Gunpowder | Facts, History, & Definition (2024)

gunpowder, any of several low-explosive mixtures used as propelling charges in guns and as blasting agents in mining.

The first such explosive was black powder, which consists of a mixture of saltpetre (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and charcoal. When prepared in roughly the correct proportions (75 percent saltpetre, 15 percent charcoal, and 10 percent sulfur), it burns rapidly when ignited and produces approximately 40 percent gaseous and 60 percent solid products, the latter mostly appearing as whitish smoke. In a confined space such as the breech of a gun, the pent-up gas can be used for propelling a missile such as a bullet or artillery shell. Black powder is relatively insensitive to shock and friction and must be ignited by flame or heat. Though it has largely been supplanted by smokeless powder as a propellant for ammunition in guns, black powder is still widely used for ignition charges, primers, fuses, and blank-fire charges in military ammunition. With varied proportions of ingredients, it is also used in fireworks, time fuses, signals, squibs, and spatting charges for practice bombs.

Black powder is thought to have originated in China, where it was being used in fireworks and signals by the 10th century. Between the 10th and 12th centuries, the Chinese developed the huo qiang (“fire lance”), a short-range proto-gun that channeled the explosive power of gunpowder through a cylinder—initially, a bamboo tube. Upon ignition, projectiles such as arrows or bits of metal would be forcefully ejected, along with an impressive gout of flame. By the late 13th century the Chinese were employing true guns, made of cast brass or iron. Guns began to appear in the West by 1304, when the Arabs produced a bamboo tube reinforced with iron that used a charge of black powder to shoot an arrow. Black powder was adopted for use in firearms in Europe from the 14th century but was not employed for peaceful purposes, such as mining and road building, until the late 17th century. It remained a useful explosive for breaking up coal and rock deposits until the early 20th century, when it was gradually replaced by dynamite for most mining purposes.

The preparation of black powder from solid ingredients requires uniform mixing and blending of the saltpetre, charcoal, and sulfur. The earliest manufacturing processes used hand methods; the ingredients were simply ground together into a powder using a mortar and pestle. Beginning in the 15th century, water-driven crushing devices of wood, called wooden stamps, came into use to grind the ingredients, and power-driven metallic crushing devices replaced the wooden stamp mills in the 19th century.

Because the burning of black powder is a surface phenomenon, a fine granulation burns faster than a coarse one. A fast burning rate is effective ballistically but tends to create excessive pressures in the gun barrel. Thus, black powder in its powdered form burned too rapidly to be a safe propellant in firearms. To remedy this, Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries began manufacturing powder in large grains of uniform size. The speed of burning could be varied by using a different size of granule. In the 19th century, as elongated projectiles replaced round balls and the rifling of gun tubes was adopted to rotate and stabilize the projectile, black powders were manufactured to burn even more slowly. In the 1850s Thomas J. Rodman of the U.S. Army developed black powder grains so shaped that they provided a progressively greater burning surface as the combustion progressed, with a resulting maximum energy release after the projectile had already begun to travel down the bore of the gun.

Beginning in the 1860s, black powder was gradually supplanted for use in firearms by guncotton and other, more stable forms of nitrocellulose. Unlike black powder, which burns by the chemical reactions of its constituent ingredients, nitrocellulose is an inherently unstable compound that burns by decomposing rapidly, forming hot gases. In contrast to black powder, it produces almost all gas upon combustion, earning itself the appellation smokeless powder. Also unlike black powder, nitrocellulose burns progressively, generating more gas pressure as combustion proceeds. This results in higher muzzle velocities (for the projectile) and less strain exerted on the firearm.

Nitrocellulose is manufactured by nitrating cellulose fibres such as cotton or wood pulp with nitric and sulfuric acids. Early manufacturing techniques often failed to remove all traces of residual acids from the nitrocellulose, which then tended to undergo an unpredictable spontaneous decomposition resulting in explosion. In the 1880s European chemists began adding special stabilizers to neutralize the residual acids and other decomposition agents in nitrocellulose. The resulting stable and reliable product, known as smokeless powder, was widely adopted in all types of guns in the following decades and supplanted black powder as the propellant charge in artillery and small arms ammunition. (Black powder is still used to ignite the main [smokeless] propellant charge in large-bore artillery pieces, however.)

Nitrocellulose propellants produce much less smoke and flash than black powder and deliver much more mechanical work per unit of weight. The other advantages of smokeless powder are its improved stability in storage, its reduced erosive effects on gun bores, and the improved control obtainable over its rate of burning.

Most forms of gunpowder produced today are either single-base (i.e., consisting of nitrocellulose alone) or double-base (consisting of a combination of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin). Both types are prepared by plasticizing nitrocellulose with suitable solvents, rolling it into thin sheets, and cutting the sheets into small squares called granules or grains, which are then dried. Control of the burning rate is achieved by varying the composition, size, and geometric shape of the propellant grains and sometimes by surface treatment or coating of the grains. Generally, the goal is to produce a propellant that is slowly converted to gas in the initial stages of burning and more rapidly converted as burning progresses.