How was smokeless powder invented? Detailed answer

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How was smokeless powder invented? Detailed answer

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How was smokeless powder invented?

In 1845, the German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein (1799-1868) conducted an experiment in the kitchen of his home using a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids. His wife strictly forbade him to bring his flasks into the kitchen, so he hurried to finish the experiment in her absence - and spilled some of the caustic mixture on the kitchen table. Fearing a scandal, he grabbed the first rag that came to hand (it turned out to be a cotton kitchen apron), wiped the puddle from the table, and then hung the apron in front of the hearth. After drying, the apron exploded.

Schönbein knew immediately what he had received. The name he gave to the new substance, literally translated from German as "shooting cotton", is now called nitrocellulose by chemists. Schonbein sold the recipe for the production of a new explosive to several governments at once. At that time, black powder was used in artillery, the soot from which so soiled the guns that they had to be cleaned between shots, and after the first volleys such a curtain of smoke rose that one had to fight almost blindly.

The military was enthusiastic about the explosive, which gives much less smoke, and besides, it is also more powerful than black powder. They began to build factories for the production of nitrocellulose, but they exploded very quickly. Nitrocellulose was too impatient to wait for battles, and therefore had to be abandoned in the early 1860s.

Later, however, they came up with a way to clean nitrocellulose from impurities that caused spontaneous explosions, and nitrocellulose became safe to use. And in 1884, the first smokeless powder was invented - pyroxylin. It was made from nitrocellulose with a nitrogen content of over 12 percent (pyroxylin) with the addition of substances that give gunpowder special properties.

Author: Kondrashov A.P.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

What does the abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) mean?

The time in each time zone is indicated relative to UTC - for example, UTC+4:00. However, this abbreviation itself does not have any official decoding. The International Telecommunication Union adopted this standard in 1970 and considered the options CUT (English Coordinated Universal Time) and TUC (French Temps Universel Coordonne). Not recognizing any of them as suitable, they decided to stop at the neutral version of UTC.

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