M aker

The Fire Drug

A maker’s history of black powder. By William Gurstelle

IT TRANSFORMED THE FATE OF NATIONS; it changed the way wars were fought, made weak countries strong and strong kingdoms weak. It ended the Middle Ages and ushered in the Renaissance with a bang. Its gush of hot, expanding gas blew away feudalism, for no longer could chain-mailed knights on horseback, invulnerable to hand-held weapons and arrows, maintain domination over their fiefdoms. In my estimation, black powder, or gunpowder, is the most important chemical discovery in the history of mankind.

For a thousand years, black powder was the only propellant and explosive in existence, making it the most powerful, deadly, entertaining, and politically potent chemical on Earth.

Because gunpowder was cheap and relatively simple to make compared to fashioning armor, it was the great equalizer among those who fought.

54 Make: Volume 13

It led to the supremacy of technology over arm strength, making engineers and scientists more important than knights and ninjas.

Francis Bacon, the English statesman, essayist, and philosopher, wrote that gunpowder (along with printing and the magnetic compass) had “changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world … insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs.”

Despite its essential simplicity, compounding black powder is not for everybody. While relatively tame compared to its high-energy cousins, flash powder and smokeless powder, black powder has more than enough brisance to blow off valuable body parts if handled carelessly. But after reading several books dealing with the subject, I decided that I couldn’t intimately understand the stuff until

Photography by WIlliam Gurstelle