West Point Chemists Have Also Made Gunpowder Great Old Recipes

Making gunpowder powder is a bit like cooking, except for a lot of explosions. Gunmakers in the 14th and 15th centuries used black powder imported from Europe from China, and then blended its three ingredients together: saltpeter (also known as potassium nitrate), charcoal, and sulfur. But it also made it look like a cookie, with a splash of brandy, vinegar, or varnish.

Now a team of experts at the US Army Military Academy in West Point has re-invented the old recipes and tested a professional rifle as a rifle. They found that the original gun took a lot of effort to be accurate — and this gives them an idea of ​​how modern bomb makers can use the same experimental techniques in making explosive devices.

The work began when West Point history professor Cliff Rogers was looking at Fire records (German for “fire book”), a list of unknown documents. Rogers says Feuerwerkbuch is a handbook for gunmen, discussing how to make a mixture of gun powder, how to make it, and how to send and shoot guns. The manuscripts were compiled over a period of years as the technology of firearms and weapons of war changed rapidly; The book contained recipes from 1336 until its publication in 1420 and used descriptive terms such as “common,” “better,” and “continuous” in describing all the ingredients.

Rogers asked his friend Dawn Riegner, professor of chemistry, to study one method of combining the amount of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal. Riegner, who was the editor in chief of the team’s paper, said this month in the newspaper ACS Omega. The material was found to be inaccurate in translation, not scientific, but interesting. “Then it turned out: What about all the other things that the old terrorists were putting in, and what was his idea?” Riegner says. “Did these people who don’t have a chemistry degree know what they were doing? Did they have an idea about what the new features would do for them, or how the mix would help them? ”

Riegner and Rogers decided to revisit the original recipes to see if they could still work. Riegner worked in his chemistry lab with his daughter, a bachelor of science degree at the Stevens Institute of Technology, who was at home during the Covid-19 epidemic last year. “We started mixing ingredients in the lab, starting with the dry ingredients together,” he recalls. “And, of course, as explained in the recipe, we also apply a variety of water methods, whether it’s water or varnish or vinegar.”

As soon as they came up with the last item, the mother-daughter team placed the items in a well-ventilated room to test the “calorimetry of the bomb” of the gun, which is a measure of the amount of energy produced in the ignition.

Riegner says this part of the project has faced some obstacles. The ingredients used in the lab were scientific, meaning they were very pure. But the sulfur and potassium nitrate used in the 14th and 15th centuries would have been extremely destructive. That could be one reason why firefighters added more – the team found that, over time, recipes began to use more sulfur to replace expensive salt products, which were hard to find. Sulfur needed to be cleaned, hence the use of additives, Riegner says.

It can also be used to make dry ingredients into a wet paste that is then dried and refined into gunpowder. And there is a third theory: Researchers believe that the alcohol content of brandy may also have contributed to the burning of charcoal in the past. But modern experiments have not been able to accurately predict the effects of these supplements, because researchers were starting with the most advanced products. Riegner states: “None of them changed their power.”