The Truth About The Ironic Origins Of Gunpowder

The Truth About The Ironic Origins Of Gunpowder

Rather than invented, gunpowder was rather discovered by alchemists in China sometime around A.D. 850. But they weren't hoping to come up with a new way to kill people. Ironically, the somewhat unlucky innovators were actually trying to invent an elixir that would prolong a person's life. Instead, they got something that has the power to drastically shorten one in an instant. The encyclopedia "Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine" quotes a 9th-century Taoist text on alchemy that describes the dangerous unanticipated consequences of Chinese scientists' tinkering with a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, a mineral called realgar, and honey (which would have contained the carbon necessary for the incendiary reaction). Those unfortunate scientists ended up making their discovery the hard way, for from the mixture "smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down."

In 1040 Chinese scholar Zeng Gongliang published the world's first formulae for gunpowder in his military compendium called the Wujing Zongyao, which is often translated into English as the "Complete Essentials for the Military Classics." The explosive was then shipped to the rest of the world via the Silk Road, and the rest is history. But hey, not all of the unanticipated consequences of those Chinese alchemists' experiments have been negative. At least we got fireworks out of the painful ordeal.