American Rifle - Alexander Rose [122]
Smokeless powder was discovered, quite by accident, in the impeccable, bourgeois kitchen of Frau Schönbein in 1845. One day when she was away, her husband, Christian Friedrich (1799–1868), a Swiss-German professor of chemistry at the University of Basel, was toying with a vial of nitric acid—in violation of Frau Schönbein’s express orders not to play with such stuff in the house—and spilled it over the table. Worried about his formidable wife‘s reaction, he quickly mopped up the mess with one of her cotton aprons and tucked it away near the stove to dry. Frau Schönbein, he thought, would be none the wiser. Then the apron blew up.1
A year later, presumably after Frau Schönbein’s fury had been assuaged, the professor addressed a meeting of Basel’s august Society of Scientific Research on the subject of his work treating cotton with nitric and sulfuric acids. The professor was closed-lipped about his exact process—he had a mind to patent his combustible invention—but there was no doubting that “nitrocellulose” (soon dubbed guncotton) was an intriguing idea.
Journalists present at the talk dispatched their stories home, and overnight Herr Professor Schönbein became famous. Scientific American commented in November 1846 on “a curious discovery in Europe, by which cotton was so prepared as to explode with all the force or effects of gunpowder.” The journal professed itself “suspicious of the genuineness of the report,” but even after discounting for gossip, “we are left to conclude that cotton (like saltpeter) will explode.” The magazine humorously warned that henceforth “young ladies who travel by railroad will have more than ordinary occasion to ‘beware of sparks.’ ” More seriously, Scientific American published a rudimentary guide to the process, which it claimed consisted of “simply dipping common cotton in nitric acid, and immediately washing it in water and drying.”2 There was a little more to it than that, as several subscribers soon discovered.
One eager amateur explained that he had loaded his old .75 musket with twelve grains of guncotton, less than a quarter of his usual gunpowder charge, and rammed a ball down on top. “On discharging the rifle, about five inches of the breech end of the barrel together with the lock, were completely blown to pieces. One piece weighing eight ounces was carried through the roof of the building.”3 And Mr. J. H. Pennington, “who has been trying to fly for two or three years,” told the editors that he was going to turn himself into a human rocket by strapping on a few pounds of homemade guncotton.4 His fate remains unknown.
Schönbein was even invited to Osborne House in London to demonstrate guncotton’s properties to Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort. First, of course, they needed a guinea pig. The prince selected a colonel of the Household Regiment, who recoiled from the idea. Albert, always interested in scientific endeavor, then himself volunteered. The professor placed a small amount in his hand, and “off went the cotton, without smoke, stain or burning of the skin.” Then the colonel consented, but the sample was not as high quality, and “it gave him such a singeing that he leapt up with a cry of pain. A hearty laugh was all the commiseration he received.”5
Cruel laughs aside, every army in the world was clamoring to try out this miraculous substance, which looked like cotton wool. Major Alfred Mordecai, the leading American ordnance specialist, soon managed to acquire a sample. He too “used to burn little bits of it in the palms” of his children for entertainment, but his tests revealed that “gun-cotton seems to produce in the musket an effect equal to about twice its weight of good rifle-powder.”6 After firing 60 grains of guncotton (the equivalent of 120 grains of regular gunpowder), Mordecai found hardly any visible residue in the barrel—though it did leave behind water and nitrous acid, which could corrode the metal if not cleaned properly—and even after eight shots, “there was scarcely any perceptible heat.”7
In short, guncotton fired clean and cold.