Tenney L. Davis

This book was written in 1943, and it shows:

"Cuprous acetylide, of which only a very small quantity may be prepared safely at one time, is procured by bubbling acetylene into an ammoniacal solution of cuprous chloride. It precipitates as a brick-red powder. The powder is collected on a small paper filer and washed with water. About 0.1 gram of the material, still moist, is transferred to a small iron crucible -- the rest of the cuprous acetylide ought to be destroyed by dissolving in dilute nitric acid -- and the crucible is placed on a triangle over a small flame. As soon as the material has dried out, it explodes, with a loud report, causing a dent in the bottom of the crucible."

Now that's an attitude I can appreciate. I'm old enough to have grown up with the chemical terminology, but nowadays one would say "copper-I acetylide." Also, one would not be conducting this experiment in front of most college students. It's too hard on precious snowflakes.

So the book is an interesting combination of fairly good (for the time) chemistry and fairly unsafe instructions for preparing various explosives. Well, let me qualify that: The recipes are probably as safe as they get if you know exactly what you're doing. It's the process of gaining experience that seems iffy. Oh, I know; my fingers start itching just reading some of the recipes. But I'm old enough to have developed enough sense that I wouldn't make anything more spectacular than flash paper or perhaps black powder (in small quantities.) But it's great fun reading about. Chemistry p0rn, if you will.

There is a whole chapter on black powder, with lots of interesting history. Bacon did not in fact introduce black powder to the West; he merely was the first to write about it, and his writing make it clear that black powder was already being used in children's toys. There are recipes, of course, and some interesting chemical analyses of what the final products of combustion are. (There is a surprising amount of unburned sulfur.) There is also a chapter on pyrotechnics, with more good recipes.

There are long chapters each on aromatic nitro compounds and nitro esters. (TNT is an example of the former, and nitroglycerin of the latter. If you must experiment, you are significantly less likely to kill yourself synthesizing TNT; it was the first of the insensitive explosives.) There is a chapter on smokeless powder, a chapter on dynamite, and a chapter on nitroamines, of which the most important is nitroguanidine. Nitroguanidine has the interesting feature that, because its nitrogen content is so high, it is a relatively cool explosive. There's good stuff on primers, which are the kinds of explosives one ought to be posting recipes for everywhere possible, as a way of culling the next generation of would-be terrorists. There is a nice illustration of how mercury fulminate was mixed for primers: In laboratory-scale batches, from behind a concrete wall, using a triangle of cloth whose ends were tied to ropes strung over pullies. My sense is it was fairly routine to lose a batch. Mercury fulminate is actually fairly safe so long as you keep it under water, but Heaven help you if the flasks dry out. Not quite as bad as silver azide, though, which explodes under its own weight if the crystals exceed a certain fraction of a millimeter in size.

Curiously, if mercury fulminate is slowly compressed, it becomes much less sensitive. It is then coated with something like lead styphnate to resensitize it in primers.

Great fun to read about. The casual attitude towards the occasional laboratory explosion is curiously refreshing. Thumbs up.… (mehr)