| Existing comment:
The Decline and Fall of Black Powder: Black powder's nine-hundred-year reign as a gun propellant and as a high explosive ended in the 19th century. One of the first alternatives to black powder was nitrocellulose, or guncotton. Christian Friedrich Schonbein invented guncotton in 1846 by treating cotton wool with concentrated nitric acid and concentrated sulfuric acid. Guncotton was an improvement over black powder because it exploded without creating smoke or leaving behind residue. However, deadly explosions at several plants led to the end of its commercial production until 1863. In that year, Frederick Abel developed a safer means of producing guncotton. Wet guncotton could be shaped by tools safely and inserted in mines, torpedoes, and other explosive ordnance. |