EXPLOSIVE COMPOUNDS.

Thames Advertiser, Volume VII, Issue 1781, 6 April 1874, Page 3

EXPLOSIVE COMPOUNDS.

A hobbible fascination belongs to those terrible chemical compositions which so often have been literally as Frankensteins, to swallow up their makers. The late tragedy in Melbourne, by which Mr Reynolds lost his life, Mr English was put in danger, and Augustus Eupert Green has been committod for wilful murder, gives a special interest just now to the explosive compounds, at the head of which, for power. , and, .danger, stands, nitro-glycerine. " Villanous saltpetre," though dangerous enough, is a mere baby compared to ( the newer inventions of chemistry. M. Papillon.in a late number of the Revue des Deux Mondesi has a readable paper on " Nevf Explosive. Substances," and we shall borrow;from it some things, bearing, upon this esting subject of deadly contrivances and combinations. When .gunpowder was invented the chivalrous old warrior who thought it ignoble to kill a man save by fair'blows of sword, or spear, or arrow, hoped it would, not get into use,in war. We, and our fathers before us, hayj had no such graceful compunotions,: and so | we and'they have blazed•>away „as it answered, or was supposed to answer, our always high and moral purposes. We English, too, .have been very expert in gunpowder making. Like bread making, the receipt for powder making, is well known, for the ingredients remain the same—saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal, but it took a hundred years to find out that granulated materials were more effective than mere impalpable • powder. ;Now, gunpowder : is of all degrees of coarseness, and. the combinations of proportions' of the diabolical materials are varied according to the use to bo made.of the gunpowder. For most purposes of. international murder, men adopt a mixture of 6 parts of saltpetre to 1 of sulphur and 1 of charcoal.. At intervals there has been great trouble among kings and statesmen how to get saltpetre and sulphur enough to practise the: divine right of human slaughter. Bomba stopped the export of Neopolitan brim' stone once, and: Napoleon I. resorted to divers schemes for getting a good supply of nitre, but since then the science of the chemist and the discoveries, of new deposits of'natural, nitre and sulphur have made the way of legal murder niore.easy. The vigour of. the gunpowder is in the carbonic acid gas evolved and set on fire by the combustion of : the oxygen of the nitreand the carbon of the charcoal, and the discharge of a cork from a bottle of seltzerwater or ginger-beer is the result of a similar force. But soon the chemists found out several things far more murderous than the old-fashioned trinity combined in gunpowder. Berthollet doubled the force of gunpowder by substituting chlorate of potass for saltpetre, but the new thing went off too easily, and was, in fact, rather too muoh of a Frankenstein for ordinary purposes of murder or mechanics. They tried it in a mortar, and before the experimenters knew where they were they and the mortar were blown to pieces. This was inconvenient, and the new invention was renounced. One of the convenient discoveries of the last 100 years was the " Howard's powder," or that combination of mercury dissolved in nitric acid and mixed with alcohol, which used in Egg's capsules, introduced the new principle of percussion, and did away with the old steel,' flint, and priming, with which our immediate ancestors so laboriously did their assooiate murderings to the good old tune of" llulo Britannia." After this discovery tho chemists seem to have got on a straight line of scent, and hunted down a host of explosives.. The last 50 years have been rich in such discoveries, but up to tho present moment, although we have been blessed with combinations frightfully more destructive than gunpowder, nothing but it has been found practically usable in the specially human or inhuman vocation of" glorious war." At least thia is so in regard to all sorts of firearms. All other things but gunpowder are either too dear or too dangerous for us in pistols, rifles, and cannons. It turns out, too, that it is some form of the old " villanous saltpetre" that comes into the more deadly mixtures of the modern chemists. Nitric acid is the great explosive fact in combinatioa with some other things. Gun-cotton, dynamite, nitroglycerine, are all forms of newer and deadlier, force with au element of the old saltpetre in them all. _ Schcenbin found that cotton, soaked in nitric and sulphuric acids, washed in water, and carefully dried, looked unchanged, but was really changed into a deadly explosive. As simple cotton it was a hydrate of oarbon, but combined with the acids it became a magazine of terrible force, Too dangerous in its first form for generel use, gun-cotton was subsequently made more usable by the discoveries of„Lenk in Austria, and Abel in England. Lenk made it into the form of a cord, and Abel improved it still more by reducing the cotton to a pulp, and condensing it into a oompound mass, easily and safely manipulable. We may remark in passing that the Abel mentioned by il, Papillon is a principal in the govern-1 ment laboratory and pyrotechnic school' at Woolwich, and nephew to Mr Abel, of Ballarat. For mine and other purposes the altered form of the explosive became of groat value. But the most terrible of all the inventions is that obtained by mixing the essence of (he old villain saltpetre, with that smooth, limpid, .soft, harmjess-looking stuff, known asglycerino. This mixture is known as nitro-glyoerine, and was invented by Ascagne Sobrero, an Italian chemist, in 1817. One drop of it on an avil when struck with a hammer explodes with the report of a rifle. But it; was so deadly a thing that up to tho year 1863 it was only regarded by the chemists as a dangerous curiosity. In 1863, Nobel, a Swedish ohemist, discooovered a method of exploding it in strong capsules, and in that form it came into use in mines, But there still remained tho terrible liability to oxplosion from tho slightest agitation, and fearful tragedies were ever and anon happening in tho removal of the explosive from one place to another. A London chemist qne day was experimenting, and exploded one drop of the nitro-glycerine by a blow with a hammor. The explosion so acted, upon a vessel full of tho stuff some yards off that it exploded, and not a vostiga of the chemist was ever seen afterwards. Ho and his laboratory werolitwlly Wqsto

into pieces. Thus, too, the Melbourne tragedy happened the other day. There was no percussion, it is true, but there was agitation with a similar result. Thus, too, when some nitro-gly-cerine was being carted to some slate quarries at.Carnarvon, the compound exploded, and men, horseß, and waggons were destroyed, and a great gaping gulf made in the road where the explosion oo« curred. Thus, too, at Brussels a load of nitro-glycerine was being removed from the waggons to the warehouse when an explosion took place, shaking the earth for a distance of nine miles. The air was converted into a hurricano which twisted , trees, tore off their leaves, out down the crops over a wide extent of country, •shook houses to their foundations, lifted off their roofs, the nitro-glyoerine warehouse was left a heap of bricks, the waggons and the labourer* were invisible, but two horsos were found with bars ;of iron through their bodies ' and their eyes blown out... In this, form, then, nitro-glycerine was too dangerous to deal with, but Nobel, the| Swede, mixed it with porous; earth, : aud ; - made it dynamite, in which form it,re?, tained its explosive' power without' its' l dangerous liability to qu'asi-sppntaneous combustion. It has been combined with other things, but the porous earth was found to be the best medium of absorp-, tion. The litho-fracteur is a < weaker form of dynamite, containing nitrate of soda, sand, sawdust, and sulphur._ ''-Id, France, dynamite waß first used in the late war, and several manufactories were established. Since then it has come into use' in mines and other'works of a similar) kind almost every where'. There 'is another material called pioric acid, a' clear,' bitter' extract from coal tar, and this mixed with potash forma picrate of potash, and is a powerful ox- * plosive. Mixed with saltpetre and chlorate of potash, the picrate was made into a new sort of gunpoffddr, stronger than ordinary blasting-powder, but less powerful than dynamite or gun-cotton. For blasting purposes it has been found in, Germany that dynamite, thou»li more dowerful in shattering rook, needs to be followed by ordinary powder in order to get the rock displaced in fragments.' > In faot, it is said that the use of blasting- • powder has increased in Germany since the introducing of the use of dynamiue, the latter being employed in the first and heavier process of shattering huge masses, and the powder being employed in the. work of breaking up the partially dislodged masses. Temperature affects the explosive value of dynamite,-and detonation- is difficult at 10.degrees be- " low zero. With some explosives there is, it seems, a curious sympathy with delicate forces. Thus some French chemists found that iodide of azote exploded on a bass viol when the bow was worked on the higher notes, bat re-; mained inert when the lower sounds were touched. On this principle also gas , flames are made, literally to dance to the, /;. sounds of music We have already stated that the force which discharges a ball from a firearm is the same as that whioK, > discharges, a cork from a bottlo of sodawater, and wo fiad that experiments to: : , test the explosive force in firearms ... showed that the first'force exerted upon a cannon by the combustion of the ' powder was equal to. 200,000 times the atmospheric force of a hurricane that tears up trees and destroys houses.— Ballarat Miner.