Discussion Propellants and breach loaders

kevin klein

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Feb 10, 2019
Some things I have been wondering about. When did the use of gun cotton come into use as an artillery propellant, was it used in later muzzle loading guns ? When did black powder stop beeing used for large artillery pieces? When did larger guns start getting breach loading arrangements using black powder or gun cotton?
 
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How long had black powder been used for large artillery pieces? When did larger guns start getting breach loading arrangements using black powder or gun cotton?
The use of black powder in Europe can be traced back to the 14th century.
An English manuscript by Walter de Milimete from 1326-27 show a short of cannon being fired by a knight.
The first documented use on the battlefield is at Crécy in 1346.

During the 16th century iron breech loaded artillery was common. They where a lot cheaper to make in iron and had a higher rate of fire and could be loaded from a safer position.

But the breech was not tight and gases escaped and this limited their range. And the way they where made, limited how much pressure they could take.
So over time bronze muzzle-loaded guns became the norm.

Then in the mid 19th century iron guns and breechloaded guns started to come into use again thanks too much better metallurgy.
By 1860 European armies was looking at getting their artillery rifled and breechloaeded... if possible.
But the cost and lack of the technological know-how was a limiting factor.

But the Prussians and brits was at the front of this development.
 
While Alfred Nobel famous for the prize in his name and making things to blow people and stuff up developed dynamite just after the Civil with patents in Great Britain in 1867 and the US in 1868 it took him until 1887 to develop ballistite for use as a firearms propellant. Meanwhile the Frenchman Paul Vielle had beaten him to it with Poudre B in 1884 which initially showed extreme promise due to providing much greater impetus to projectiles for a given weight of propellant than gunpowder in addition to much reduced smoke. The problem was its tendency to degrade in storage rather too rapidly and occasionally go bang spontaneously.

Guncotton had been known since the 1840s but it would take time to learn how to manufacture without blowing up the factory and store it safely.
 
Christian Friedrich Schönbein, a national of the Duchy of Württemberg who was a professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland, inadvertently discovered guncotton [Nitrocellulose] in 1845 when he spilled a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid and used his wife’s cotton apron to mop it up. When Schönbein hung the apron over the stove to dry, it spontaneously ignited and burned without smoke so quickly that it appeared to disappear. For years, chemists had been trying to develop a propellant which produced less fouling in the bore of weapons and less smoke than black powder. Looking at the properties of his accidental discovery, Schönbein was quick to realize the possibilities of the substance in creating an improved propellant for firearms. Schönbein received a U.S. patent for guncotton as a propellant for firearms ammunition in 1846.

In 1849 Captain Nikolaus Wilhelm Freiherr Lenk von Wolfsberg, began the Austrian Army's (k.k. Army) experiments with guncotton as a possible propellant for artillery and small arms. Lenk’s experiments led to the first production of guncotton on an industrial scale. In 1854 the k.k. ärarische Schießwollanstalt [Imperial Royal State-Owned Guncotton Institute] was founded in Hirtenberg, Austria. The factory produced guncotton as a propellant for the k.k. Army’s artillery, and later for small arms. There were a number of advantages to the use of guncotton as a propellant. In comparison to black powder it produced very little smoke, and virtually no fouling in the bore of the weapon. It was also much more resistant to damage from exposure to moisture or water than black powder, and it was substantially more powerful than black powder. The impulse of burning guncotton on the base of the System Lorenz compression bullet was so effective, for example, that one could find no trace of the two compression grooves on fired bullets. Had guncotton worked as Lenk and Lorenz hoped, the results would have been revolutionary. There were problems in its use, however. Lenk’s production process left small quantities of acid in the guncotton which caused it to be unstable over time. This resulted in explosions at the factory, and produced unpredictable burning rates in guncotton which led to bursting of artillery barrels. When Lenk attempted to use guncotton as a high explosive filler for artillery shells, the acceleration of the shell when the gun was fired sometimes caused the explosion of the shell in the barrel of the artillery piece. The k.k. Army’s experiments with guncotton essentially ended in 1865 following the explosion of two magazines at the Institute resulting from the spontaneous combustion of guncotton stored in the magazines. It was not until 1884 that Frenchman Paul Marie Eugene Vieille created Poudre B, which was the first stable and successful smokeless powder. The French Army’s deployment of cartridges loaded with Poudre B immediately started the next round in the small arms technology race among the military forces of the world.

Regards,
Don Dixon
 
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