The Tincal Trail: A History of Borax

Although this is undoubtedly the most informative history of the borax trade ever written, it is also a business history of the Anglo-American company that has dominated the borax industry for the last hundred years. Author Norman Travis, who has a degree in chemistry from Oxford, rose to become chairman and managing director of this company, now called RTZ Borax Limited. His co-author, John Cocks, studied history at Cambridge, then read law, and for fourteen years served as secretary of the Imperial Smelting Corporation. He is the co-author of A History of the Zinc Smelting History in Britain. Combining these backgrounds with a taste for scholarship, Travis and Cocks treat us to a wide-ranging adventure in time and place on the tincal trail. Tincal is the mineral name for borax, or sodium tetraborate decahydrate. the book traces the progress of man's knowledge about borax as part of the general history and development of the science of chemistry, and it then tells the story of how the mining and processing of borax and boron products have become an important industry in today's world.