Explosions: How We Shook the World Page #2

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Right, so China was just a good place at the time,

like, had the right climate for saltpetre to occur like that?

There's a lot of things that come together,

but the availability of the right climate is important.

Can I try and start assembling it in the right proportions?

Certainly. Well, roughly, you want to put in about 50% of saltpetre.

For every one of those?

Yeah, that's equal amounts of the powdered sulphur that we've got

and the powdered charcoal.

What were they trying to make at this point?

This is a mixture for parcelling up and throwing, basically,

into an enemy city using a catapult like this.

This thing here is called a hui pao, which means a fire catapult.

Now, from my knowledge of chemistry,

- saltpetre is what they call potassium nitrate.

- That's right.

And that's got kind of oxygen bound up with nitrogen inside it.

That's right. If we warm it up, it'll let the oxygen loose,

and that will aid the burning of the other ingredients.

The sulphur basically helps everything to happen at a rather lower temperature before

and ultimately, of course, the carbon is the main source of the stuff that burns.

And there we go, that's good, look at that!

Take the flame away now. See it goes. That's very nice.

That's fabulous!

I'd call that an effective incendiary, wouldn't you?

I can imagine once you get a bucket load of that landing in your camp...

- It's discouraging, isn't it? Makes you wish you hadn't come.

- Yes.

The black powder that the Chinese military were using in 1044 had got

grains of different chemicals close enough to react together

and produce lots of heat and gases.

In the open air, there's plenty of room for the gases to expand,

so there was no sudden explosion,

but the basic chemistry of gunpowder was there.

However, an even older Chinese book

suggests that the very first chemical explosive in the world

had been developed 200 years before this.

A book with the lovely title

Classified Essentials Of The Mysterious Way Of The Origin Of All Things,

which happens to contain a few recipes listed as,

"Don't try this at home if you are an alchemist,"

- and amongst that is a recipe which I think we ought to try.

- I'm game.

You have some saltpetre. You have some sulphur.

Those two ingredients. The carbon comes in the form of honey.

OK, and what kind of quantities do you use?

Oh, well, I would say most of that jar would get us

something interesting happening.

If you got about the same quantity of the other two ingredients,

the saltpetre and the sulphur, that should go nicely.

Why did they ever think of mixing these things together at this point?

The idea is to try to subdue the fiery properties

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