Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1877 — History and Uses of Gunpowder. [ARTICLE]

History and Uses of Gunpowder.

Who invented gunpowder? No one knows. All agree that its composition and propeities were understood in remote antiquity. Authentic history extends bat a short way into the past, ana it is always difficult to draw the line separating the authentic from the fabulous. Like some other tilings, gunpowder, as ages rolled on, may have been invented, forgotten and re-invented. Certainly in some form it was known and used for fireworks and incendiary material long before anyone dreamed of a gun, or of using it to do more than create terror in warfare. And yet it is said that some of the ancients had means of using it to throw destructive missiles among their enemies—probably a species of rocket or bomb. Nor does it seem, in its infancy, to have been applied to industrial purposes, such as blasting and quarrying rock, for there is evidence that the people who used it for fire-works at their feasts quarried immense blocks of stone by splitting them ont of the quarries with hammers and wedges. Its first uses probably were connected with the religious ceremonies of the pagan ancients. An old tradition taught that those were the most powerful gods who answered their worshipers by fire. The priests, therefore, who practiced upon the credulity of the people, exercised their ingenuity in inventing ways of producing spontaneous fire, which they told the people was sent ty the gods from Heaven in answer to their prayers. The accounts of old writers still preserved and dating back to three hundred years before Christ, describe “a sulphurous and inflammable substance,” unmistakably like our gunpowder. There was a certain place galled the “ Oracle of Delphi,” once visited by Alexander the Great, where this kind of fire was produced by the priests, and It is said that the Druids, the ancient priests of Britain, also used something of this sort in their sacrifices, for they not only produced sudden fire, but they also imitated thunder and lightning, to terrify the people with their power. This must have been more than two thousand years ago It is known that the Chinese, on the other side of the world, had gunpowder about the same time, but they used it chiefly for fire-works, which then, as now, formed the main feature of all their festivals and ceremonies. In India it was early used in war, for a writer who lived about A. D. 244 says: “When the towns of India are attacked by their enemies the people do not rush into battle, but put them to flight by thunder and lightning.” It is said, too, that one of the Roman Emperors, who lived just after the crucifixion of Christ, “ had machines which imitated thunder and lightning, and at the same time emitted stones.” Then, about A. D. 220, there was written a recipe “ for an ingenious composition to be thrown on an enemy,” which verr nearly corresponds to our gunpowder. During the many hundred years that follow, little is recorded until about the ninth, century* when there appears in an old book, now in a Paris library, an exact recipe for gunpowder, and a description of a rocket. It is said that in 1099 the Saracens, in defending Jerusalem, “ threw abundance of pots of fire and shot fire-darts”—no donbt some kind of bombs and war-rockets. History affords accounts of other wars about this time, in which gunpowder was undoubtedly used in some form. Bat in 1210 a monk, Friar Roger Bacon, made gunpowder; and it is asserted he discovered it independently, knowing nothing of its existence elsewhere. It is not unreasonable to believe this, for in those days people kept their inventions to themselves if they could, and news traveled slowly. Borne authors say a German named Schwartz discovered it in 1320, and perhaps he did, too, and as honestly and independently as did Friar Bacon, or the East Indians or the Chinese. Others Insist that it was invented originally in India, and brought by the Saracens fiom Africa to the Europeans, who improved it. At any rate, an English gentleman who has made a translation of some of the laws of India, supposed to have been established 1,500 years before the Christian era, or over 8,300 years ago, makes one of them read thus: “The Magistrate shall not make war with any deceitful machine, or with poisoned weapons, or with cannon and guns, or any kind of firearms.”—St. Nicholas for July. —The miserable little three-cent pieces coined in 1853, and whose disappearance from circulation did more than anything else to reconcile the people to postal currency, are returning again, not to “plague” the inventor, but to bother the Postmaster. —Detroit Free Press. —The authorship of the Kentucky resolutions of ’9B, which has been attributed by nearly all histories to Thomas Jefferson, is disputed by the Breckinridge# of Kentucky in the name of their ancestor, John Breckinridge.