over the Hindu Kush. According to Biruni in his book Gems, any cloths made of asbestos (, āzarshost) were called shostakeh (). Some Persians believed the fiber was the fur of an animal called the samandar (), which lived in fire and died when exposed to water; this was where the former belief originated that the salamander could tolerate fire. Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor (800–814), is said to have had a tablecloth made of asbestos. Marco Polo recounts having been shown, in a place he calls Ghinghin talas, "a good vein from which the cloth which we call of salamander, which cannot be burnt if it is thrown into the fire, is made ..." Some archaeologists believe that ancients made shrouds of asbestos, wherein they burned the bodies of their kings to preserve only their ashes and to prevent the ashes being mixed with those of wood or other combustible materials commonly used in funeral pyres. Others assert that the ancients used asbestos to make perpetual wicks for sepulchral or other lamps. A famous example is the golden lamp asbestos lychnis, which the sculptor Callimachus made for the Erechtheion. In more recent centuries, asbestos was indeed used for this purpose. Industrial era The large-scale asbestos industry began in the mid-19th century. Early attempts at producing asbestos paper and cloth in Italy began in the 1850s but were unsuccessful in creating a market for such products. Canadian samples of asbestos were displayed in London in 1862, and the first companies were formed in England and Scotland to exploit this resource. Asbestos was first used in the manufacture of yarn, and German industrialist Louis Wertheim adopted this process in his factories in Germany. In 1871, the Patent Asbestos Manufacturing Company was established in Glasgow, and during the following decades, the Clydebank area became a centre for the nascent industry. Industrial-scale mining began in the Thetford hills, Quebec, from the 1870s. Sir William Edmond Logan was the first to notice the large deposits of chrysotile in the hills in his capacity as head of Geological Survey of Canada. Samples of the minerals from there were displayed in London and elicited much interest. With the opening of the Quebec Central Railway in 1876, mining entrepreneurs such as Andrew Stuart Johnson established the asbestos industry in the province. The 50-ton output of the mines in 1878 rose to over 10,000 tonnes in the