Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics -- The History of the Explosive that Changed the World (review)

The publication of this book marks an interesting stage in the evolution of gunpowder studies, because an important subject which has animated a small group of historians for the last twenty-five years or so is now being made accessible to the general reader. Jack Kelly assures us that he has no intention of writing a "scholarly work," but this disclaimer is followed by a review of his sources which shows how fully he has read his way into the subject. Indeed, the comprehensive nature of the bibliography and the perceptive notes on each item are a valuable aspect of the book. They also serve to show how recently this subject has taken off. Chancing upon gunpowder manufacture in the course of documentary research in the mid-1970s, my own primers were mostly books written around 1900, such as Oscar Guttmann's Manufacture of Explosives, with J. R. Partington's Greek Fire and Gunpowder (1960) only adding to the mystery and the great Joseph Needham's Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic (volume 5, part 7 of Science and Civilisation in China) still to come in 1986. Now this general survey provides a useful addition to the growing list of specialist publications.

Kelly's aim in this relatively small book is to describe and explain the way in which the tenth-century innovation of making gunpowder was transferred from China by various avenues to Western Europe and the rest of the known world, where it was first respected as an agent of progress but later feared as a barbaric source of destruction and national aggrandizement. Gunpowder is presented as unique, since its effects cannot be replicated by any other combination of natural ingredients. It is also presented as a catalyst, because of its subsequent effect on the history of the world, and as an anachronism, because in a world increasingly dominated by science it survived into the twentieth century as the product of a craft-based technology.

The story is well told. Kelly excels in word pictures; he describes with great verve the intensity of battles on land and at sea, the part played by such exigencies as the need to carry powder during a naval engagement from the relative safety of the magazine to the gun deck, and the fatalistic courage required to withstand the furious onslaught of noise and smoke. But for the academic reader this very certainty of touch is a disadvantage. We reach in vain for the familiar apparatus of the footnote to check out some particular statement, but the text stands alone. Similarly, the intriguing chapter headings such as "The Most Pernicious Arts," "No One Reasons," and "Conquest's Crimson Wing" have no accreditation, and the sparse illustrations also lack underpinning. The reader gets little explanation of the two engravings from the Encyclopédie (1751-52), and, since the acknowledgments at the end of the book are to ownership and not source, the Hagley Museum and Library is credited but not Diderot.

The reader also loses out in the trade-off between maintaining the sweep of the story and exploring the details. Take, for example, the process at the heart of making gunpowder, selecting the ingredients and then grinding them so thoroughly that they are incorporated in the right proportion in every grain. This may be achieved by stamp mills, favored by the French until well into the nineteenth century, or by upright edge-runner or wheel mills, favored by the British and coming into use from the early eighteenth century on. Under the French influence, the du Ponts set up stamp mills at their Brandywine works in 1802, but then after some twenty years they began to make the costly and inconvenient change to wheel mills, probably influenced by the superior mixing and shearing effect of the edge runners. Such fascinating details are not dealt with adequately in the text. Omitted altogether, surprisingly, is the story...