Smokeless Powders: Cordite

In our last post, we studied the invention of ballistite by Alfred Nobel in France. In today's post, we will study how Britain managed to obtain a similar smokeless powder: cordite.

As we saw previously, the French had managed to invent a smokeless powder for military use in 1884, which they called Poudre B and had developed a new rifle, the Lebel M1886 rifle in 1886, after which other governments became aware that the French had a new secret propellant that was superior to black powder. Shortly after this, Alfred Nobel invented ballistite in 1887 and tried to sell it to the French military. However, since they had already settled on using Poudre B and partly because of Poudre B's inventor, Paul Vieille, having connections with the French military, the French turned Alfred Nobel's offer down, even though ballistite was superior to Poudre B. Therefore, Nobel tried to sell his invention to other countries and managed to make a sale to the Italians. While the French weren't about to reveal the secrets of Poudre B to others, Nobel was selling ballistite to anyone who could pay him. In 1888, the British government formed a special commission to gather information about Vieille's and Nobel's discoveries. The British feared that if a smokeless powder was actually invented, they needed to get access to the technology as soon as possible, in order to remain a world power. The British commission's mandate was "to investigate new discoveries, especially such as affected the use of military explosives, and to submit to the War Office, proposals for the introduction of any technical improvements in the field."

One of the two scientists that the British put in the commission was Sir Frederick Abel, who we studied about in previous posts. Abel was instrumental in improving the Von Lenk process of manufacturing gun cotton and making it safer. The other scientist was Sir James Dewar, who was also a well known chemist and physicist of that era.

Sir Frederick Abel

Click on the image to enlarge. Public domain image.

Sir James Dewar

Click on the image to enlarge. Public domain image.

Nobel was pretty well acquainted with both men. Abel was actually a sort of rival to Alfred Nobel about 20 years previously, when Nobel had tried to set up a factory to manufacture dynamite in Britain and Abel had managed to convince British authorities that gun cotton produced by his process was safer to make and thereby prevented dynamite from being sold or manufactured in Britain for a long time. However, as time passed, the two rivals had become somewhat friendly to each other, even exchanging letters and occasionally meeting each other in Paris or London to discuss technical matters. James Dewar was a close friend of Abel and he too had corresponded with Nobel before on technical matters in chemistry.

As part of the commission's study, they requested some detailed information about production and samples of ballistite, which Nobel readily supplied to them. They also carefully studied Nobel's patent claim for ballistite in France. This is where Nobel's patent claim came back to haunt him. His patent for ballistite stated that "ballistite was a combination of equal parts of nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose "of the well known soluble kind", with about 10% camphor. " The wording here is very precise and your humble editor has taken the liberty of highlighting a few bits, because they are important to the next few paragraphs.

So in 1890, Nobel's Explosives Company in Scotland obtained a British patent for ballistite and tried to market it to the British War Office, only to be informed that they had already acquired a patent for a smokeless powder invented by Abel and Dewar, called "the committee's modification of ballistite", or cordite. While looking at Nobel's patent notes on ballistite, the two chemists noted that they could make a few small changes to the original formula and get similar results with the modified formula. Therefore, they quickly took out a patent in secret for their new substance and told the British military about it first, before informing Nobel about it.

Cordite had a few minor modifications to the original ballistite formula. It used vaseline instead of camphor, which was a better stabilizer anyway. Secondly, it used a larger proportion of nitroglycerin in its formula. Thirdly, the formula for ballistite had specified nitrocellulose "of the well known soluble kind" (i.e. a collodion paste that was soluble in water). The formula for cordite used the insoluble form of nitrocellulose (i.e.) gun cotton instead.

Of course Nobel was extremely angry about this and launched a patent infringement lawsuit immediately. The case dragged on to the Chancery Division Court in 1892, which ruled against him. Nobel appealed again and the case got pushed up into higher courts until it reached the House of Lords in 1895, which also ruled against Nobel, due to technicalities in his original patent application, and he was ordered to pay court costs. The problem was that his patent clearly specified that it used "the well known soluble kind of nitrocellulose", whereas cordite used the insoluble kind. The Lord Justice Kay was actually quite sympathetic to Nobel in his remarks: "It is quite obvious that a dwarf who has been allowed to climb up on the back of a giant can see farther than the giant himself ... In this case, I cannot but sympathize with the holder of the original patent. Mr. Nobel made a great invention, which in theory was something extraordinary, a really great innovation -- and then two clever chemists got hold of his specifications for the patent, read them carefully, and after that, with the aid of their own thorough knowledge of chemistry, discovered that they could use practically the same substances with a difference as to one of them, and produce the same results one by one". Therefore, what Abel and Dewar had done was probably morally wrong, they were technically and legally in the right, as cordite was sufficiently different from ballistite to have its own separate patent.

Nobel was naturally not very happy with the court decision, but he did manage to sell ballistite to quite a few other countries. After a few years, ballistite was being used by the militaries of Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary empire, Sweden and Norway. Poudre B was being used by France, Russia and USA. Cordite became the predominant propellant used by the British empire, many countries in South America and Japan. Nobel's Explosive Company eventually manufactured both ballistite and cordite (even though his lawsuit caused the British government to not award any contracts to his company for over a decade afterwards). The company paid Nobel a half portion of the royalties from every batch of cordite produced, so he did make some money in the end.

In the next couple of posts, we will study the process of making cordite in some detail.

Smokeless Powders: Further Developments by Abel and Schultze

In our last post, we studied some discoveries by Baron Von Lenk, who succeeded in developing a process to manufacture gun cotton in larger quantities. The Austrian empire adopted his gun cotton as a propellant to replace black powder and supplied thirty howitzer batteries with gun cotton cartridges, as well as a new model of the Lorenz rifle (the M1862 model) to use gun cotton. Two factories in Austria started to manufacture gun cotton based on his process.

The gun cotton, as made by Von Lenk's process, retained the fibrous nature of the original cotton. The Austrians spun it into threads and braided them together, or wound them on wooden or paper bobbins, and arranged them in cartridges, so as to secure the desired air gaps in between and insure proper ignition. The Austrians found that this propellant was not affected by dampness, only required a charge of 1/4th to 1/3rd of the amount of black powder previously used, left less residue inside the barrel, produced less smoke and the gases evolved were also less harmful to the weapons and the men around them. France and England got interested in his discoveries and sent scientists to study the Austrian process as much as they were willing to reveal and Von Lenk also lent his expertise to scientists from both countries.

Unfortunately, there was an accident in 1862 in the factory at Hirtenberg, Austria, which blew up for some unknown reason. Soon after this, a British company called Thomas Prentice & Co. started to manufacture gun cotton in 1863, in a town called Stowmarket in England. Shortly thereafter, Sir Frederick Abel also began to research producing nitrocellulose safely at the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey, England. His process was based on Von Lenk's process as described in our previous post, but he effected a more complete purification of the gun cotton by pulping it before the final washing process, thereby cutting the tubular fibers into short lengths and rendering it possible to remove the last traces of acid retained within the tubes by capillary action. Traces of acid remaining in the gun cotton was what caused it to decompose over time. He patented this method in 1865, just around the time that the second Austrian factory also blew up. The Austrians had also had some accidents with their guns and after the second factory blew up, they decided to stop using gun cotton in their military. Meanwhile, Abel continued to experiment in England with his pulped, purified gun cotton, which he could compress into various shapes and in 1867 and 1868, he got some very promising results when used with field artillery. However, the British military were still very wary of gun cotton and military authorities were concerned about safety issues more than the advantages of the smokeless powder technologies. Also, the Thomas Prentice & Co. factory in Stowmarket blew up in 1871 and this was another reason why the British military discontinued further research for artillery and small arms for about twenty years. Instead, the compressed gun cotton was used in naval mines and for filling torpedoes and this is where the entire gun cotton production at the Waltham Abbey factories went to for the next couple of decades.

While military interest in gun cotton had decreased, civilians were very interested in this new technology. In particular, sportsmen who liked to hunt, appreciated the lack of smoke combined with higher velocities and lack of fouling and the next few years of developments were largely done in response to their demands. Naturally, the goal was to reduce the force of the explosion, so that barrels would not rupture, as had happened in the previous years. Around 1863, a Prussian artillery officer, Captain Johann Edward Schultze, invented a powder made from well purified and partially nitrated wood. His process started by sawing the wood into thin sheets about 1/16th of an inch in thickness, which was then passed through a machine that punched out disks or grains of uniform size. The next step was to remove the resinous matter from the disks, which was done by boiling the disks in sodium carbonate solution, washing them, steaming them, bleaching them with chloride of lime and then drying them. After this, the cellulose was nitrated in an acid mixture similar to the Von Lenk process. After this, the nitrated wood was then steeped in a solution of potassium nitrate and barium nitrate and then dried, which completed the process of manufacturing process. Using this process, the nitrocellulose that was produced was diluted with unconverted cellulose and metallic nitrates, which allowed for an even rate of combustion.

The advantage of using nitrates and organic substances as diluents was soon copied by other people and many other powders were soon on the market, using potassium, sodium and barium nitrates, and potassium nitrate (saltpeter), while sugar, cellulose, charcoal, sulfur, starch, gums, resins and paraffin were all used as combustible diluents and cementing agents.

Schultze started manufacturing his smokeless powder in a factory in Potsdam, near Berlin, around 1864. His powder soon gained popularity among civilian hunters. However, in 1868, there was a major fire in his factory and it burned to the ground. Shortly after this event, over in England, near a town called Fritham in the New Forest area, at a site called Eyeworth Lodge, a new factory called the Schultze Gunpowder Factory was established by two businessmen, Clement Dale and William Bailey. There was already an earlier attempt about 7 years previously to establish a black powder factory at the same site, which was not successful. The new owners hoped to capitalize on smokeless powder technology as well as the name of Captain Schultze, from whom they obtained a license to manufacture the powder. It must be noted that while Captain Schultze was not really directly involved with the new Schultze Gunpowder Factory, they did use his original manufacturing process and subsequently improved it over the years as well.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Initially, the factory was not very successful and in 1871, they only had four employees. The November 1872 edition of Popular Science had this to say about the factory and its production process:

"Here and there at intervals wide apart are various buildings of light structure from one of which rises a tall chimney instrumental in raising steam to drive a 10HP sawing machine which rapidly creates the "wood powder". This is subjected to chemical washing leaving hardly anything behind save pure woody material, known as lignine or cellulose. The next operation involves the conversion of these cellulose grains into a sort of gun cotton material by digestion with a mixture of sulphuric and nitric acids. Next it is washed with carbonate of soda and dried. The resultant grains are stored away until the time of packaging and dispatch when they are charged with a definite percentage of a nitrate powder -- nitrate of baryta is preferred.  All the buildings requisite for manufacturing this explosive are cheap and flimsy so that if they did catch fire no loss would ensue. The plant and machinery is of small cost in comparison to that used for making black gunpowder and Schultze wood powder is sold at a price commensurate with its cheap production."

In 1874, a talented self-taught chemist named R.W.S. Griffiths was appointed as the general manager and he refined the production process. Soon after this, the company began to become famous for the quality of its powder, particularly after samples of powder were successfully tried out in a series of trials organized by The Field magazine. By 1878, it became a leader in the world's sporting powder market. Many of the famous cartridge manufacturers, such as Eley Brothers, Kynoch and Union Metallic Cartridge Co. (UMC), used Schultze powder in their cartridges. The company rapidly expanded and the population of the local village of Fritham expanded with it, causing a reservoir, a new church, a store and workers houses to be built. Nevertheless, powder manufacturing remained a dangerous process and therefore, the wages for workers at that factory were around double that of those working in agriculture at that time.

At its peak, the Schultze Gunpowder Factory also opened offices in Gresham Street, London and had agents in various cities around the world. They became the largest manufacturer of smokeless powder for sporting use and produced about 75% of the world's supply. In 1897, they formed an American branch in conjunction with E.C. Gunpowder Co. and called it American E.C. & Schultze Gunpowder.

One of the most famous users of Schultze powders was the legendary American exhibition shooter, Annie Oakley, who was the star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

The legendary Annie Oakley. Click on the image to enlarge. Public domain image.

Annie Oakley had mentioned in several interviews, that she only used Schultze powder for her performances. Interestingly, when the Wild West Show toured France in 1889, she brought along fifty pounds of Schultze powder with her and then discovered at the dock that there was a French law that forbade the import of foreign gunpowders! At that time, the quality of French powders was not as good, because of a government monopoly on powder manufacturing and she didn't have the time to experiment with a new brand anyway. Fearing that her accuracy would be affected, there was only one thing she could do: smuggle the powder in! She obtained five hot-water bottles and enlisted four other lady riders with the show as co-conspirators. They filled the hot-water bottles with Schultze powder and each woman wore a dress with a bustle, hiding the bottles within. In fact, Annie had never worn a bustle in her life before that day, but she admitted that on this occasion she was glad to do so. She led the women safely through the customs line and into France. As she later admitted, "We sure did attract some attention when we went down the gang plank, for although the bustle originated in France, it was going out of fashion at that time". Even then, as the tour went on in France, her supply of powder eventually ran out and her shooting accuracy was affected because she had to use French powder. In fact, the French powder exploded one of her best guns and gave her a big bruise and her husband noted that no matter how carefully one loaded French powder into cartridges, no two ever fired alike. Luckily for her, in Marseilles, she received a notice to go to the Customs House to pick up a box mailed to her by some friends in England. The box was rather large and inside it were two dozen fresh eggs and an unsigned note telling her that she should try the packing material out in her gun before throwing it away. The eggs were packed in Schultze powder! She gladly paid the 40 cent import duty on the eggs and as she reported, "I never shot better in my life than I did the next three days, either winning or dividing every event. It may be that I was in better form, but I'm sure my Schultze load had a great deal to do with my good scores."

By the early 1900s, Schultze Gunpowder Company expanded so much that they had to move to Redbridge in Southampton, which was more suitable for transportation of its products. However, the company really suffered during the World War I period due to anti-German sentiment. In fact, the company had to take out newspaper advertisements declaring that despite their German-sounding name, all the owners, management and workers were British! Soon afterwards, a bunch of British powder manufacturers all combined together to form Nobel Industries, which later combined with three other companies in 1920 to form ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries),which was Britain's largest manufacturer for most of its history. This was around the time that the Schultze factory at Eyeworth Lodge was closed. All that remains there today are a few buildings and a farm.

In our next post, we will how gun cotton started to attract the interest of militaries once again.