American Rifle - Alexander Rose [124]
Less tangibly, the advent of smokeless powder also changed the experience of combat. Throughout history men in battle had been fearful of what they could see, usually the enemy directly ahead of them; that localized, immediate fear had disappeared as soon as the foe did. But now that the enemy could fade into the landscape, soldiers grew alarmed at what they could not see; death might strike suddenly at any time, from anywhere, and emanate from the long-range rifle of an invisible, lurking assailant. Terror was about to become universal and opaque.
The most practical argument to be made against guncotton, however, was that it was too dangerous to manufacture. During the initial wave of excitement various countries had built factories to produce the substance in large quantities. But careless preparation, unfamiliarity with the process, and other factors resulted in a series of horrific explosions. In July 1847 Hall & Sons of Faversham, in Britain, blew up with the loss of twenty-one lives. In July 1848 sixteen hundred kilograms of guncotton exploded at a factory at Bouchet, France, killing a large number of civilians and employees. Major industrial accidents occurred in Prussia and Russia as well. By 1850 guncotton production had been almost wholly outlawed throughout Europe. In the United States such disasters had not occurred, mostly because manufacturers had been awaiting Ordnance approval before investing in large factories. They had a lucky escape.15
Chemists, however, continued to discuss the substance’s properties in the new scholarly journals, so specialized that not even Scientific American carried summaries of their findings. Scientists were fascinated by guncotton, for unlike gunpowder, which explodes owing to the physical proximity of its ingredients, guncotton’s constituent molecules were bound organically to one another.
The one place where practical research on guncotton for military purposes continued to be quietly carried on was Austria. In the late 1850s and early 1860s Baron von Lenk, an intimate of the Habsburg emperor, maintained a small, secret project to investigate the use of guncotton as a bursting charge in howitzer shells. Lenk’s experiments were only partially successful, but he did achieve the purification of guncotton’s ingredients so as to better stabilize the substance and regulate the rate of combustion. Based on his research, the baron went so far as to speculate that if sufficient acid were removed during processing, guncotton could possibly be used in small-arms production.16
Although the United States lacked the requisite manufacturing facilities, it had maintained a highly covert interest in guncotton ever since publicly disclaiming it as a small-arms propellant. During the Civil War both North and South made some limited forays into guncotton production, only to be frustrated by the Union’s lack of cotton and the Confederacy’s lack of acid. In 1863, probably using Lenk’s office as an unofficial channel, Lincoln’s consul in Vienna, Theodore Canisius, obtained a small number of experimental guncotton cartridges and shipped them to the Ordnance Department. Colonel Theodore Laidley reported favorably on them but cautioned that they were too few for the department to carry out exhaustive research. A secret telegram was then dispatched to Canisius, directing him to obtain as many cartridges as he could. The consul, pulling every string in Vienna and then some, succeeded in acquiring a batch of one thousand and smuggled them home in the diplomatic bags. Though this number was nowhere near sufficient to render an accurate judgment, and even considering that the army’s Spring fields could not handle the Austrian cartridges, Laidley believed that Washington should in any case purchase the rights to Lenk’s purification process. And that was the last anyone heard of guncotton officially until 1879, the year when the Ordnance Department first mentioned the subject again in its reports.17
The department remained firmly convinced that guncotton was too unstable