[HN Gopher] Scientists test medieval gunpowder recipes with 15th... ___________________________________________________________________ Scientists test medieval gunpowder recipes with 15th-century cannon replica Author : benbreen Score : 64 points Date : 2021-09-30 15:02 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (arstechnica.com) (TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com) | Centmo wrote: | When I was thirteen, I had the brilliant idea to make my own | gunpowder and use it to build a bomb to set off in the field | across from my house. I looked up the recipe in my Encyclopedia | Brittanica (this was the early 80's) and began collecting the | ingredients. I will never forget the ratios: 75% Potassium | Nitrate, 15% Charcoal, 10% Sulpher. After pulverizing the | ingredients and combining, I funneled the mixture into a spent | CO2 cartridge from a pellet gun. I inserted a sparkler as a fuse, | and lay it up against a large tree. I lit the sparkler and ran | around to the other side to wait for the explosion. After a | painfully long wait, I heard a loud hissing sound and saw some | something fly and land right at my feet, a jet of flames shooting | out the tiny hole. I took off running but it never exploded. I | was old enough to realize I had won a dice roll and never played | with gunpowder again. | sophacles wrote: | Oh cool, glad you were smart enough to learn rather than | doubling down and getting hurt! | | My version of this story is from high school chem class. | Somehow a lab partner and I convinced our teacher to let us | test "which gunpowder mixture burns best". This was a several | week long "student run experiment" type project, culminating | with presentations in class. One component of the presentations | was a demo - we chose to show the difference between the worst | performing mix and the best performing mix. The "slow mix" made | a ton of smoke and stunk up the whole wing of the school w/ | suphur. The fast mix cause enough thermal shock to shatter the | crucible we used - pieces went everywhere doing a little damage | to the audience even: one kid's notebook caught on fire because | some of the power landed on it. Another kid had a freshly | melted hole in his big pants (it was the mid 90s) - I'm glad no | one was hurt. We got an A, but younger folks told me that in | later years fire experiments were banned. | | The only lesson I managed to learn was: It's important to do | bold stuff before everyone else, because you either get to have | fun or deal with the rules that the fun people caused. | | I'm not sure that's a great lesson, but I have yet to see it | violated. | gliese1337 wrote: | Not quite as bold, but there were similar results to me and | my friends being the first ones in our school to build a | functioning railgun during school hours, and dissolve lunch | trays in PCB cleaner... | | (No injury or [unintended] property damage incurred, but The | Adults quickly realized that we hadn't actually broken any | rules, and there definitely _should have been_ rules to be | broken.) | AmericanChopper wrote: | You pretty much had it right. It seems the two things you | missed were: | | 1. Milling the powder makes it a lot more effective. My buddies | and I would make ball mills with old washing machine engines, | and whatever non-sparking material we could find for the balls. | | 2. If you want it to explode rather than burn you have to | granulate it. Wet it and let it dry, and grind it a little bit | and pass it through some mesh to grade it. | | The raw powder is good for making rockets, but it won't very | readily explode. | bserge wrote: | Black powder won't detonate by it's nature, it just | deflagrates, burns real fast. Those cartridges can hold _a | lot_ of pressure, only something with a higher explosive | velocity like nitroglycerin or TNT can fragment them. | quercusa wrote: | I had a very similar experience (using a piece of copper pipe). | We made a strategic error in testing it in my friend's driveway | at 11 pm. My friend's dad was a chemistry professor, so he | could only be so upset about it... | pvg wrote: | I love that the tremendous ambition of this is what kept it | non-functional and relatively safe - the self-made gunpowder is | probably not fine enough to blow up the very sturdy CO2 | cartridge, the hole at the end of the cartridge is probably too | big, etc. | | You can make an equivalent functional microscopic 'pipebomb' | with just matchstick head scrapings and the plastic body of a | pen. This usually does produce a small satisfying bang and the | risks of screwing it up are mostly limited to 'very nasty | burn'. | packet_nerd wrote: | Ha! Around that age (actually probably a little older) I begged | and pleaded with my mom to get saltpeter and sulfur to make | firecrackers and rockets. Eventually she relented and got it | for me, but with the stipulation I had to wear a welding | helmet, heavy coat, and heavy rubber gloves while working with | it, and that only under supervision... Anyway, the actual | gunpowder I managed to make didn't really work, just kind of | fizzled out. I never managed to get a firecracker to actually | make any noise. It sure was a lot of fun though. :-) | 0x0nyandesu wrote: | Call your mom and tell her someone on the internet said she's | awesome. | withinboredom wrote: | I had a similar experience, but with napalm. | wil421 wrote: | Back in the late 90s I found a document called the Anarchist | Cookbook on the internet. It was full of fun ideas for a | teenager. Some were fun destructive ideas like how to break | open a coke machine or make small "bombs". Others like how to | derail a train or make exploding shells from shotgun shells | were not so good. There was some pretty serious stuff my friend | and I wanted nothing to do with. I looked for the doc again but | can't find it anywhere online. | | My friend and I took the powder out of fireworks and into a | spend CO2 cartridge like you did. We used an M80 fuse and had a | similar experience as you, some fizzing but no bang. Based on | ideas in the Anarchist cookbook we sawed open shotgun shells | and tried to get the gunpowder out. I think it was mostly | sawdust mixed with buckshot and little gunpowder. No bang. My | fiends brother caught us and said dude you're making pipe bombs | so we stopped. | | Anyone else heard of the anarchist cookbook in the early | internet days? | hilbert42 wrote: | Yeah, the _Anarchist Cookbook_ used to be a must-have file | for nerds in the early days of the internet, it used to turn | up in collections of hacks and even in floppy disk /CD | collections attached to computer mag covers. | | I don't think most ever took it seriously, it was just an | antiauthoritarian status symbol of the early internet. It was | a badly-written compendium of nefarious bits and pieces | collected by the likes of youngish teenage boys. I suppose | the powers that be would now consider it dangerous material | and its possession deemed suspicious. That said, go to the | chemistry section of any library and you'll find much more | subversive info therein. | | BTW, when I was at school a part of the chemistry curriculum | was to make and prepare black powder then test it. Moreover, | the complete chemical equation of the reaction was in our | textbooks and we had to understand it. Not only was the | explosive reaction presented as just one equation but also it | was subdivided into its constituent parts, sub-reactions | etc., so that one fully understood the chemistry. That's to | say we had to know how to calculate proportions for full | combustion, etc. | | Being allowed to officially make black powder under the | auspices of the chemistry teacher made chemistry fun. Oh, how | times have changed. Boring! | wil421 wrote: | Myth busters did a show about something called guncotton | and I always wondered if I could make it but I'm not really | into that kinda stuff any longer. Pretty cool you were able | to do it in a controlled environment. | bombcar wrote: | http://textfiles.com/anarchy/ | wil421 wrote: | Haha yup that's it. Oh god I remember reading about how to | get nicotine out of cigarettes and use it to poison | someone, thinking why would someone ever do that. | | Thank god I never boiled bleach to try to make plastic | explosives. | [deleted] | annoyingnoob wrote: | I used to use CO2 cartridges and match heads, with model | rocket fuse from the hobby store. If you overfill the | cartridge, or pack it, it works more like rocket engine and | slow(er) burns. There needs to be some space inside for the | initial spark to spread to get something more exciting. I | suppose I never tried somehow packing it with the fuse all | the way through the material. You want to get as much of the | material to burn as quickly as possible. Found that grinding | the powder out of model rocket engines (yikes!) works better | than match heads but is decidedly more sketchy. | | I grew up pre-internet. A high shcool friend had a copy of | that book, but we never used it for much. Found our own fun. | | We were just boys being boys back then, I'm sure we'd be in | big trouble with those things now. Do not try this at home. | xcskier56 wrote: | I remember hearing about it in high school (mid 00's) but | there was a rumor that the government was tracking everyone | who downloaded it so none of us ever dared | psyc wrote: | I have a clear memory of a similar recipe being laid out in an | early 80's kids' cartoon, in which a character needs to | MacGuyver some gunpowder in the wild. I became obsessed with | mimicking the feat, but never figured out how to source the | ingredients. Although in the cartoon, I believe they got the | potassium nitrate from seagull shit. Around the same time, The | Dukes of Hazzard provided instruction on Molotov Cocktails. I | was four or five. | | Oh, and then there was Mr. Wizard...... | verve_rat wrote: | That sounds like an episode of Transformers[1] I randomly | remember sometimes but never bother to look up, until now. | | [1] https://tfwiki.net/wiki/A_Decepticon_Raider_in_King_Arthu | r%2... | psyc wrote: | That's definitely the one! | hilbert42 wrote: | Seems to me that 'adding' the brandy might have been just an | excuse to syphon at least some of it off for more traditional | purposes. :-) | brudgers wrote: | Yes, your highness, ten hogshead fine brandy. | | 'Tis essential for powder making. | | Hic. | bserge wrote: | Brandy grants increased accuracy due to synergy with the other | ingredients :) | setgree wrote: | Shout out to the novel Blood Meridian, in which the main | characters brew gun powder from volcanic ash, urine, and other | things on hand | seer wrote: | Well Jules Verne's "The Mysterious Island" awakened all sorts | of engineering thinking in me when I was very little. | | My parents were believers in not reading children's books but | actual novels to me, at ages 4+ and they went through most of | Verne's novels, but I will never forget that particular one. | | Bootstrapping civilization from literally nothing to gunpowder, | steam engines and telegraphs was mesmerizing. I think this was | the time I decided I wanted to get involved in engineering in | general. I mean McGyver is nice and all but I've not seen | anything come close to scope and ingenuity as a literary work | since. | pault wrote: | Also the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. Sabotage of | gunpowder stocks, exploding cannons (and cannon operators), and | brewing red phosphorus from urine (and subsequently getting run | out of town by an angry mob because of the stench). | JoeAltmaier wrote: | Brandy? Maybe as a solvent to release some other ingredient from | whatever form they found it. For example saltpeter was found | under wagonloads of dung I believe - maybe the brandy was used to | purify it somehow. | eutectic wrote: | Water can dissolve KNO3, and ethanol can dissolve sulfir | (slightly) and tar from the charcoal, so maybe it helped create | a more intimate mix? It would also have kept down sparks and | reduced the chance of ignition while mixing and grinding. | cs702 wrote: | What fun! I can only imagine how the funding proposal might have | been evaluated: | | "Hmm... so these guys want us to give them money to fire a bunch | of medieval cannons with pre-industrial gunpowder." | bfbelmont wrote: | I'd fund it as long as I get to see the results in person:) | sneeeeeed wrote: | They say "don't eat these recipes" but gunpowder has been used in | cookery for a very long time. Corned beef recipes used gunpowder, | for instance. | nitwit005 wrote: | I believe they used potassium nitrate (saltpeter) for corned | beef, rather than gunpowder. | scohesc wrote: | Interesting! Was that for flavor, texture, or explosive | properties when going through your digestive system? | GordonS wrote: | I thought it acted as a preservative? | dogorman wrote: | Potassium nitrate (the main ingredient of gunpowder) has | historically been used as a preservative, particularly for | curing meat. Some people might still use it, but these days | sodium nitrite is more common. | throwaway20222 wrote: | It's what gives certain meats looked corned beef that | distinct "pink" color. | morsch wrote: | Makes sense, in fact it seems the ingredients are all still | individually in use as food additives, if rarely. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-01 23:00 UTC)