Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Notes on Military Explosives
Exhaustion of the third edition of these "Notes on Military Explosives" has given an opportunity to bring them up-to-date and to include such changes bearing upon the manufacture, use, storage, and transportation of military explosives as have developed during the last four years. It has particularly given the opportunity to introduce certain changes that have developed in connection with the European war. The more important of these latter changes have been the substitution of wood pulp for cotton in the manufacture of the nitrocellulose explosives, and the fixation of the nitrogen of the air by the three separate processes which are now employed. Both of these important changes have been due to the ingenuity, cleverness, and skill of the German chemists. Generally speaking, there have been no new explosives introduced, and it would seem that in the matter of explosives the field is limited, apparently somewhat definitely, to the nitrocellulose series, the nitroglycerin series, the nitrobenzene series, the alkaline-metallic nitrate mixtures, and to a combination of two or more of these with the others. The great propellent explosive for guns continues to be nitrocellulose, alone or in combination with nitroglycerin. The explosive for charging shells appears to have been quite definitely reduced to picric acid or some derivative thereof; that for submarine mines and torpedoes to trinitrotoluol or guncotton. As to the old nitrate mixtures, they appear to be limited to hand grenades, rockets, and pyrotechnics.
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