Gunpowder: From Alchemy to Empire with Jack Kelly

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Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee,

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a global leader in science, technology, and innovation.

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My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum

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of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center.

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Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors,

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scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between,

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sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics.

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Welcome and thanks so much for joining us on AMSEcast.

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I’m very pleased to welcome our guest today, Jack Kelly.

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Jack is a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and

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an award winning historian, journalist and novelist.

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He’s written for publications like the Wall Street Journal

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and American Heritage, and you may have heard or seen him

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during appearances on NPR, PBS, and the History Channel.

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Some of his many books include Heaven’s Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the

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Erie Canal; God Save Benedict Arnold: The True Story of America’s Most Hated

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Man; and the book we’re going to discuss today, Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards,

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and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World.

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Jack, welcome to AMSEcast.

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Well, thank you very much, Alan.

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I so enjoyed this book.

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It’s really fascinating from beginning to end.

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Let’s start at the beginning.

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The Chinese invented gunpowder.

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They first created it.

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When did that happen?

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And then when did it make it to Europe?

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The first gunpowder is really developed

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around 1000 AD. That’s a good date to pick.

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There was actually a piece of writing from 850 AD that was a warning.

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And the development of gunpowder in China was mostly done by Alchemists, and

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unlike in the West, where the alchemists were looking to change lead into gold,

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in China, they were trying to develop an elixir of long life, and they tried

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mixing together various chemicals that they thought would have this purpose.

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Some of them were deadly poisons, but they didn’t know that at the time.

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And there was a warning that was written down in 850 AD, “Watch

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out if you combine these various ingredients because they can

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explode or they can flame up.” And so, that was thought to

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be the first reference really, to anything like gunpowder.

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By 1044 AD, they had, already, recipes for gunpowder.

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And it was referred to as the fire drug, or the fire

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medicine, which gives a kind of clue into the origin of it.

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So, what are those basic ingredients?

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One of the really fascinating things about gunpowder is that all the

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ingredients—the three ingredients, I should say—are naturally occurring.

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You can find them in nature.

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And the other thing I think that’s worth keeping in mind when we talk

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about gunpowder, is that gunpowder is a mixture of these ingredients.

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It’s not a chemical in itself.

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It’s sort of like a salad, where you have the lettuce and the tomatoes.

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You can separate them out, but they’re all mixed together.

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The first and most important ingredient in gunpowder is saltpeter.

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That makes up about three quarters of gunpowder, and it’s a

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naturally occurring salt that could be found in various places.

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Charcoal makes up 15%, and that’s simply the same type of charcoal we use in

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a barbecue reduced to a powder, and then sulfur makes up the remaining 10%.

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And that we use—it’s scraped from the openings of

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volcanoes, and there’s other sources of sulfur.

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So, those are the three ingredients, and have remained

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in those proportions for pretty much 900 years.

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And that was the only explosive known to humankind for all those centuries.

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So, quite a unique invention back in 1000 AD.

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Really unique and really world changing, as you show.

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Saltpeter, you mentioned, is a significant part of that recipe.

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Why has it proved to be a challenging component to produce?

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Why was it hard to produce for folks around the world?

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There was really two sources of saltpeter, and one of them was in a climate

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where you had a very heavy rainy season and then a very hot dry season.

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And during the rainy season, the saltpeter would be

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produced by the action of bacteria on organic material.

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The bacteria would essentially eat the

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organic material and give off this nitrate.

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During the dry season, those nitrates would leach up to the top

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and precipitate out and form a crust on the surface of the soil.

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That occurred mostly in India, and India became a very big source of saltpeter.

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It had to be scraped off from the soil and then refined to

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make what they needed, but it was the source of saltpeter.

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Whereas in Europe, if anybody who’s a gardner knows that you

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create a compost heap, you’re trying to create fertilizer

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for your garden, and that fertilizer is also nitrate.

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And so, in Europe, they would either dig up barnyard soil or

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old privies they’d find where there’s a lot of organic material.

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Or eventually, they started these farms where they would have

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ditches full of organic material and deliberately produce, in

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essentially a large compost operation, the nitrate, which then

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had to be carefully dissolved in water and refined into a powder.

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But because it was the largest, the most important

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ingredient in gunpowder, it was always in short supply.

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Now, you mentioned, when gunpowder made its way to Europe, it wasn’t

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really—the making of the gunpowder wasn’t really a scientific process,

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but more of an engineering, almost trial-by-error [laugh] process.

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What were some of the challenges that confronted those early

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engineers with the production of that gunpowder in Europe?

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First of all, chemistry was a very late science

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to develop, and I think it’s obvious why.

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If you compare it to physics, with physics, you had the actual objects.

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You could see things hitting each other, or two weights

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dropping, whereas with chemistry, everything was invisible.

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And even today, even with electron microscope, we

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couldn’t just barely see a molecule because it’s so tiny.

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So, everything in the development of

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gunpowder had to be through trial and error.

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And it was amazing that they developed, really, the formula

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that lasted for 900 years through this trial and error.

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And the other thing that was an obstacle to making gunpowder

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was that you didn’t just mix the ingredients together; they

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had to go through a process, what they called incorporation.

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And that was essentially they would take the powders, these

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three powders, mix them together in the right proportions, and

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then moisten them with either water, or sometimes they thought

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that urine or wine or something would give it more power.

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They would moisten it into a kind of putty, and they would

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put that in a mortar and pestle and pound it for 24 hours,

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completely integrate the three ingredients together.

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They still remained separate ingredients, but they intimately mixed together.

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Later, they developed a more industrial way of

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incorporating the powder with these giant rollers that

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would roll over platters filled with this moist gunpowder.

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But those were the challenges that they had to overcome to really—and

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gunpowder really did develop slowly for many centuries, you know, just

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increasing the power and the reliability and the consistency of it.

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Seems like there’s a good amount of danger built into that process, though.

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Yeah, that was always the case.

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The gunpowder mills tended to blow up quite easily.

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I actually went out to see what was the last gunpowder mill in

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America—I think—when I was writing the book, and I asked the

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proprietor, I said, “How did you get past that danger aspect of

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it?” Because now they have OSHA and all these workplace regulations.

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And he said, “We never did.” And he said, “They’re still a dicey

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operation.” And ironically and really tragically, about a month

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afterwards, they did have an explosion there, and two men were killed.

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And they were probably the last, hopefully, of a long

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list of men who died making gunpowder over the years.

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When science did develop, when the science of chemistry

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developed, what did it reveal about how gunpowder works?

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Each of the ingredients has a specific role.

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And the saltpeter, the role of the saltpeter

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is to produce oxygen from within the powder.

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The saltpeter is potassium nitrate.

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The nitrate radical—what they call the nitrate radical in

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chemistry—is a nitrogen atom with four oxygen atoms attached to it.

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It’s a very unstable radical, and when it gets hot

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and starts jiggling around, the oxygen flies off.

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That is the key to why gunpowder works because the oxygen, for the

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combustion of the charcoal and the sulfur, is inside the powder.

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The charcoal burns at very high heat, produces a lot

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of hot gas, and sulfur, in the contrary, burns at a

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relatively low temperature, so that speeds up the reaction.

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I always try to compare it to a candle.

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If you light a candle, the hot gasses that are coming off the flame will suck

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in oxygen from the air—suck in air, actually—to make the burning continue.

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But air is only 20% oxygen.

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In gunpowder, you have all the oxygen you

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need contained within the actual substance.

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So, speed is everything.

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The whole gunpowder reaction takes place

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in about three one-thousandths of a second.

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So, it’s just a blink of an eye, and it’s

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all burned up and turned into this hot gas.

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I sometimes compare it to, you know, burning a piece of charcoal.

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There’s actually more energy, more heat, in a charcoal briquette than

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in an equal amount of gunpowder, it’s just that, with the briquette, it

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burns over half an hour, and the gunpowder, it goes off instantaneously.

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And with the briquette, I can never get them

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lit, but that’s another matter altogether.

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So [laugh]

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.
They always seem to be at the perfect—just getting

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to be perfect temperature when you’re done cooking.

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[laugh] That’s right.

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I never understand that either.

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So, I found it really interesting that as gunpowder developed,

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men like Galileo were looking at it, it helped really inspire

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new ideas in areas like combustion, mechanics, forces of motion.

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Can you talk a bit about that?

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There was a great incentive to study and to improve gunpowder because it was so

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essential to the power of the various countries that were using it in warfare.

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They developed the chemistry of it.

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For example, Lavoisier was a famous chemist in France in the 18th

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century, and also was the man who directed their gunpowder operations.

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So, he brought in a lot of improvements to making gunpowder.

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He understood what was going on better than the craftsman

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of earlier times, and he particularly got past the

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idea that the fire was a substance inside of a fuel.

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They thought that a block of wood had this phlogiston,

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as they called it, inside it, and it was let out when it

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burned, and of course, that was not the way that it worked.

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As far as physics go, gunpowder weapons I

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should say, were very influential in physics.

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There was a gentleman in the 1500s who was studying what’s the best

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angle to aim a cannon to get the longest range in the cannonball,

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and he tried to look at it mathematically as well as it could.

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And he found that, for example, if you fire it exactly

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parallel to the earth, it still curves downward.

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Why is that?

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You know, now it seems so obvious to us, but

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they started asking, why does it do that?

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And that developed—through Galileo, who came a little bit

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later—into the idea of gravity, inertia, acceleration.

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And the guns were an incentive to study all these aspects.

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And eventually you get to Isaac Newton, who really took

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the cannonball and compared it to the moon and the planets

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and unified the science and totally transformed science.

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Mentioning guns and cannons, when do you see those appear on the scene?

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One of the interesting myths about gunpowder is a lot of people

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say that the Chinese, they discovered gunpowder, but either

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they were so wise that they didn’t use it for warfare, or they

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were so dumb they didn’t see how they could use it for warfare.

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Both of those things are wrong.

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They used it very extensively for warfare, and they

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developed flamethrowers and rockets and bombs and landmines.

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When it got to Europe a couple centuries

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later, the Europeans focused mainly on the gun.

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They didn’t get going for the more exotic

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weapons of war that the Chinese had developed.

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And the first guns were used in battle, I think pretty much assumed, in 1346.

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Edward III on one of his conquest of France, he fired off guns.

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Very ineffective, but it created a big sensation.

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It was sort of a psychological weapon almost.

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By the 1400s they began to develop larger and more efficient cannon.

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Mehmed II in 1452 used a cannon to break down the walls of Constantinople

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and end the Byzantine Empire that had been there for many, many centuries.

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So, they were beginning to be then, very effective by that time.

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A lot of folks don’t realize, the Roman Empire really didn’t end

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until the 15th century, and it ended thanks to those cannons, yes.

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So, you talk about the impact of these new weapons, powered

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by gunpowder, on government-owned social structures.

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Can you talk a bit about how that started transforming those in Europe?

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As they developed a larger and larger cannon, their main purpose

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was not to kill people, but to break down fortifications.

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And by the 1450s

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they had 16-foot-long cannons shooting two-foot

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diameter balls into the walls of castles.

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That destroyed the base of the nobility during feudal times.

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And they couldn’t hide in their castle anymore, and they didn’t have the

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money that the king had in order to buy the guns, very expensive, the

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powder was very expensive, and the fortifications that you needed to protect

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yourself against cannon fire were much more expensive than building a castle.

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So, the feudal age then died out and gunpowder

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was one of the things that contributed to that.

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The other aspect was that using what was called, originally a hand cannon, or

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later a musket, a peasant could fire a ball and pierce the armor of a knight.

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And the knights had ruled for many centuries, the knight on horseback

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in his armor was sort of impenetrable, and they suddenly became

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obsolete as well, so the possibility of power being taken up by common

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people who didn’t need a lot of training, they just needed to have a

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gun and fire it, really transformed the dynamics of society as well.

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And also, as you show, helped lead to the spread of empire as well.

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We have to look at gunpowder as a form of power.

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And in the days of, for example, of Alexander the

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Great, to exert your power, you had to send an army.

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And the army was expensive, you had to transport the

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troops, you had to pay them, you had to feed them.

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With the gunpowder, you had the power concentrated in a ship.

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And you had cannon on the ship.

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You would take it out, as Vasco da Gama did to India, and threaten to

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blow down their buildings, and they would then come to a conclusion

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that was made more sense to trade with you on unfavorable terms.

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And so, that was the way that Europeans spread their power out through

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India and Africa, the West, the East Indies, and then around the world.

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Now, we’ve talked about gunpowder in the context of war and conflict,

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but it started to be used for more economically productive ways.

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What were some of those, and why did it take so long for

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it to get to these more peaceful ways of using gunpowder?

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It was slow to be used what I would call generally blasting instead

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of use in weapons, partly because gunpowder was so expensive.

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It was not seen as—these were practical enough

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uses to use this very valuable material.

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It was dangerous.

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It was, just tradition continued on, and people didn’t want to change.

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But eventually they did see that gunpowder could be used for making

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canals or for drilling tunnels through a mountain or for mining.

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It became very big use of gunpowder, for mining.

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When we get into the 1800s and gunpowder began to be

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produced on an industrial scale, these uses really blossomed.

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And if you look at the overall history of gunpowder over the many,

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many centuries, there was more gunpowder used for peaceful purposes

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and for blasting than was used in all the wars because the wars used

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a huge amounts of gunpowder, but only for a few years at a time.

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Year in and year out, they were producing a lot of

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gunpowder to do what was basically civil engineering jobs.

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Interesting.

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I know in your book, and I don’t mean to not go into all the details, but

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I want our listeners to read the book if they haven’t already, you talk

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about a whole host of different types of weapons and ammunition, but we

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talked a bit before we went on air today, about the Minié ball—if I’m

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saying that correctly—of how that transformed or helped transform warfare.

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Can you tell us a bit about that?

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I actually have written a number of books about the Revolutionary War, and

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during the time, and for a long period of time in the development of muskets—the

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musket was a smoothbored weapon, I should call it—and it was very inaccurate.

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They didn’t even aim muskets; they would just fire in a phalanx

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of muskets and hope that some of the bullets had effect.

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And the reason was that it was not rifled.

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And the rifling was a way of spinning the bullet in a

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predictable way, and it would go in a completely straight line.

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That was the idea of the rifle.

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But the rifle was a very slow weapon to load, so they thought that firing

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more quickly with the musket, the smoothbore musket—the trouble was, of

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course, you always had to reload in between the shots, but that remained.

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By the Civil War, they had this idea of the Minié ball, which had a hollow

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in the back of it, and it was more like a modern bullet as opposed to a ball.

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And that hollow would spread out and it would catch the

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grooves in the barrel of the gun and deliver that spin.

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It was still a muzzle loader, but it was much

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more accurate out to quarter or half a mile.

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And a lot of the destruction, a lot of the fatalities in the Civil War were

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because their tactics were had been developed during the time of the musket, but

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when the Minié ball had come in, and these rifled muskets came in, with their

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accuracy, they were able to mow down troops and Pickett’s charge—and I talk in

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the book about Pickett charge is just one of the great tragic results of that.

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As I mentioned to you previously, I was director of the Lincoln

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Library Museum in Illinois for a while, and certainly that

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weapon has used a devastating effect during the Civil War.

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Let’s talk about the age after gunpowder.

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So, what has replaced gunpowder and weapons and other explosives today?

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If you were to point to one person who brought down this 900 years

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of technological supremacy of gunpowder, it would be Alfred Nobel.

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I wouldn’t call him a scientist.

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He was an engineer, a Swedish engineer, quite knowledgeable about

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chemistry, though, and he found a way to use nitroglycerin for the

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type of blasting projects that we were talking about a minute ago.

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And nitroglycerin was a synthetic product made in a

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chemistry lab using glycerin and treating it with acids.

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It was highly explosive, but it was hard

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to figure out exactly how to set it off.

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And he came up with the idea of the blasting cap—which was really his most

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important invention—of using a little tube of gunpowder that could be set

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off with a fuse to create a shock that would set off the nitroglycerin.

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He started a whole industry of selling nitroglycerin.

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The problem was that the nitroglycerin got to be—it could easily

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go unstable when it was being shipped or stored and explode

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spontaneously, which you didn’t want to happen, of course.

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So, he went back to the drawing boards, and he found that if he

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took the nitroglycerin and absorbed it in clay, and then took

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that clay and formed it into sticks wrapped with paper, that it

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was stable and he could still set it off with the blasting cap.

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He called it dynamite.

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And that was the end of the blasting off with gunpowder because dynamite was

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easier to make, it was more reliable and it was much, much more powerful.

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He invented that in 1867 and by the end of

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the 1800s, gunpowder was pretty much obsolete.

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The other use for gunpowder was as a propellant to shoot

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bullets out of a gun, and that use was taken over by

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nitrocellulose, or what they call guncotton when they invented it.

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And the big advantage that had was it was just as powerful as gunpowder, but

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it didn’t produce the smoke that had always been a problem with gunpowder.

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If you ever see a reenactment of Revolutionary War or Civil War battles,

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there’s always a lot of smoke, and that was a product of gunpowder.

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So, they called this new powder, smokeless powder, and gunpowder became

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known as black powder and reached the end of its useful life, I’d say.

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Is black powder used in anything today?

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Well, it’s still used in fireworks.

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There’s certain aspects of fireworks, the lift

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charge that throws the mortars up into the air.

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It’s used in reenactments.

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It’s very popular among Civil War and Revolutionary War reenactors.

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Muzzle-loading hunters use it.

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Gunpowder continues to be in heavy use in certain quarrying operations,

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particularly slate and marble, where you don’t want to shatter the

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rock, you just want to split off sections of it, and dynamite would be

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too powerful for that, and would tend to totally shatter the material.

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Those are relatively minor compared to the vast use of gunpowder in the 19th

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century, and I think you can effectively say that gunpowder is obsolete today.

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This one thing I’ll have to note, I had no

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idea that there still were musket hunters.

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That’s amazing.

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I had no idea.

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Yeah, they have a season that extends beyond the

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regular season for muzzle-loading guns, yeah.

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And just as an interesting thing, they’ve now developed a substance

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called Pyrodex that these hunters use and the reenactors use as well.

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That’s essentially smokeless powder, with

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a another chemical added to create smoke.

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It’s less corrosive and it’s more reliable than the

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old black powder, but it still looks like black powder.

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Interesting.

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Well, I’ve been to several of those reenactments, including Gettysburg,

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and that’s I’m sure, I assume, then they’re using that new thing.

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That’s interesting.

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Jack, you have so many interesting books.

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What are you working on right now?

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What’s next for you?

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The last few years, I’ve been specializing in books about the

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Revolutionary War, and of course, we’re now in the 250th anniversary

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of the war, and next year is going to be the culmination.

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I thi—I’m hoping there’ll be a lot of interest in

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the 250th anniversary of the birth of the country.

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And I have a book coming out in January of 2026 that’s

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about Thomas Paine and his role in the revolution.

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He’s noted as a thinker, and he wrote the famous essay that, “These are

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the times that try men’s souls,” but a lot of people don’t realize that he

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was also a soldier, and he marched with Washington’s army during 1776 and

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was really involved in the action in a very crucial time for the country.

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So, I refer to him as the founder for our time, and

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I think his ideas are well worth looking at again.

396
00:25:23,200 --> 00:25:23,640
Absolutely.

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I’m really interested.

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I can’t wait to read that.

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I will tell you right now at AMSE, we have an exhibit all about

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President science and engineering, and the story we tell about

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00:25:32,450 --> 00:25:36,129
George Washington is when Paine came to visit him while they’re

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waiting on the treaty to come back from France, and they do a little

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00:25:39,380 --> 00:25:43,310
experiment on the river in New Jersey to see why it catches on fire.

404
00:25:43,660 --> 00:25:46,460
And it’s really fascinating to see that interest in science early on

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00:25:46,469 --> 00:25:49,269
from our founding father, George Washington, along with Mr. Paine.

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They were all men of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment

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was—science was their guiding compass, so yeah, that’s not surprising.

408
00:25:58,429 --> 00:25:59,769
So, thank you again, Jack.

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Really enjoyed our conversation.

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00:26:01,360 --> 00:26:02,219
Thank you so much.

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00:26:02,360 --> 00:26:04,700
Yeah, same here, Alan, and best of luck.

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00:26:09,540 --> 00:26:12,240
Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast.

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00:26:12,650 --> 00:26:16,980
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You can also shop at our online store and become a member at AMSE.org.

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Thanks to our production team with Matt Mullins, plus our supportive colleagues

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Management, and Office of Legacy Management, as well as Oak Ridge National

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Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, NNSA, and the AMSE Foundation.

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And of course, thanks to our wonderful guests

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today, and to all of you for listening.

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