1890.] on Smokeless Explosives. 15 



rope with a hollow core. While the two latter forms of gun-cotton 

 always burned with almost instantaneous rapidity in open air, and 

 with highly destructive effects if they were strongly confined, the 

 tightly wound or plaited masses burned slowly in air, and would 

 frequently exert their explosive force so gradually when con- 

 fined in a firearm, as to produce good ballistic results without appre- 

 ciably destructive eifect upon the arm. Occasionally, however, in 

 consequence of some slight unforeseen variation in the compactness of 

 the material, or in the amount and disposition of the air-spaces in the 

 mass, very violent action would be produced, showing that this system 

 of regulating the explosive. force of gun-cotton was quite unreliable. 



Misled by the apparently promising nature of the earliest results 

 which von Lenk obtained, the Austrian Government embarked, in 

 1862, upon a somewhat extensive application of von Lenk's gun-cotton 

 to small arms, and provided several batteries of field guns for the use 

 of this material. The abandonment of these measures for applying a 

 smokeless explosive to military purposes soon followed upon the attain- 

 ment of unsatisfactory results, and was hastened by the occurrence of 

 a very destructive explosion at gun-cotton stores at Simmering, near 

 Vienna, in 1862. 



It was at about this time that the attention of the English Govern- 

 ment, and through them of the lecturer, was directed to the subject 

 of gun-cotton, the Austrian Government having communicated details 

 regarding improvements in its manufacture accomplished by von 

 Lenk, and results obtained in the extended experiments which had 

 been carried out on its application to the various purposes above 

 indicated, according to the system devised by that officer. One of the 

 results of the lecturer's researches, subsequently carried on at Wool- 

 wich and Waltham Abbey, was his elaboration of the system of 

 manufacture and employment of gun-cotton which has been in exten- 

 sive use at the government works with little if any modification for 

 over eighteen years, and has been copied from us by France, Germany, 

 and other countries. By reducing the partially purified gun-cotton- 

 fibre to pulp as in the ordinary process of making paper, com- 

 pleting its purification when in that condition, and afterwards convert- 

 ing the finely-divided explosive into highly compressed homogeneous 

 masses of any desired form and size, very important improvements 

 were effected in its stability, its uniformity of composition and action, 

 and its adaptability to practical uses, a great advance being made in 

 the exercise of control over the rapidity of combustion or explosion of 

 the material. 



No success had attended the experiments instituted in England 

 with wound cannon cartridges of gun-cotton-threads made according 

 to von Lenk's plan ; on the other hand a number of results which at 

 first sight appeared very promising, were obtained at Woolwich in 

 1867-8 with bronze field-guns and cartridges built up of compressed 

 gun-cotton-masses arranged in different ways (with varied air-spaces, 

 &c.) with the object of regulating the rapidity of explosion of the 



