Gunpowder and the Chemical Revolution

Abstract

T HE CHEMICAL STUDY OF GUNPOWDER DETONATION in the early nineteenth century has its antecedents in discussions of gunpowder explosion, or of niter, throughout the eighteenth century. This hitherto neglected topic illuminates significant aspects of the Chemical Revolution, including the development of the concept of the gaseous state in the eighteenth century and the development of Lavoisier's thermochemistry. This article is divided into two parts. The first examines the discourse over detonation in the time leading up to the Chemical Revolution. Here I argue that detonation attracted much attention to the subject of possible states of matter and their change through chemical reaction because detonation was a most striking manifestation of the release of an air or some other enormously expansible material from a solid. I shall outline what I see as three traditions of explanation for gunpowder detonation current by the mid-eighteenth century: the aerial, the vaporous, and the aqueous explanations. The second part explores the study of and theorizing about detonation during the 1770s and 1780s. Here I examine the role played by the study of detonation in the development of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's thermochemical theory and its interaction with the phlogiston theory as upheld by Claude-Louis Berthollet, the chemist who was in fact to become Lavoisier's first major convert. My focus is exclusively on the filiation of scientific ideas before and during the Chemical Revolution. I recognize that there is another, complementary aspect of this subject-that of the context of these ideas in the industrial and military history of gunpowder manufacture, quality control, and testing in the eighteenth century. This aspect, too, has remained virtually unexplored by scholars; how it bears on the scientific ideas and debates I investigate here remains to be explored.