Trego's Mountain Ear

I’m reading that Martin Paul Gilleard will be spending most of the next 4 years in the slammer for having a hand-written note on making gunpowder. England is a strange place. As I read the article, I couldn’t help wondering why anyone would need to keep the proportions of black powder written down.

The ingredients are simple – potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur. The proportions are easy to remember – 75, 15, 10. So long as you remember that the 75% refers to potassium nitrate, you can’t screw up too badly. It still puzzles me that a man pushing fifty would need to write the recipe down. On the other hand, I recall how, at ten years old, finding out the proportions was more of a challenge – but we didn’t have the internet back then. Heck, learning that potassium nitrate was the modern term for saltpeter made the process simple – back in 1960 that substance was sold in fertilizer sacks.

I don’t know why it was important to know how to make black powder – experimenting with explosives manufacturing always seemed like a good way to lose fingers. Still, in England the ability to make your own gunpowder might be handy . . . and is obviously controlled. Finding sulfur is the challenge – though I can list counties where it has been mined in Montana, and any place with hot springs is probably worth examining. I produce charcoal enough by accident just burning a wood stove – and Europe used manure management to produce the potassium nitrate. It seems a brit can spend a long time in a sassenach prison for writing down information that just clatters around the brain of an aggie who once shot black powder revolvers in the US.

So I got on line – I can buy 10 pounds of KNO3 for $37.95 and the stuff is 99.7% pure. Another sack is offered, describing the chemical as “used for high energy exothermic reactions.” Thinking of the cost of Haz-mat shipping for black powder, I can see why folks might want to roll their own. A pound of sulfur is going for about twenty dollars. I don’t think manufacturing gun powder at home is for me – but I can understand why the Brits may get excited over the knowledge being readily available. I’d rather pay a little more and let someone else take the risks.