[HN Gopher] Scientists test medieval gunpowder recipes with 15th...
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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.
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