertiliser first synthesised in the 1840s by reacting bones with sulfuric acid. The process was subsequently improved by reacting phosphate coprolites with sulfuric acid. Subsequently, other phosphate-rich deposits such as phosphorite were discovered and used. Soluble phosphate is an essential nutrient for all plants, and the availability of superphosphate revolutionised agricultural productivity.
Superphosphate is a chemical fertiliser first synthesised in the 1840s by reacting bones with sulfuric acid. The process was subsequently improved by reacting phosphate coprolites with sulfuric acid. Subsequently, other phosphate-rich deposits such as phosphorite were discovered and used. Soluble phosphate is an essential nutrient for all plants, and the availability of superphosphate revolutionised agricultural productivity.
==History== The earliest phosphate-rich fertilisers were made from guano, animal manure, or crushed bones. So valuable were these resources during the Industrial Revolution that graveyards and catacombs across Europe were pillaged for human bones to satisfy demand.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).