Gunpowder!
The invention of gunpowder, that mixture of potassium nitrate (saltpeter), charcoal, and sulfur, changed a lot of things. It was initially used in fireworks and various displays, but it wasn’t long before some enterprising types discovered that putting some of that black powder in a metal tube, jamming a metal ball (or a round rock) down on top of it, then setting off the powder, would toss that projectile with great speed and terrifying force. That’s how the first cannons and the first “hand gonnes” were made: Iron or bronze tubes, attached to a tiller, loaded from the muzzle and fired by a match to a touch-hole. These designs were later refined to include a stock, a rotating arm controlled by a crude trigger to drop a lit wick into a priming pan. Then, designs grew more efficient: Wheellocks, then flintlocks. Percussion caps came along early in the 19th century, soon to be followed by self-contained metallic cartridges. Guns went from front-stuffing single shots to cartridge-fed repeaters.
All the while, there was that one constant: The gunpowder, still a mixture of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur. Then, in 1884, a French chemist joined the chat.
There Was This French Guy…
Paul Marie Eugène Vieille was born in 1854, somewhere in France; details of his early life are sketchy. We do know that he was a graduate of École Polytechnique, a science and engineering school founded in 1794 and still in operation in Palaiseau, France.
Later, at the age of 30, Monsieur Vieille started messing about with nitrocellulose. Also known as guncotton, flash cotton, and pyroxylin, this is a flammable substance made by nitrating cellulose, that stuff found in the cell walls of plants, with a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid. Turns out that guncotton was interesting stuff; as a propellant, it was more or less three times as powerful as black powder for a given volume. More to the point, it was actually “smokeless” in that it didn’t belch out a cloud of blue-white, rotten-egg-smelling smoke like black powder. Black powder aficionados today may be fond of the smell of that characteristic smoke, but in military applications, it was a blasted (hah) nuisance, with the clouds of black-powder smoke quickly building up thick enough to obscure the battlefield. Better still, the new propellant left only a tiny portion of the residue in the barrel and action as black powder.
Impact
The new propellant presented several advantages. The new powders were efficient and powerful, but utterly incompatible with the older front-stuffing guns still very much in evidence in the late 19th century; those were, by their design, limited to black powder. But the newer cartridge-fired guns, the ones that could be proof-tested for the higher pressures of smokeless powder, gained a big advantage, not only from not belching out big clouds of smoke, but also in not gunking up a repeater’s action.
Indeed, the first few semi-auto and automatic weapons, which by 1884 where just starting to enter the scene, were rendered impractical by the problem of fouling. After a few shots, the action gummed up, requiring disassembly and cleaning to return to service. With the new powders, they could run a lot longer between cleanings. I’ve covered some of the earliest semi-auto guns in a previous entry:
Read More: Sunday Gun Day Vol. III Ep. I - History of the Semi-Autos
And among the first of those came from a familiar name: Ferdinand Von Mannlicher. In that earlier segment, I wrote:
One of the very first was a rifle. In 1885, Ferdinand von Mannlicher brought out his Handmitrailleuse, a long, awkward arm firing the 11mm Austrian black-powder cartridge then in use. The Mannlicher arm didn’t blow up any skirts, as the heavy black powder round gunked up the action quickly; the arm never entered mass production.
But the big jump forward came with ammunition.
The Smokeless RevolutionBlack powder, both in muzzle-loading and cartridge applications, was limited in possibility. Black powder guns depended on heavy slugs at low to moderate velocity for their hitting power. But the new powders opened a wealth of high-velocity alternatives. Rifle cartridge velocities started markedly upward, beginning with the famous 7x57mm Mauser round at about 2,600 feet per second (fps), to the American .250-3000 Savage, the first round to break 3,000 fps, and the .300 Weatherby Magnum that clocked an impressive 3,250 fps. The commercial champion remains the .220 Swift, introduced in 1935, and after almost a century still racks up an impressive 4,200 fps in some loads.
All this resulted in rifles and cartridges with a much longer point-blank range, the maximum range for which no eyeballing of “holdover” is necessary. That also resulted in a big increase in striking power in rifle cartridges; the kinetic energy of a bullet on its way downrange, remember, increases in a linear progression with the weight of the projectile but by the square of the velocity. In other words, when you double the weight of a projectile, you double the kinetic energy; double the velocity, and you quadruple the kinetic energy.
That’s a big difference.
Read More: Sunday Gun Day XLIX - The Drip Rifle
Where Things Stand Now
Smokeless powders are now ubiquitous, and there are as many varieties and formulations available as there are cartridges. There are shotgun and pistol powders, rifle powders, and even low-powered, low-pressure variants treated to produce the smell and smoke of black powder at black powder pressures without as much corrosive fouling. Many handloaders have a dozen or more varieties on hand at any given moment; I keep several for loading chores, from handgun powders for my stiff .45 Colt loads to slower-burning rifle powders for my even tougher .338 Winchester Magnum rounds. Avid handloaders can spend hours discussing their favorites, and in powders as in any other components, if you put two handloaders in a room, you’ll get at least four different opinions.
The modern world of shooting would not be possible if not for smokeless powder, based on nitrocellulose. There are now single-based powders based on nitrocellulose, along with double-based powders combining nitrocellulose with nitroglycerin for added power. Artillery, the really big guns, now use a triple-based smokeless powder that also includes nitroguanidine, which is cooler-burning and good for barrel life.
Even in firearms history, replete with brilliant designers, it’s not often that one man changes everything so dramatically. Granted, this would have happened sooner or later, but when it did, it was all thanks to a French chemist with an idea.
