EXPERIMENTS IN THE SPANDAU POWDER-MILL. 55 



gnu-cotton, and sent it with a formal explanatory 

 letter to the war-minister. 



The result was glorious. The minister of war 

 instituted a shooting -trial in his large gardens, and 

 as it went off brilliantly immediately induced the 

 heads of the ministry to make a regular trial with 

 pistols. On the very same day I received an official 

 order direct from the minister to repair to the powder 

 manufactory at Spandau, which had already been in- 

 structed to place everything requisite at my disposal, 

 to institute experiments on a larger scale. It is seldom 

 I fancy that a memorial to the war office has been 

 so quickly acted upon! Of my returning to the brigade 

 there was no more talk. I was soon the only one 

 of my brothers in misfortune, who had not been 

 obliged to leave Berlin. 



The experiments on the large scale, which were 

 made under my direction in the powder factory at 

 Spandau. did not lead to the result expected in the 

 first glowing moments, viz. that gun-cotton would 

 generally supersede gunpowder. It is true the trials 

 with small arms as well as with cannon yielded 

 excellent results; it appeared, however, that gun- 

 cotton was not a sufficiently fixed combination, since it 

 gradually decomposed in the dry state, and occasionally 

 also would go off of itself. Moreover its effectiveness 

 depended on the degree of compression of the gun- 

 cotton and on the mode of its ignition. My report 

 therefore ran. that the gun-cotton produced according 

 to my method by means of a mixture of nitric and 



