Invention of Gunpowder

10 Key excerpts on "Invention of Gunpowder"

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  eBook - ePub

  War and Technology

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  2

  GUNPOWDER TECHNOLOGY, 1490–1800

  Edward Gibbon was to claim that gunpowder “effected a new revolution in the art of war and the history of mankind,”1 a view that was common in the eighteenth century and indeed both earlier and later.2 More recently, the widely repeated thesis of the early modern Military Revolution3 has focused renewed attention on the issue of gunpowder technology. Improved firepower and changing fortification design, it is argued, greatly influenced developments across much of the world and, more specifically, the West’s relationship with the rest of the world. In other work, I have questioned the thesis,4 but here, first, I want to draw attention to the changes that stemmed from the use of gunpowder.

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF GUNPOWDER

  Gunpowder weaponry developed first in China. We cannot be sure when it was invented, but a formula for the manufacture of gunpowder was possibly discovered in the ninth century, and effective metal-barreled weapons were produced in the twelfth century. Guns were differentiated into cannon and handguns by the fourteenth.

  Each of these processes in fact involved many stages, with technical issues overcome as well as the need to accept a new idea in weaponry, the explosion. As far as the earliest use of gunpowder as a propellant or explosive, as opposed to a pyrotechnic composition for, say, fireworks, is concerned, someone discovered, probably by chance, that compacting the powder in a small chamber altered the way the material behaved when ignited; or, rather, the way the combustion gases behaved. This discovery, in itself, probably led nowhere until someone else (probably) had an idea about how to harness the energy of the explosion. Several inventive leaps were necessary before any sort of recognizable weapon appeared. It is likely that there may have been a considerable time interval between the discovery of the combustible properties of what was to become known as gunpowder and the discovery that it could be used to explode things and to propel objects. This schema would be in accordance with the normal condition of technological development prior to modern industrialization. Such development was largely incremental based on experience, rather than being revolutionary and based on abstract conceptualization.5

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  Medieval Handgonnes

  The first black powder infantry weapons

  • Sean McLachlan, Gerry Embleton, Sam Embleton(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Osprey Publishing

    (Publisher)

  7 DEVELOPMENT The gunpowder revolution The development of one of the most important substances in the history of warfare is a matter of controversy and sparse evidence. Gunpowder appears to have been invented in China in the 8th or 9th century AD and it was quickly adopted for use in bombs, grenades, rockets, and fireworks. It was a further few centuries, however, until the Chinese developed cannon and handgonnes; in other words, before they used gunpowder as a propellant rather than as an explosive. India adopted the technology next and may have had handgonnes as early as the 12th century. The Middle East seems to have started using gunpowder at about the same time. The first recipes in Europe are found in the late 13th century. Roger Bacon gave a formula for gunpowder in the year 1267 or a little earlier in his Epistola de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae, et de Nullitate Magiae (Letter on the Secret Workings of Art and Nature, and the V anity of Magic). Another recipe was recorded in Albert the Great’s De Mirabilibus Mundi (Concerning the Wonders of the World), written c.1275. Marcus Graecus went into more detail in his Liber Ignium ad Comburendos Hostes (Books of Fires for the Burning of Enemies) c.1300. Their recipes differ in the proportion of sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal and none of them describes a military use for the weapon, although some scholars were already thinking along those lines. In his Opus Tertium (Third Work), written c.1268, Bacon said: By the flash and combustion of fires, and by the horror of sounds, wonders can be wrought, and at any distance that we wish – so that a man can hardly protect himself or endure it. There is a child’s toy of sound and fire made in various parts of the world with powder of saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal of hazel wood. This powder is enclosed © Osprey Publishing • www.ospreypublishing.com

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  Rational Fog

  Science and Technology in Modern War

  • M. Susan Lindee(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  A fire spear, de-veloped in China, was a tube filled with gunpowder that was intended to set fire to a target. Fire spears were heavy and awkward and could not send fire very far, but enough of them could ignite a target. At some point after around 1200, Chinese gunsmiths developed the true gun. A true gun is defined as having a barrel, high-nitrate gunpowder, and a single projectile. Around this time, guns, grenades, rockets, and other in-cendiary weapons became regular tools of war in China. These technologies were used extensively in siege and naval warfare by vast armies and navies in a period of chaotic conflict between the Mongols, the Song Dynasty, and the Jurchin Jin Dynasty. Chinese battlefields were filled with gunpowder technologies and Chinese military forces used novel strategies to exploit them. Essentially, then, early modern warfare was invented in China between about 1200 and 1400, as the historian Peter Lorge has conclusively shown. 1 It is important to say this very plainly because much of the literature produced by European historians over the last two centuries about the rise of the gun has left out or minimized the story of gunpowder warfare in China. The gun has played both an actual role in European history that matters a great deal and a (somewhat tiresome) symbolic role as a sign of European superiority. There is a similar tendency in stories about other kinds of military technology that came later, reflecting the force of technological seduction. In my view the celebration of technological differences—particularly as markers of national or continental superiority (and here tone can be impor-tant)—is the opposite of serious historical analysis. But it is common even in 24 Rational Fog many very respectable and serious historical accounts.

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  History of the Explosives Industry in America

  • Arthur Pine Van Gelder, Hugo Schlatter(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  With the advent of gun-powder and firearms this equality completely disap-peared. Civilized man now had an advantage over the barbarian that was difficult to overcome, and slowly but surely he has extended his dominion over practi-cally the entire globe. But the introduction of these means of destruction had a no less marked effect on the inner political con-dition of the European nations. It signalled the be-ginning of the end of the feudal system, which had held a large portion of the people in subjection. It had a levelling effect in the sense that it ended the career of the strong-armed man and lessened the im-portance of individual prowess. The castles of the robber-barons and the feudal lords were no longer impregnable retreats. On the one hand, the citizenry became less dependent on the protection of petty lords and princes, on the other, it strengthened the pow-ers of honest and efficient central governments and brought about a more perfect national development. In the arts of peace, gunpowder was of less import-ance and cannot be compared in this respect with high explosives. Indeed, it was only in the first half of the 17th century that black powder began to be used for mining, and towards the end of that century for en-gineering work, such as the building of roads. As with most inventions that are centuries old, the name of the inventor and even the country of its dis-covery remain in doubt. The principal claimants for the honor are the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Greeks, the Arabs, the English and the Germans. It is now practically certain that gunpowder was unknown in CHINESE SNOW 5 ancient times, since its main constituent, saltpeter, is not mentioned in ancient classical literature, although it is found as an efflorescence on walls, in cellars and in stables. No doubt it was confused with carbonate of soda which is also found in these conditions.

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  Encyclopedia of Solid and Liquid Fuels

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Academic Studio

    (Publisher)

  A slow match for flame throwing mechanisms using the siphon principle and for fireworks and rockets are mentioned. Academics argue the Chinese wasted little time in applying gunpowder to warfare, and they produced a variety of gunpowder weapons, including flamethrowers, rockets, bombs, and land mines, before inventing guns as a projectile weapon. ____________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ____________________ Middle East The Sultani Cannon, a very heavy bronze muzzle-loading cannon of type used by Ottoman Empire in the siege of Constantinople, 1453 AD. The Arabs acquired knowledge of gunpowder some time after 1240 AD, but before 1280 AD, by which time Hasan al-Rammah had written, in Arabic, recipes for gunpowder, instructions for the purification of saltpeter, and descriptions of gunpowder incendiaries. Gunpowder arrived in the Middle East, possibly through India, but originating in China. This is implied by al-Rammah's usage of terms that suggested he derived his knowledge from Chinese sources and his references to saltpeter as Chinese snow, fireworks as Chinese flowers and rockets as Chinese arrows. However, because al-Rammah attributes his material to his father and forefathers, al-Hassan argues that gunpowder became prevalent in Syria and Egypt by the end of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth. ____________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ____________________ A picture of a 15th century Granadian cannon from the book Al-izz wal rifa'a . Al-Hassan claims that in the Battle of Ain Jalut of 1260 AD, the Mamluks used against the Mongols in the first cannon in history gunpowder formulæ with near-identical ideal composition ratios for explosive gunpowder. However, Khan claims that it was invading Mongols who introduced gunpowder to the Islamic world and cites Mamluk antagonism towards early musketeers in their infantry as an example of how gunpowder weapons were not always met with open acceptance in the Middle East.

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  Routledge Handbook of the Global History of Warfare

  • Kaushik Roy, Michael W. Charney(Authors)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART V The Impact of Gunpowder Passage contains an image

  17 ECONOMY AND GUNPOWDER WEAPONS IN WESTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE

  DOI: 10.4324/9780429437915-23

  Philip T. Hoffman

  Western and Central Europe were politically fragmented and had been so, almost without interruption, from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. Like other splintered parts of the globe, the polities in this part of Europe fought incessantly. In the early Middle Ages, most of the leaders of these polities were what we would today call warlords, controlling realms that possessed little permanent tax revenue. To reward the followers who battled on their behalf, the leaders gave them not money from taxes but grants of land with powers over people. Over time, these leaders became the lords and princes of medieval history, and to fund their fighting they eventually managed (typically by negotiating with elites) to impose permanent taxes. This achievement allowed them to turn their administratively weak dominions into strong states able to impose heavy taxes by the standards of the preindustrial world. Most of this tax revenue paid for continued conflict. In the nineteenth century, economic growth and representative institutions gave leaders more to spend, even during lulls in the fighting. The result was that by 1913—admittedly at the end of an arms race building up to the First World War—European powers and the United States (itself a relatively small military spender) accounted for nearly 85 per cent of the world’s military expenditure (Eloranta 2007 : 260).

  From the end of the Middle Ages, this military expenditure went increasingly (and by the seventeenth century almost exclusively) on fighting with the technology of gunpowder weapons; that is, the technology of firearms, artillery, ships armed with guns, and the older weapons (swords, pikes, cavalry lances) that proved essential for gunpowder warfare through at least the sixteenth century. The gunpowder technology, it turns out, was ideally suited to conquest abroad. It helped a small number of Europeans to topple the Aztec and Inca Empires, and allowed them to gain toeholds in Asia by building fortresses that rebuffed assaults by enormous armies, In the late nineteenth century, more advanced gunpowder weapons and the invention of remedies against malaria made it possible for the Europeans to colonise Africa. By 1914, 84 per cent of the world was, or had been, a European colony.

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  Warfare in World History

  • Michael S. Neiberg(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Two obvious legacies from this period stand out. First, access to guns and the administration and training needed to effectively use them proved to be dominant on battlefields across the world. Europe’s ability to take the early lead in gunpowder warfare produced both an increase in warfare on the continent itself (as well as in colonies controlled by European states) and one of the key resources needed for imperialism to develop. Across the Americas and Asia, especially, Europeans, despite their numerical inferiority, carved out new empires and used their guns to control vast areas against the will of native peoples.

  The second, related, legacy involves the centralization of state power that guns facilitated. Centralized governments grew markedly stronger in this period in large measure thanks to their near-monopoly of gunpowder weapons. New financial and logistical administrations created the features of the modern European state. The need to field and maintain reliable armies served as a key motivating factor.

  In the next chapter we will examine how Europeans took their gunpowder advantages a step further and extended their colonial holdings. As Braddock’s defeat proved, guns alone did not guarantee victory, but the battlefield power of these weapons could not be denied. Indeed, as Braddock’s opponents knew, ambushing an army before it could bring its guns to bear vastly increased the chances for success. Still, guns produced a larger difference between wealthy and poor armies than had previously existed.

  The introduction of gunpowder weapons must therefore be regarded as one of the most important developments in military and world history. When combined with men trained and able to use them, they made possible the creation of modern states, the decline of feudalism, and the onset of imperialism. The next major development in the history of warfare would come with the rise of nationalism, first in North America then, even more revolutionary, in France. Sophisticated weapons would therefore become wedded to men motivated by an entirely new set of values. The result changed the nature of warfare forever.

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  Offshore Asia

  Maritime Interactions in Eastern Asia before Steamships

  • Fujita Kayoko, Momoki Shiro, Anthony Reid(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • ISEAS Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Hence, this research starts with the pre-European period, c .1390–1515, and follows with the period when European gunpowder technology caused an increasing demand for saltpetre in Asia ( c .1515–1850). I argue that it was the active trade in saltpetre across Asia that made possible the gunpowder wars which altered the history of different parts of Asia to different degrees. This special commodity, though inferior in terms of volume, played a unique role which nothing else could have replaced. In addition, the demand for saltpetre and sulphur 8 (and related commodities such as metals for making guns and cannon) for gunpowder warfare spurred their flow across land and sea, which connected different parts of early modern Asia in an unprecedented way. 132 Sun Laichen PART I: SALTPETRE TRADE, c .1390–1515 Chinese Saltpetre and Korea Let us start with Korea where the consumption of saltpetre is much better documented. From 1104 to the 1370s, for more than two and a half centuries, the Koreans had been employing some primitive types of gunpowder weapons (and from the 1350s on, real firearms) and displaying fireworks. However, they had relied on Chinese technology (and presumably Chinese craftsmen), as they had not grasped the technological know-how of manufacturing gunpowder and firearms. Since 1350, as Japanese pirate activities started to intensify on the Korean and Chinese coasts, China and Korea faced a common enemy. In order to combat the increasingly threatening Japanese pirates, the Koryo court of Korea in 1373 and 1374 twice sent envoys to the Ming court to request weapons, gunpowder, sulphur and saltpetre for use on warships. The Ming instructed Korea to procure 500,000 jin 9 of saltpetre and 100,000 hu of sulphur from Ming China to manufacture gunpowder for Koryo to use. It was during this time that a Korean learned from a Chinese saltpetrer how to make saltpetre and this commenced Korea’s own gunpowder business.

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  Artillery

  An Illustrated History of Its Impact

  • Jeff Kinard(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R T W O Early Gunpowder Artillery BLACK POWDER No reliable account of the origin of black powder (or gunpowder)—a mixture of carbon (charcoal), sulfur, and saltpeter (potassium ni- trate)—has survived. The earliest medieval European accounts credit its discovery to various diabolical characters practicing magic or alchemical experiments. Although various explosive compounds had been known for centuries, a Chinese official named Tseng Kung-Liang recorded the first accurate formula for black powder in 1044, in a reference work entitled Wujung Zongyao. By 1300, the mixture was in wide use by the Chinese and Mongols for rockets, fire arrows, and bombs. Beginning in the mid-thirteenth century, Mus- lim artillerists were using it to create explosive trebuchet projectiles. It later passed to the Near East and, by way of the Muslims, on to Europe, where its critical ingredient, saltpeter, belied its discoverers under such names as Chinese snow and Chinese salt. The English scholar and alchemist Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1292) recorded the first reliable Western account of the formula in 1267. Bacon’s writings indicate that gunpowder was known in Europe in the thirteenth century and widely used for amusement in firecrack- ers. He also clearly understood the destructive potential of the com- pound: “There is a child’s toy of sound and fire made in various parts of the world with powder of saltpeter, sulphur and charcoal of hazel- wood. This powder is enclosed in an instrument of parchment the size of a finger, and since this can make such a noise that it seriously distresses the ears of men, especially if one is taken unawares, and the terrible flash is also very alarming, if an instrument of large size 31 32 were used, no one could stand the terror of the noise and flash. If the instrument were made of solid material the violence of the explo- sion would be much greater” (Partington, 78).

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  A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder

  • J. R. Partington(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Braunfell Books

    (Publisher)

  Wu Ching Tsung Yao is correct (and I have no reason to doubt it), mixtures containing saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, usually with other ingredients such as oils, vegetable matter, arsenic compounds, etc., were known at that time. The name huo yao was used for such mixtures. These were deflagrating (see p. 266) and some were explosive, though probably not so powerfully as modern gunpowder. They may be called “proto-gunpowder.” They were used in bombs and not as propellants.

  (iii) About 1232 a kind of bomb called a chen t’ien lei was used, which had a powerful effect and seems to have contained something approximating to modern gunpowder. About 1130 the fire-lance (huo ch’iang) had been used. In 1233 it is described as a paper tube, in 1259 a bamboo, from which solid fragments were projected by a charge which can be described as a weak gunpowder. This is the prototype of a gun.

  (iv) True gunpowder, of more or less the modern composition, was known in the later part of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (A.D. 1260-1368), when it was also known in Europe. It is uncertain whether it was developed by the Chinese or the Mongols, or even if a knowledge of it came from the West. The statement under (ii) suggests that it was discovered in China.

  (v) There are extant Chinese cast iron cannon dated from 1356. If the dating is substantiated by expert examination, these are ten or twenty years older than European iron cannon of comparable size, but the information about the Chinese guns is at present unsatisfactory. The statements about cannon in later Chinese historical works are contradictory and of no real value. The question as to whether cannon were invented in China before they were known in Europe cannot be answered with the information available, and dogmatic statements on one side or the other are worthless.

  These conclusions are substantially the same as, but are more precise than, those reached by Reinaud and Favé.{1714} The opinion{1715} that modern gunpowder was known to the Chinese from the first century A.D. would not require to be denied if it had not very recently been made.{1716}

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