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MINUTES OE PROCEEDINGS OE 
into suitable preparations for use (e.g, dynamite) are also in themselves 
perfectly safe operations. Again, the manufacture and purification of 
gun-cotton, and its conversion into the compressed or granulated 
substance, are absolutely safe operations, the material being wet 
throughout the entire course, and therefore quite uninflammable, until, 
when completed, it is dried by long exposure to air, or by artificial 
heat. On the other hand, gunpowder, and all preparations of similar 
nature, are explosive from the very commencement of their manu¬ 
facture ; the roughly mixed ingredients already furnish a material 
which deflagrates violently when a spark reaches it, and the subsequent 
operations of intimate mixture or incorporation, compression, granu¬ 
lation, &c.—which are necessarily carried out with the nearly dry 
material—are all of a highly dangerous character, demanding for their 
safe performance the strictest attention to precautions which have been 
dictated by practical experience and knowledge of the sources of danger 
to be guarded against. 
Accidents at gunpowder factories are very frequent, and though they 
may not often involve considerable loss of life or destruction of property, 
the fact that their occurrence must in most instances be caused by 
partial, occasional, or complete and persistent neglect of precautions 
absolutely essential to the safety of the people employed in the works, 
or to a reduction of the risks of accident to the minimum, points to the 
necessity for improved legislation connected with manufactories of 
gunpowder and other explosive preparations, whereby the proper atten¬ 
tion to regulations and precautions for safety may be rendered com¬ 
pulsory, and seconded by an efficient system of inspection. The 
absolute exclusion of lucifer matches from such works; the adoption of 
every possible precaution for excluding grit from all buildings in which 
the explosive substance is submitted to any kind of operation, by 
proper construction and closing of the buildings; the employment of 
special shoes and other external clothing for use in the buildings only; 
the total exclusion of iron, in any form, from the works; the proper 
separation from each other of the buildings in which the several opera¬ 
tions are carried on, and their construction with a view to divert the 
force of a possible explosion into comparatively harmless directions; 
the reduction within particular limits of the quantity of explosive 
allowed to remain in any one building; the provision of efficient 
lightning conductors—such are some of the principal precautionary 
measures which go far to reduce the possibility of accident in works of 
this kind (or the mischief accruing from such accidents when they do 
arise), and the adoption of which does not present any serious difficulty. 
And lastly, though properly first in importance, the manufacturers of 
gunpowder and other explosive agents should not only themselves 
possess some scientific as well as practical knowledge of the nature and 
properties of the substances in the manufacture of which the lives of 
their workmen are at stake, but they also should ascertain and insist 
that at any rate the persons who act as managers and foremen in their 
factories should not be deficient in the elementary knowledge indis¬ 
pensable to a proper performance of their duties. 
Major Majendie, the Government Inspector of Gunpowder Works, 
