The Origin of Black Powder
It seems easy now, but launching a projectile from a firearm has quite a history.
Warning: if you’re a proud American, this might bug you just a little. The gunpowder that won us our independence wasn’t really ours.
Picture the Continental soldier. Homespun coat, worn-out shoes, a musket he probably paid for himself. Maybe it had been passed down through the family. We might like to imagine he was firing patriot-made American gunpowder, ground in some mill by candlelight!?!?!?
Mostly, he wasn’t. When the colonial powder mills ran short of saltpeter in 1777, domestic production fell off a cliff, and it never came close to feeding the Revolutionary War machine.
The stuff that actually kept the Revolution alive came off ships, and a lot of it was French. Silas Deane, our “I know a guy” in Paris, arranged for us to obtain close to a million pounds of it, and by the time of the Saratoga campaign, the gunpowder in American cartridge boxes was, for all practical purposes, supplied by the French.
So the nation that loves its guns more than any other on earth was, at the critical moment of its birth, completely dependent on foreign black powder. Yeah, I know. That’s just supplies. It was the effort that counted. I agree. It’s just an interesting story.
But here’s the even crazier part of the black powder history. That powder, French or colonial or otherwise, traces back through a chain so bizarre it sounds like bad fiction, or maybe an episode of Dr. Who. Before it was a weapon, before it was even a firework, black powder was a health tonic, kind of like “essential oils.” Somebody was trying to live forever, and instead, they invented the thing that would help a lot of people do the opposite.
Once the concept of powder-launched projectiles was figured out, the rest was simple
refinement of the details, a little at a time. Now it's easy and safe.
The Immortality Tonic That Blew Up
During the Tang dynasty China, somewhere around the year 850. Taoist alchemists were hard at work on the great project of the age: the elixir of life. The goal was immortality, or, at least, a major extension. These were serious people mixing serious ingredients, and one of the things they kept reaching for was saltpeter, along with sulfur and a few other odds and ends.
Saltpeter, the active ingredient, was mostly harvested from, let’s say, exotic places. Bat guano. Barnyard muck. The crust that builds up under an old outhouse. The key to the world’s first explosive, and to the dream of living forever, was more or less poop.
You can see where this is going.
A Taoist text from around that time outlines what may be history’s first safety warning about the stuff. Roughly translated, it tells fellow alchemists that some who heated saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal together with honey got “smoke and flames, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house burnt down.” OK, that part sounds like classic American, but remember, we were far from being invented in our current state.
Think about the irony for a second. The search for a potion to cheat death produced the exact opposite. Instead of eternal life, they got a fast, loud, and dramatic method of ending it. See? The universe does have a sense of humor.
From Party Favors to Payback
Once you can make things go bang, someone figures out how to make the bang entertaining. The Chinese packed the powder into tubes and got firecrackers and, eventually, fireworks. For a good while, the world’s most consequential chemical discovery was mainly employed to scare off evil spirits and impress the neighbors.
It didn’t remain as simple entertainment for long. If a tube of powder can throw sparks, it can launch other things too, and the Chinese were at war often enough to explore the idea. They started strapping powder charges to arrows. By 904, we get a possible mention of “fire arrows” at a siege, and by 975, the Song dynasty used them to burn a rival fleet down to the waterline.
Then came the weapon that really matters: the fire lance. Picture a spear with a tube of gunpowder lashed near the business end. You light it, and it belches a jet of flame, sparks and whatever bits of debris you stuffed down the barrel, straight into the face of the guy in front of you. We’re starting to get into “forward projectile” territory now. The earliest confirmed use dates to 1132, and there’s even a silk banner from a couple centuries earlier that appears to show one in action.
Look closely at that fire lance, because you’re looking at the ancestor of everything in your safe. A tube. A powder charge. Stuff flying out the open end in the direction you’re pointing.
When the Tube Became a Gun
For a while, that debris the fire lance spat was just filler, whatever was handy. Then somebody had the idea that changed the world. What if the tube fired one dedicated projectile, snug against the bore, so the whole force of the burning powder pushed against it?
That’s a gun. Not a flamethrower on a stick, but a barrel built to launch a single ball at a dangerous speed. Make that tube out of metal so it doesn’t blow apart, and it’s an actual firearm. The oldest surviving example, the Heilongjiang hand cannon, dates to around 1288. It was a stubby bronze thing fired with a match. Another one, the Xanadu Gun of 1298, was a bit more refined and somewhat accurately dated. There’s enough evidence to consider it a true firearm.
The earliest forms of these were arrows, barnyard junk, rocks and who knows what else.
Going West
The Mongol conquests helped spread gunpowder knowledge beyond China and across Asia. Somewhere between 1240 and 1280, a Syrian named Hasan al-Rammah was writing down recipes and even ways to purify saltpeter for a better burn.
Europe was the next stop. Around 1267, the English friar Roger Bacon described a device no bigger than a thumb that made a noise “exceeding the roar of strong thunder.” Within several decades, the continent was pouring the stuff into cannon. When English guns fired at Crécy in 1346, primitive as they were, the writing was on the wall for the armored knight.
From there, the path of continuous improvement was predictable to handheld matchlocks, flintlocks, that Continental soldier and his imported cartridges, and eventually the striker-fired polymer pistol on your hip.
Like steaks in the grocery store, we're no longer exposed to "how the sausage is made"
and we can just buy ready-to-go powder. In the early days, there were plenty of
fiery consequences to making the stuff.
The Long Fuse
So the next time you touch off a round, consider the the origins. You are lighting a chemical accident, originally made from poop and more than a thousand years old, cooked up by men who wanted to live forever.
Much, much later, we started this country relying on powder from wine and cheese connoisseurs. We ended up building an entire culture around what that powder became. Not bad for a failed immortality serum that mostly just burned down the house.
Get more exclusive online content from American Handgunner delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for our free American Handgunner Insider newsletter.
