American Rifle - Alexander Rose [260]
Return to text.
5. “Sconbein’s [sic] Explosive Cotton,” p. 64.
Return to text.
6. “Cotton Powder,” p. 79. On his use at home, see J. A. Padgett, ed., “The Life of Alfred Mordecai, as Related by Himself,” North Carolina Historical Review 22, no. 1 (1945), pp. 58–108. Interestingly, some superstitious backwoodsmen were convinced that black powder was actually more powerful than guncotton. For an example, see T. Aber and S. King, Tales from an Adirondack County (Prospect, N.Y.: Prospect Books, 1961), p. 189.
Return to text.
7. “The explosive cotton,” Scientific American 2, no. 13 (December 19, 1846), p. 101; Norman, Guncotton to Smokeless Powder, p. 115.
Return to text.
8. Norman, Guncotton to Smokeless Powder, pp. 63–64, 80, 120.
Return to text.
9. “Foreign Correspondence No. Two,” Scientific American 2, no. 10 (November 28, 1846), p. 77.
Return to text.
10. Norman, Guncotton to Smokeless Powder, pp. 70–71.
Return to text.
11. Quoted in ibid., p. 115.
Return to text.
12. P.A. Clarke, “Skirmish Line Target Practice in the Regular Army,” Harper’s Weekly 33, no. 1714 (October 26, 1889), p. 862.
Return to text.
13. Referring to French exercises, Scientific American observed that “it will now be necessary to substitute subdued colors for their red pantaloons and other bright accouterments, as the absence of smoke renders the gay figures of the men very conspicuous when in action.” Scientific American 62, no. 15 (April 12, 1890), p. 226, quoted in Norman, Guncotton to Smokeless Powder, p. 198.
Return to text.
14. G. Hartcup, Camouflage: A History of Concealment and Deception in War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), p. 12.
Return to text.
15. Norman, Guncotton to Smokeless Powder, p. 53.
Return to text.
16. Ibid., pp. 55–56, 60, 67–71.
Return to text.
17. Ibid., pp. 74, 116–23.
Return to text.
18. R. Amiable, “Scientific Reasoning and the Empirical Approach at the Time of the European Invention of Smokeless Powder,” in B. J. Buchanan, ed., Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A Technological History (Aldershot [U.K.]/Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), esp. pp. 346–52.
Return to text.
19. Scientific American 63, no. 6 (August 9, 1890), p. 89.
Return to text.
20. On these powders and developments, see P. G. Sanford, Nitro-explosives: A Practical Treatise Concerning the Properties, Manufacture, and Analysis of Nitrated Substances . . . , 2d ed. (London: Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1906), pp. 179–80, 191, 193.
Return to text.
21. Scientific American 61, no. 25 (December 7, 1889), p. 353. On military attachés, see R. I. Wolf, Arms and Innovation: The United States Army and the Repeating Rifle, 1865–1900 (Unpub. Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1981), p. 227.
Return to text.
22. On the rivalry between Ordnance and private enterprise, see D.R. Beaver, “The U.S. War Department in the Gaslight Era: Stephen Vincent Benét at the Ordnance Department, 1870–91,” Journal of Military History 68, no. 1 (2004), pp. 118–20. On the Whitney and Remington buyouts, H. G. Houze, Winchester Repeating Arms Company: Its History and Development from 1854 to 1981 (Iola, Wis.: Krause, 2004), pp. 133, 139, 143.
Return to text.
23. Norman, Guncotton to Smokeless Powder, pp. 124–25, 132.
Return to text.
24. Unfortunately his optimism was almost perfectly mistimed. When the Spanish-American War erupted in 1898, the army assuredly enjoyed powder enough for its 28,000 regulars—Frankford by now could turn out seven million cartridges annually—but not for the hundreds of thousands of men who enlisted during the war’s first six months. The subsequent investigation in the Senate was a nasty one, with populist politicians and army technocrats tangling over who was to blame for the fiasco. In a rerun of the Jacksonian years, Ordnance officers found themselves accused of discriminating against small entrepreneurs and agglomerating power to the department; they in turn charged Congress with starving the department of funds for decades and thus could not have been expected to produce the quantities