Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, And Pyrotechnics: The History Of The Explosive That Changed The World [Hardcover]

Jack Kelly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 2004

When Chinese alchemists fashioned the first manmade explosion sometime during the tenth century, no one could have foreseen its full revolutionary potential. Invented to frighten evil spirits rather than fuel guns or bombs-neither of which had been thought of yet-their simple mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal went on to make the modern world possible. As word of its explosive properties spread from Asia to Europe, from pyrotechnics to battleships, it paved the way for Western exploration, hastened the end of feudalism and the rise of the nation state, and greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution.With dramatic immediacy, novelist and journalist Jack Kelly conveys both the distant time in which the "devil's distillate" rose to conquer the world, and brings to rousing life the eclectic cast of characters who played a role in its epic story, including Michelangelo, Edward III, Vasco da Gama, Cortez, Guy Fawkes, Alfred Nobel, and E.I. DuPont. A must-read for history fans and military buffs alike, Gunpowder brings together a rich terrain of cultures and technological innovations with authoritative research and swashbuckling style.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A novelist and popular history writer, Kelly traces the history of gunpowder from 10th-century China to the late 19th century, when it was supplanted by Alfred Nobel’s nitroglycerin. Kelly takes advantage of gunpowder’s role in the histories of armaments and war to titillate with gruesome but fascinating accounts of the atrocities the destructive power of gunpowder visited on Europe: in the 30 Years War, the German states lost an estimated eight million people—one-third of their population. As opposed to the shocking immediacy with which the atomic bomb entered collective consciousness, gunpowder and its accompanying technology developed as effective instruments of war over hundreds of years. But of the two, Kelly says, gunpowder has had a greater impact on the course of civilization. For example, he argues plausibly that, by the 16th century, the cost of gunpowder needed by an effective fighting force "favored strong centralized states" with the authority and ability to tax and in turn created "the foundations of modern nations." This miscellany jumps between the technical developments that continually improved gunpowder (readers will know more than they ever felt necessary about the creation of saltpeter), and gunpowder’s cultural impact. Kelly’s erudition ranges from the development of the science of ballistics to the infamous 1605 Guy Fawkes gunpowder plot to blow up the English parliament. Kelly (Line of Sight, etc.) writes well and has a terrific eye for the instructive detail or odd historical fact that brings the narrative to life. It is an entertaining and readable effort. 36 b&w illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

This story-filled chronicle of gunpowder extends from its invention in China about a millennium ago to its last use in battle during the American Civil War. Kelly covers the main points about the explosive--what it's made of, how it's made, who made it, and the evolution of gunpowder-powered weapons. They spelled the end of the walled city and the mounted knight, which Kelly illustrates through the 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and the 1346 Battle of Crecy. From such exemplary applications of gunpowder's noisy, smoking appearance on the battlefield, Kelly repairs to the laboratory to relate what early chemists such as Robert Boyle or Antoine Lavoisier discovered about how gunpowder exploded and what others figured out about the ballistics of shot. With similarly lively portraits of figures who chaperoned gunpowder to its technical peak in the 1800s, the Du Ponts on the manufacturing side, or the inventors of revolvers and rifled arms on the weaponry side, Kelly accesses history through technology. A skillfully done treatment with solid popular potential. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (April 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465037186
• ISBN-13: 978-0465037186
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #449,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great intro to history, science and technology, January 21, 2005

By 

Paul Eckler (princeton jct, nj United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, And Pyrotechnics: The History Of The Explosive That Changed The World (Hardcover)

Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, & Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World, by Jack Kelly, Basic Books, NY, 2004. Kelly had done a very nice job with this crisp, well written history of gunpowder. He covers the subject nicely, in survey fashion, but with some detailed stories. There's history, technology, and science-all in fine factual detail but for the general audience. The chemistry, mathematics, metallurgy, and physics are there, but not in rigorous detail. Just enough to whet the appetite for further study. References are included for each chapter, though footnotes are lacking.

A detailed study of the history of gunpowder and related technologies could have gone on for thousands of pages. The author has selected certain stories for focus. He begins in China, and tells especially the European story, and the use of firearms in battle, on land and at sea. He includes some stories from America including the Revolutionary War, the story of Samuel Colt, and the Dupont story of gunpowder. He ends with development of the A-bomb, but really coverage ends at the beginning of the Twentieth Century with smokeless powder. There is no mention of lead mining or the famous shot towers. Kelly covers the abundance of saltpeter in the warm climate of China, its general shortage in Europe, and the extensive efforts to collect and extract it in Britain and France. But there is no mention of the Nobel Prize winning Borne-Haber process, invented in World War I in Germany, that resolved the nitrate shortage by making synthetic nitric acid from air and fossil fuels (natural gas, naphtha, coal), as is still practiced today.

The book is highly readable and will be appreciated by those interested in history, science, and technology. Index.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The history of gun powder, May 8, 2004

By 

B. Barrett (Kansas City, MO USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, And Pyrotechnics: The History Of The Explosive That Changed The World (Hardcover)

Kelly starts with the invention of gun powder in China and goes through 1900. I found the book very enlightening, as well as a fun read. Kelly describes how powder was originally invented by Chinese alchemists, use by the Chinese to fight off the Mongols, adaptation by European powers, the parallel development of guns and cannons, and societal effects like ending the age of castles and spurring the development of chemistry. The chapter on the Duponts was interesting. Highly recommended.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Explosive History, June 4, 2004

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, And Pyrotechnics: The History Of The Explosive That Changed The World (Hardcover)

"Better living through chemistry" was the motto of the Du Pont Corporation. Actually, it would have been more accurate to have said "Better killing through chemistry." Du Pont was at the apex in the history of gunpowder, getting out of the outdated business only in 1971, but by then gunpowder had over ten centuries of effects on history. In _Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, & Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World_ (Basic Books), Jack Kelly has tied the explosive chemical not only to changes in war and international history, but has explained its effect on the inchoate sciences of chemistry and physics. Kelly more often writes as a novelist, but here shows an impressive range of facts laid out with a novelist's eye to entertainment.

It is well known that the Chinese invented gunpowder (a combination of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter), but it is not true that the Chinese were happy to use gunpowder for fireworks and never used it in war. They had incendiaries and primitive guns. The gun was originally viewed as the weapon of cowards. That anyone could use a gun, and that the results of such use were distant and consisted generally of random havoc rather than, say, a well-placed slice from a sword, took some of the valor out of fighting. By the sixteenth century, cannons had developed into forms that would still be used in the American Civil War. There was little scientific input into making either gunpowder or guns; it was, rather, the work of craftsmen who were the earliest engineers. The craftsmen had to put up with an inherently dangerous arena. Not only were accidental explosions common, but barrels inevitably exploded. Gunpowder burns at hundreds of degrees hotter than the melting point of iron, and every shot eroded the barrel.

There is a good deal of military history here, naturally, and lots about the effects of gunpowder or lack thereof on such wars as the American Revolution or the Civil War. Gunpowder had other effects, societal ones, changing the importance of class. Kelly writes that since it enabled commoners to hold in their hands a new form of lethal power, gunpowder was "...among the elements that fertilized the long slow growth of feelings of rights and entitlements that would blossom into democracy." It also inspired physics. Studying the trajectory of cannonballs, Galileo was able to overthrow the classical physical theories of Aristotle. Newton, building on this, performed the famous thought experiment of firing a cannonball harder and harder from a mountain, hard enough eventually that the ball would only fall in maintaining an orbit around the earth; from there it was but a jump to celestial motions. Eventually, gunpowder was surpassed by better chemicals; investigations into nitroglycerin and dynamite in the 19th century brought better-burning, safer means of shooting guns and cannons. "Black powder" is now the name given to the gunpowder which is the subject of this interesting and wide-ranging history. It is still manufactured, much going to the army of hobbyists and historical reenactors. The greatest market, however, merely shows that things have not changed too much. We take the same delight in fireworks as the Chinese did a thousand years ago, and use the same gunpowder for the charge.