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for everyday service use. In any case, neither the advocates of military repeaters nor the backers of the Springfield were keen on the introduction of a new powder: Winchesters, Hotchkisses, and the like had a hard enough time handling a service load, let alone one of guncotton, while the Springfield, according to its most ardent exponents, was near to reaching its apex of perfection. A switch to guncotton would require a wholesale revamping of the weapon. Returning the new Springfield, perhaps not to square one but certainly to square two or three, would require years of testing and render obsolete all the results so painstakingly gathered from various experiments and trials over the decades.

By the mid-1880s rumors circulated within Ordnance circles that the French had made a top-secret breakthrough. Whereas British, German, and American chemists had discussed each other’s academic papers, the French had remained mysteriously aloof ever since the discovery of guncotton. Then, from nowhere seemingly, they announced the appearance of the Lebel rifle, powered by a propellant named Poudre B. It was the invention of a young military chemist, Paul Vieille, who blended guncotton with ether and alcohol to produce a gelatinized mass that could be thinly rolled, cut, and dried for easy cartridge loading. Poudre B thus successfully retarded and stabilized guncotton’s furious burn rate.18 Moreover by keeping the bullet inside the barrel for longer, so as to better exploit the burgeoning pressure behind it, the new propellant permitted the projectile to achieve amazing speeds. Consequently, just 43.25 grains of Poudre B produced an incredible velocity of 2,020 feet per second for a bullet weighing 232 grains. The Springfield .45-70-405’s velocity, by way of comparison, was roughly 1,350 feet per second. “These are about the best results ever given with a small arm,” judged a studiedly phlegmatic Scientific American.19

The magazine’s calmness notwithstanding, Vieille’s taming of guncotton understandably sparked a frantic powder race among the Great Powers. Poudre B was a single-base powder—it used only one explosive as the active ingredient—as opposed to the still more powerful double-base powders soon conceived by the Swede Alfred Nobel in 1888 and Hiram Maxim a year later.20

In the United States, Ordnance looked distinctly inept and behind the times. Its pooh-poohing of guncotton’s possibilities as a small-arms propellant—now proved wholly erroneous—had lost it pride of place in the global constellation of first-rate arms and munitions manufacturers. Mesmerized by its internal debates over repeaters versus single-shot weapons, over Indian fighting versus European warfare, and over firepower versus marksmanship, the country’s military had collectively missed the greatest ammunition development since the beginning of the metallic-cartridge era.

In 1889 the chief of Ordnance was forced to confess grimly that every attempt his department had made to reproduce smokeless powder had failed. As the new double-base smokeless powders, being highly classified, were impossible to purchase on the open market in Europe, it was alarming that “all effort, official and otherwise, to date, to obtain a smokeless powder has been abortive.” Even American military attachés to the chancellories and palaces of Europe, whose job it was to procure secret intelligence, could do no better than file sparse reports gleaned from sources of dubious accuracy.

Given these failures, Benét felt it was imperative that the United States develop its own powder and produce it. To this end, the Ordnance chief decided to make his memorandum on smokeless powder public in the hopes of stimulating some American company or entrepreneur to concoct a suitable substitute. Scientific American readers were additionally tipped off by his hint-hint comments that since “no American has yet submitted for trial a smokeless powder,” evidently “American powder makers and chemists have not yet awakened to the lucrative opportunity presented them.”21

Never before had a senior Ordnance