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A 1682 demonstration of Huygens gunpowder engine, where a dram of gunpowder creates enough vacuum to lift 8 boys into the air. Huygens, however, became interested in the mechanical power of the vacuum, and the possibility of using gunpowder to produce one. In 1678 he outlined a gunpowder engine consisting of a vertical tube containing a piston ...
During the American Civil War, the mill was one of the three chief sources of gunpowder for the Union forces, producing up to 12,500 lb (5,700 kg) a day. At its peak, the Hazard Powder Company operated in 125 buildings occupying hundreds of acres of land. [1] [2] [3] It had 25 water wheels and three steam engines along a mile of Scantic River ...
More than 2.75 million pounds of first-quality gunpowder (a majority of the powder used by the Confederacy) were produced before its closure in 1865. [5] By comparison, Union gunpowder manufacture was distributed among many mills, with the larger Hazard Powder Company of Connecticut producing 40% of the annual production of 8.4 million pounds. [6]
1868 advertisement in a mining newspaper for the California Powder Works. California Powder Works was the first American explosive powder manufacturing company west of the Rocky Mountains. When the outbreak of the Civil War cut off supplies of gunpowder to California's mining and road-building industries, a local manufacturer was needed.
The Frankford Powder-Mill is a historic gunpowder factory in the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the time it was built in 1774 by Oswald Eve, it was the only such mill in the American colonies. Other powder mills operated in the 17th and 18th centuries but stopped production after the French and Indian war.
Powder mills were originally powered by windmills, water mills or horse mills. Despite later availability of steam engines, the older power sources did not require a fire to generate steam, and avoided the possibility of sparks which might ignite the gunpowder. Some 20th-century powder mills used electric power.
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Portrait identifying Schwarz as the "inventor of artillery" Berthold Schwarz O.F.M. (sometimes spelled Schwartz), also known as Berthold the Black and der Schwartzer, was a legendary German (or in some accounts Danish or Greek) alchemist of the late 14th century, credited with the invention of gunpowder by 15th- through 19th-century European literature.