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Gunpowder
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Gunpowder has been
an important invention for man. Gunpowder is not always used
destructively, it has other industrial and commercial uses
too. For a long time now, gunpowder has been used to
facilitate the process of accessing natural resources.
The
origin of gunpowder is, however, not very clearly known.
Evidence has been found to support the fact that the Chinese
used a weak form of gunpowder in the eleventh century. Further
evidence points out that by the middle of the thirteenth
century gunpowder was being used as a propellant. It is the
oldest known explosive.
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Gunpowder
is believed to have been invented in China in the tenth century, but
may also have been independently discovered by the Arabs. This is
supported by the fact that the Arabs produced the first known
working gun, in 1304. Europeans gleaned information about gunpowder
through the writings of Arab scholars. Gunpowder was used as a
propellant for many firearms, canons being one of them. By this time
gunpowder had seen many changes and had become more effective than
its earlier version.
The
composition of gunpowder is a mixture of 7 per cent potassium
nitrate (saltpeter), 15 per cent charcoal and 10 per cent sulphur.
All the three substances have different characteristics. Sulphur
ignites at a low temperature, charcoal burns readily and the
potassium nitrate provides the oxygen for the explosion. Earlier,
the main use of gunpowder was for firearms and it is still used,
though only for quarry blasting, fuses and fireworks.
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Gunpowder |
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Around
1880, the addition of a new ingredient made gunpowder even more
effective. This new substance was nitrocellulose. The addition of
nitrocellulose empowered the user to a much larger extent than the
earlier version of gunpowder.
Gunpowder
was used in warfare from the 14th century, however it was
used for civil purposes like mining only in the 17th
century. It used to be manufactured in 'powder' mills. There were
such powder mills at Waltham Abbey and at Faversham in England.
These mills date back to the 1560s. The United States set up its
first powder mill in 1675 at Milton, Massachusetts.
Let us now
take a look at how gunpowder is made. The ingredients that go in to
the making of gunpowder are mixed together and a moist pasty
substance is obtained. This moist substance is then compressed under
high pressure into blocks. The blocks are then broken into pellets
or granules of required sizes. One of the ingredients, charcoal, was
considered to have a bearing on the explosive strength of the
resultant gunpowder. So the quality of charcoal used was scrutinized
carefully before being incorporated in the mixture used for making
gunpowder. Top grade charcoal would be obtained from a particular
variety of dogwood and for making second grade gunpowder, charcoal
from willow and alder trees would be used. The other ingredients
used, as mentioned earlier, were saltpeter or potassium nitrate. The manufacturing process and the composition would be varied to
suit the need for which the gunpowder was being manufactured.
Gunpowder is still used for many industrial purposes since it is
economically viable. |
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