Friday, November 12, 2010

The Origins of Pig Sweat


Ok,   This should be interesting.  This is going to be my first attempt at doing a blog type thing.  I don’t really know what if any format I should use?  My purpose?  Well, I find myself to possess either knowledge of weird things or at least a thirst for knowledge that leads me to look up random and abstract things.  I enjoy educating others on this random world I live in.
My muse for this relates to one time when one of my Facebook Friends posted that they were Sweating like a Pig.  Well, I learned from my son and his FFA projects that Pigs, in fact, do NOT sweat. They don’t have sweat glands. This fact is what contributes to them having the problem of getting sunburned easily and why they take to rolling in the mud to cover their body. Nature’s sunscreen so to speak.  But I digress.  
Now,  it would be enough for most people to simply know that Pigs don’t sweat, but I had to find out where the phrase came from.  So I looked it up.  
Turns out that when they smelt iron ore they pour it into a series of channels that are made into sand, the channels, or runners, off the main channel resemble a series of piglets suckling on a sow, so the result of the process was termed “pig Iron”.  As the iron cools the air reaches it’s dew point and starts condensing droplets of water on the iron.  This meant the iron was at a safe temperature to move.  Pig Iron is basically so brittle that it is useless, it can be further processed to make wrought iron, cast iron or steel.
So there ya have it.  Next time you say you are sweating like a pig, you really mean you have cooled down and are ready to move.

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