MUNITIONS OF PEACE. 
Munitions of Peace. 
How the Deadly T.N.T. can be put on its Good 
Behaviour and Made to Work for its Living. 
By C. H. CLAUDY.* 
YSNQ|HE world is but beginning to make use of its war-developed 
ideas for peace-time pursuits. It was the war impetus to 
aviation which made transoceanic flights possible. The war 
developed the radio telephone to a practical basis. It was 
war which showed this nation how to build ships and build 
kly. It was the effect of the war which produced a revolu- 
tion of trade practices, and convinced even ardent trades unionists that 
the artificial restrictions of apprenticeship measured in years where 
months would do was a mistake, though perhaps this realization came 
more in England than in this country. 
It is one of the pleasant functions of peace to make use of the 
developments of the art of war, but it is seldom that peace can use 
the material of war. Peace hath no use of great guns, nor for shells, 
nor for armies, nor even for submarines. But peace may use the very 
tool of tools of war itself, if only peace will believe it. The adaptation 
of T.N.T. the terrible to peaceful work is one of the oddities of the 
aftermath of the great conflict. 
T.N.T.—short for tri-nitro-toluol—came into public notice only 
with the great war, although it has been known as an explosive since 
the Civil War, at least in the laboratory. But it remained for the 
great conflict to bring it into prominence, which was done because it 
offered an unusual degree of safety to the user, plus an efficiency as a 
bursting charge for high explosive shell, depth bombs, mines, torpedoes, 
and similar devices slightly greater than that of other well-known 
explosives. 
The reader may be surprised to hear T.N.T. spoken of as a “safe” 
explosive. During the war there were, it is true, many disastrous ex- 
plosions in both the manufacture and transportation, even in the quict 
storage, of T.N.T. But the explosions were due to the hurry and care- 
lessness of speed and emergency, not to inherent lack of safety in the 
explosive. Had, for instance, dynamite or plain nitro-glycerine been 
similarly handled, there is small doubt that the unfortunate explosions 
would have been vastly greater in number. Neither nitr -glycerine, 
dynamite, nor gun-cotton will stand what T.N.T. will stand, which is 
the best reason in the world why this most terrible of war’s weapons 
should find a secure place for itself in the uses of peace. 
7 
* Scientific American. 
635 
