The water used before the industrial revolution has always produced solutions for people; as a way of transportation, power generation in structures such as mills and used for processes such as washing in places such as tanneries, etc.

Water is one of the best-known solvents in the world and thanks to this feature, we can obtain continuity in our life. Water is present in our body as a solution; there it carries out a lot of work such as transporting food, electron exchanges, transporting waste. Whatever water passes through in nature, it loses its purity by dissolving the substances in itself. Anyway, water is not found as pure water except for special conditions, and even if it is produced as such, if it is not well protected, it immediately loses its purity. In any case, it dissolves the gases in the environment and loses its purity.

The main igniter of the industrial revolution was with the rotation of a linear movement with steam into a rotating movement; thus, mass production started to be realized by using machinery.

With the start of the use of steam, since water is a very good solvent, the impurities in it have started the formation of structures called scaling, which are insoluble and cause difficulties in heat transfer. These structures caused the system to become unusable after a while. Calcium and magnesium salts and silica played the leading role in this formation, which we call hardness in water.

A lot of stories are told about water conditioning. The first starting story, that comes believable to mind and which is the solution in terms of its results, is as follows

With the use of steam, especially the trains have started to be used in transportation. The generated steam is released to the environment after moving a piston; and this necessitates a new water supply to the boiler, where steam is created. Every new water taken; causes new impurities to enter into the boiler,  after a while, it results in the formation of scaling structures also named as limescale among the society. The trains were able to continue their journey by filling in water to their tanks at the stations. After a while, the scaling formation prevents the heat transfer of the boiler part, where the steam is produced.  The solution created was to open the steam boilers of the trains at regular intervals and make mechanical cleaning.

According to a rumor; one day, a potato sack has been found inside a steam boiler of a train, which has come to the service for maintenance purposes but does not have any thick scaling like others.  It was realized that after starting to put potato sacks on the trains the scaling formation is not as much as before. It is known that this event is caused by the generation of fewer adherent compounds formed from the long-chain compounds of starch, which is available in potato and the compounds that cause hardness.  Later, it was tried to apply conditioning with starch for years.

Of course, this is the start of the story and then the developments continued in the following years. That is a subject for the next article...