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

~ Jack Kelly (Author) "IN THE MOUNTAINS of western China, legendary semi-human monsters called shan peeked through the leaves at the campfires of travelers..." (more)
Key Phrases: fire drug, corned powder, gunpowder technology, Civil War, New York, Henry du Pont (more...)

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.
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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; illustrated edition edition (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 (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #462,148 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great intro to history, science and technology, January 22, 2005

By	Paul Eckler (princeton jct, nj United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lively technology of celebration and destruction, September 30, 2004

By	Donald B. Siano (Westfield, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a boy, I wondered why my attempts at making gunpowder failed so miserably--I knew I had the ratios of saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur right, and I had mixed it thoroughly. But still it fizzled. I never really figured it out until I read this book, some fifty years too late.

Jack Kelly is an entertaining writer, and knows how to research a topic such as the history of gunpowder to the point of near exhaustion. For me, the central question raised by the book is the observation that while it was invented in China, they actually made little use of it outside of fireworks. Why was it that the West took their invention, surrounded it with a steady stream of innovative developments in guns and organization, and competed in a steady diet of endless warfare to implement them on a large scale? Kelly really never answers this question, but that is all right--this is not the sort of work that can authoritatively get at it.

I particularly enjoyed the section on the development of the sources of saltpeter and the efforts to produce a pure and consistent product. In an age before chemistry, the process developed only slowly, but develop it did. Made from fermenting dung piles as a cottage industry, it was a costly bottleneck for centuries.

Kelly traces how gunpowder and the development of processes for improving the strength and size of cannon interacted to produce a steady improvement in metallurgical science. All sorts of spin-offs and scientific developments followed. Few materials have had such a long period of development and use, so there are plenty of fascinating anecdotes and historical oddities for Kelly to relate. And over and over again we learn how important to progress the simple act of measuring and recording the results of trials were. An arty seat of the pants approach just wouldn't do the trick.

The book has many illustrations that really helped in telling the story, and I much appreciated them. This is a book well worth reading; it is lively and instructive, and awfully entertaining.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gunpowder and It's Huge Impact On History, June 4, 2004

By	William L Waterman (California) - See all my reviews

I've been a great fan of Jack Kelly's for some time, having read all of his riveting "noir" novels. He now changes hats and delves into historical narrative with the astounding new book, "Gunpowder".
I'm not a huge consumer of historical non-fiction, but this book is a real page turner. Kelly obviously has a knack for bringing out the drama inherent in history.
I was astounded by the immense role gunpowder has played in the outcome of history, from the rise of the European nation-state, to the very map of the world as we know it today.
"Gunpowder" offers a fasinating take on the past thousand years of human history and the monumental influence one particular technology has had upon it.