NATURAL RESOURCES—LITTLE. 217 
The chief materials for smokeless powder are cotton linters, sul- 
phuric and nitric acids, and various organic solvents, as, for example, 
acetone in the case of cordite. The shortage of cotton, which early de- 
veloped in Germany, forced that country to substitute for cotton 
chemically-prepared wood fiber. A wider range of raw materials 
is available for the production of high explosives, in which are 
utilized toluol, phenol, and aniline among organic compounds and 
sodium nitrate, sulphuric acid, nitric acid, and ammonia liquor among 
the inorganic substances most directly concerned. Nothing in the 
record of American industry is more striking and creditable than 
the enormous expansion of our output of explosives to meet the exi- 
gency of the war. In 19 months our production of propellants was 
632,504,000 pounds, an amount practically equal to the combined 
production of the British and the French. During the same period 
we made over 375,000,000 pounds of high ee 
The sulphuric ae concerned in such production is mane from 
pyrites or from sulphur. The greatest producer in the world—at 
Ducktown, Tenn.—utilizes, by subsequent oxidation, the sulphurous 
acid in its smelter fume. Many domestic plants depended upon 
pyrites from the Rio Tinto district in Spain, and this supply was 
quickly shut off by the war. We have, however, in Louisiana and 
Texas the greatest known deposits of sulphur in the world, and these 
were largely drawn upon. The danger of a highly localized supply 
was emphasized when early in 1918 a destructive storm crippled 
the Louisiana producers, but fortunately the damage was repaired 
before the acid makers were affected. 
Coal is practically the only source of toluol, from which it is com- 
monly derived through the agency of by-product coke ovens. In 
1914 the total toluol capacity of such ovens in this country was only 
about 700,000 pounds a month, and the necessity for a greatly in- 
creased supply for conversion into trinitrotoluol or T. N. T. pre- 
sented one of our greatest and most pressing problems in raw mate- 
rials. So well was it met, however, that by April, 1917, our produc- 
tion had risen to 6,000, 000 pounds a month, and this Scie output 
was doubled by Roy uber 1918. Much of cine increased supply was 
due to the expedient of stripping city gas by washing out the toluol, 
and additional supplies were secured by the development of methods 
of cracking petroleum oils. 
Trinitrotoluol was early recognized as perhaps the most impor- 
tant of the high explosives, and the courage and initiative of our 
private manufacturers brought our production up to 16,000,000 
pounds a month. Meantime two great Government plants were 
built: one at Racine, Wis., with a capacity of 4,000,000 pounds a 
month, and the other at Giant, Calif., designed for 2,000,000 pounds 
