Gunpowder from ancient times to the present

Gunpowder from ancient times to the present

Wei Boyang; the earliest gunpowder experimenter that we know about

Ancient china was an amazing place and time.  When technology was still quite primitive in Europe the Chinese Emperor was financing scientific research.  The Cantong qi or "The Kinship of the Three" is deemed to be the earliest book on alchemy in China and dealt also with Cosmology and Taoist philosophy.  In 142 AD during the Han Dynasty a man named Wei Boyang wrote in  "The Kinship of the Three" regarding gunpowder; a concoction of three powders that would "fly and dance" violently.  The three powders were sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre, also called potassium nitrate. Sulphur is found naturally as a yellow rock, it is mined and processed to create sulphur that can be used in gunpowder. You can make saltpetre with animal manure by leaving it to sit and decompose, potassium nitrate crystals form in the manure, and these can be drained off by washing the manure through with water. The three separate powders are then mixed together, using roughly fifteen parts of saltpetre to three parts of charcoal and two parts of sulphur. The reason gunpowder explodes is that it burns extremely quickly and when it burns it releases hot gases that are larger in volume than the original powder, causing a rapid expansion, and thus the explosion.  Gunpowder was not invented overnight, as far as historians can tell, it was a gradual process over hundreds of years to progress from the initial discovery of an unknown explosive substance to the sophisticated black powder that we know today. The ancient Chinese originally used it in fireworks which were believed to frighten off evil spirits and bring good luck.  By 904 AD, Chinese inventors realised that you could also use gunpowder as a very powerful weapon. Initially the Imperial army used gunpowder in the form of crude rockets. They put small stone cannonballs inside bamboo tubes and blasted the cannonballs out by igniting gunpowder at one end. This is basically the same principal that makes guns work today.  The Emperors kept their invention secret for hundreds of years until it reached European ears during the Crusades and was taken up by experimenters like Berthold Schwartz or "Black Berthold" in Germany.  Since then firearms development has progressed as the separate but related sciences of chemistry , metallurgy and engineering developed more refined methods of making propellants and steel and boring barrels.  The steam and internal combustion engines came from developments in gun making.  At some point in China around 900 a.d. someone in China lit a firecracker and the idea of using chemical energy as opposed to mechanical energy was born.  Previously manpower, animal power, water and air power had done the work of man.  Mechanical energy could be stored as in a bow or catapult but the idea of releasing the energy stored in chemicals was new. The next big innovation would be nuclear power 2,000 years later.  Man being a violent animal usually saw the potential for destruction and making war before he developed peaceful uses for his inventions.  The old Taoist experimenters, to be fair to them, were trying to find the secret of eternal youth and the means of turning base metals into gold and quite inadvertently stumbled on the means of mass destruction.  It is also interesting that the German monk, "Black Berthold" was the visionary who, in 1350 a.d., may have first divined the explosive potential of gunpowder and who may even have been later executed as a magician and that 700  years later German scientists of the Third Reich were investigating both rocket and nuclear science.  One wonders if anyone in the thousand years between Berthold Schwartz and Albert Einstein had suspected, as Einstein did, that explosive science could eventually lead to the annihilation of mankind.  Perhaps fourteenth century writers who compared black powder combustion to the fires of Hell were not so terribly wrong.

Berthold Schwartz or "Black Berthold" the hapless German Cistercian monk credited with inventing gunpowder who may have been later executed as a magician in Prague

A dangerous-for-the-user-looking Early cannon circa 1326.  One wonders what the life expectancy of the gunner was.

By 1534 black powder cannon were being used by the English - never slow to steal a good German (or Mongolian depending on the source you consult) idea - to batter down the walls of Maynooth Castle and the political ambitions of Silken Thomas Fitzgerald

By the Napoleonic period cannon had become more sophisticated and accurate.  This miniature smoothbore .60 calibre model is demonstrated here by an Irish enthusiast

The earliest black powder guns were simple devices. The earliest known European depiction of a gun appeared in 1326 in a manuscript by Walter de Milemete known as De Nobilitatibus, sapientii et prudentiis regum (Concerning the Majesty, Wisdom, and Prudence of Kings), which displays a gun with a large arrow emerging from it and its user lowering a long stick to ignite the gun through the touch hole.  It probably didn't do much harm but if you were an illiterate French peasant pressed into unwilling military service under a feudal aristocrat it might scare you enough to abandon your place in the front line.  By 1600 rifled barrels were in limited use and by the 1800's they were common.  The first and second World Wars saw the extensive use of cannon with modern propellants.  These guns differed from those of earlier centuries in their precision rifling, range, mathematical fire control, improved propellants and strong steel alloys.

Near Ypres, France, I photographed highly toxic uneatable sheep cudding peacefully amid spent WW1 artillery shells. 

The second World war brought highly accurate and destructive  firepower from such as this British 25 pounder howitzer on which I trained on a young man in the Glen of Imaal, Wicklow.  This specimen is on display near Ypres.

A Russian 152 mm howitzer-gun M1937 with a range of 15 

miles.  It is on display at Collon Military War Museum

A Korean ICBM.  The endgame?

Today Black Powder is not used by the military and has fallen out of favour with many sport shooters because of its inconvenience and corrosiveness.  Black powder combustion converts less than half the mass of black powder to gas, most of it turns into particulate matter. Some of it is ejected and it gives off a lot of smoke and flame which, strangely, enthusiasts find enjoyable and invigorating!  Some of it ends up as a thick layer of soot inside the barrel, where it  can cause subsequent shots to become progressively less accurate.  Moreover, this residue is hygroscopic, and with the addition of moisture absorbed from the air forms a corrosive substance. that turns into potassium hydroxide, or sodium hydroxide, which corrodes wrought iron or steel gun barrels.  Black powder arms must therefore be well cleaned after use, both inside and out, to remove the residue.  Some enthusiasts relish this; others abhor it and use black powder substitutes instead which are even more corrosive.  Transportation and storage are problematic because BP is classified as a class 1 explosive due to the fact it ignites so easily.  This has been used by the authorities in some jurisdictions to create a ban in effect by making transportation especially difficult.  The home manufacture of black powder is illegal apart from a few countries like the US which acknowledges that BP shooting is part of the culture in many states.  The manufacture of black powder has historically been associated with accidental explosions and mills were built to mitigate this.  Generally steel was banned from the mill in favour of brass to prevent sparks and employees wore clogs or other "safety" footwear and walls were constructed with built in weaknesses to allow exploding powder to vent towards a safe area. There is even a black-powder story in my own family.  Apparently Grandfather, during the "Great War", found his stache of BP bad become damp and he decided to dry it by spreading it on the hob in front of the big fire in the kitchen.  He miscalculated royally and a stray spark from the turf fire ignited the powder which flared spectacularly and singed his whiskers!  Careless shooters have been less lucky and accidents have happened particularly when refilling a muzzleloader after a shot.  A powder flask facilitates pouring a measure of powder down the barrel.  Unfortunately in some instances a spark has remained in the barrel from the previous shot which ignites the fresh powder AND the contents of the flask which literally becomes a bomb and people have lost hands as a result.  At the battle of the Yellow Ford near Armagh in 1598 the English powder separated out into its various components and had to be re-mixed in the field.  A lucky shot from one of Hugh o'Neill's guns (or perhaps an English soldier was careless with the fuse of a matchlock musket) ignited a wagon of powder with disastrous results for the English and presumably significant tactical advantage to the Irish.  Their Commander, Bagenal who was actually o'Neill's brother-in-law and who hated him for eloping with his sister, Mabel, was shot in the head by a ball and confusion followed with a decisive victory going to the Irish. Mabel Bagenal, O’Neill’s third wife, a protestant beauty who was known as Ireland’s ‘Helen of Troy’ later became O’Neill’s implacable enemy, before dying in Dungannon in 1591.  A skeleton has been discovered which may belong to Mabel.

A mildly eccentric modern Black Powder enthusiast returns to the spirit of the old Taoist Chinese experimenters and finds fulfilment in making loud noises accompanied by bright flares.  Amazingly such individuals are demonised in the gutter press to the point where frightened citizens are more worried about their activities than those of insane nuclear-armed dictators.

The Sharps .45-90 produces a truly spectacular flare.  It also developed considerable energy and was in great part responsible for the near-extinction of the American Buffalo and served as a sniper rifle in the American Civil War in the hands of the famous Berdan's Sharpshooters.

 

An Underhammer Muzzleloader made by Rex Holbrook of Birmingham about 25 years ago. It develops around 1200 feet per second with 100 grains of black powder and a 530 grain cast bullet which makes it about equal in energy to a modern .243