GUNPOWDER, REASON AND POP

It fired the muskets of the English civil war, defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and saw the development of sporting firearms through from the matchlock to the modern centrefire breechloader. It blasted everything from the gold mines of California to the great civil engineering projects of the railway age; and were it not for the timely intervention of a search party, it would, in 1605, have blasted the Houses of Parliament to smithereens.

For more than five centuries gunpowder, that simple mixture of saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur, was the universal explosive, and until its eclipse in the mid-19th century with the development of nitrocellulose, it retained huge strategic importance. Even today, while we have long since turned to smokeless powders for our sporting guns and military firearms, gunpowder still has the power to entertain. Indeed, every year around the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ failed attempt at regime change, several hundred tons of it are used to light up the night sky.

Gunpowder manufacture