Today we chat with an expert in chemistry to discern some of the science behind why British 1900’s era cordite and French 1900’s era Poudre B had a worrying habit of exploding inappropriately. See more from him here: https://www.youtube.com/c/AlmostaDoctor1/featured
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Pinned post for Q&A 🙂
"Aerosolised nitrogylcerine dust" is the scariest thing I've heard in a long time
6:10 Drach: We don't want to get sued.
Brandon: Or given a week long suspension.
I don't think it's a good idea to keep any volatile stuff in a container conceptualized by Jeremy Clarkson… Oh, another Clarkson, I see. Anyway, only the risk it's the same family should suffice to stay away from it 🙂
Could we have a collab with Explosions & Fire on youtube? 😀
Fascinating video. You were both super interesting to listen too!
Did the video cut off early? At about 1:05:35-36, the video seems to cut off mid-sentence and jumps to the "that's it for this video" stock footage. Drach was in the middle of saying "umm…".
An additional "hmm maybe" fact from (I think) one of the appendices of D.K. Brown's "The Grand Fleet" (I don't have it in front of me to check) — at Dogger Bank (January 1915), the Battlecruisers found that they could fire and hit at much longer ranges, which resulted in much, much greater ammunition usage. As a result, the Battlecruisers both had to replace a lot of ammunition, and took to stocking much more ammunition in the first place in their magazines. The problem was that this was at the height of the British "Shell Shortage" of 1915, so the RN didn't have the ability to just order more shells from the manufacturers. What they ended up doing what topping up the magazines with cordite that was from reserve warehouse stocks, which were in many cases very old. One of the things I believe Gunner Grant did on the Lion was to toss out the oldest cordite.
The argument is that a contributing factor to the explosiveness of the BC's at Jutland was the fact that most of them had a large amount of very old cordite in their magazines (due to being refilled from reserve stocks after Dogger Bank). This hypothesis very much gels with the discussion in this video (no pun intended).
The early cinema film was made of Celluloid , hence why it burns so much. I knew a guy who used to take discarded film stocks and melt them down with thinners to make Nitrocellulose paint (which is basically the same thing as gun cotton) which is a hard to get today and highly prized by guitar builders and woodworkers because it has a transparent quality where you can still see the woodgrain through the colour
Not happy with this one!
Nitroglycerin is liquid above 4C, not a 'dust'. And even if it were a dust, cordite was sealed in a bag inside a metal tube, making dust unlikely to be spread around enough to propagate a flash. Not stored as a loose chemical & I'd expect spillage to be noticed because Nitroglycerin is toxic, causing headaches and palpations. How reliable is the Lion story?
Cordite was used despite the risk because it delivered high performance. Wasn't described as 'safe', rather it was said to be safer than gunpowder, which is true. But it's meant to explode in a confined space and does! Quality issues and poor storage were known to make Nitroglycerin & Nitrocellulose more sensitive, worse than first suspected, fixed later. At Jutland, the Battle-cruisers weren't designed to receive heavy shells and seriously unwise things were done to increase rate of fire, like removing flash doors, stacking ammunition in corridors and working spaces, and unpacking propellant before needed. So a shell or flash from the turret could both reach the magazines. The better protected and normally operated battleships at Jutland didn't explode even though they must have had them 'dust' too.
Age and temperature are correctly mentioned as problems, but I heard no proof they were factors at Jutland. Was the cordite really old and warm enough to matter? In June the North Sea isn't hot. and why no explosions in Hong Kong, the Med, Persian Gulf, or the Caribbean? Nor did the Army have trouble with Cordite dust, despite using lots of it.
Can't speak for what sailors knew about Cordite at Jutland, but my slightly later copy of "Service Chemistry" suggests a fair bit. The RN was the most high-tech service in WW1. Officers at least were well educated, though negligence is always possible.
Poudre B suffered from quality issues, as did all early attempts at smokeless powders, The cellulose and both acids must be high purity, and extraordinary efforts have to be taken to remove unreacted acids from the product. Grubby cotton and industrial grade acids aren't good enough and the process can't be rushed. Like the USA's Mk14 torpedo scandal, the French were in denial about problems until a cartridge went off whilst being transported across a harbour in a small boat.
Other incidents may be accidents – fire in adjacent coal bunkers, or incompetence. Despite stiff regulations imposed after several accidents, the Iena was put into drydock without being unloaded: absolutely forbidden yet it happened.
Do people have time to act before a magazine explodes? Maybe. Major Harvey got a VC. Promptly flooding the magazines saved Seydlitz. As to the time taken, we do have an idea: Arizona and Barham were both filmed exploding, and the frame times are known. Much depends on the violence of the event; a slow fire would give more time than a line of cartridges foolishly set-up between turret and magazine, which would give more time than a penetrating shell.
Might be wrong but I think the Arizona magazine contained 1 ton of Black Powder, not 100!
With respect, I think the dust hypothesis is flawed. More likely the RN took too many risks with the battlecruisers, and the other explosions were due to quality problems, teething troubles and accidents.
I heard that dreadnoughts in South America used a different kind of white powder
Nobody needs you to tell them how to make explosives; there are sources specifically for that.
Cellulose,failure of health and safety officials, all off Scott free . Bosley wood treatment.
Unless necks are wrung will happen agen.
British Royal Navy: Spends a Royal ransom building state-of-the-art warships.
Also the British Royal Navy: buys the cheapest and most thermally and chemically unstable powder propellant and stores it in the most haphazard manner in the magazines of those state-of-the-art warships.
Thanks for the interesting video . It would also be interesting to hear about the japanese gun powder. I read american claims that it produced less smoke and nuzzle flash than other propellants
Nothing is funnier than British people being scared of talking about the super scary chemistry that is openly available online if you want to make nitro cellulose
This should get a lot of views from Russian Ammo Handlers 😉
@28:50 Makes me think of a tank "brewing up" there's no explosion, just a very fast burn, more like a solid fuel rocket than an explosion.
Did British tanks in WW2 use the same propellant in their shells? I'd guess if so the brass cartridge would contain any powder.
Is the reported second explosion aboard the Lusitania relevant here as she was reported to have been carrying a cargo of gun cotton.
Enjoyed this discussion very much. would be very interested if you could do a follow up, why in the second world war when British ships rolled over they exploded eg, HMS Brabham wears German ships like Bismarck and Tirpitz didn't.
It was gratefully noted there was no averts during this. Thank you.
It used to happen when old sticks of dynamite would start to sweat out the nitro, when they were wet it was bad, but when it dried and formed crystals…it was deadly. Even it one rubbed against another, major explosion
Cast iron cannon were known to break in bits while transported. Grand Slam and the Disney bomb, were only possible with the US development of substantially stronger steel. The casings were made in America.
This is maybe the most fascinating video I have ever seen that my family immediately rolls their eyes at. Quicker than any I have shared excitedly. Save my eldest son. His curiosity scared me a bit😂😂🤣🤣
6:13 [sad federal agent noises]
I wonder if the fact the Germans use case guns instead of bag guns might be a factor
What you are looking for is deflagration rather than detonation
ON DUST: I saw a doco on the problems of dust build up in grain elevators causing explosions and wheat is not considered an explosive….
"Aerosolized Nitroglycerin Dust" has to be the most inherently dangerous thing I've heard all year, and I work with firearms for a living lmao
Imagine the presentation he could give at USNI in Annapolis
Exposure to nitroglycerin is known to cause headaches due to its blood-pressure changing properties, hence its use as a heart medication.
If there was a significant quantity of nitroglycerin dust in the turrets that would have been invested by the crew in the turret were headaches reported frequently by these sailors?
I wonder if the explosion that happened on the USS Maine in Cuba's Havana harbor in 1898 was due to an 'unintended explosion'?
Search for the TNO container test videos to see just how much confinement and composition matter (or just to see big booms); and everything in those are black powder so they are all deflagrations.
Fyi, any high school chemisty book discusses the mechanisms to make many "energetic compounds" so i wouldnt worry too much about folks listing to an obscure video on WWI, WWII ships popping off to learn how to make this stuff lol
I was just reading a 1930s manual of British army ordnance. It was quite scientific and gave a lot of background. Lyddite, the army's standard HE filler/burster early in the century, tended to react with the metal of the shells so they had to coat the inside of the shells with some kind of shellack to prevent this.
I question the idea of "nitroglycerine powder". Nitroglycerine is a liquid, melting or freezing at 58 °F, so a powder of it will not be possible at most temperatures. I offer another possibility: does cordite weep nitroclycerine? Could this saturate the fibers shed by the propellant bag so you have just nitro saturated dust? Would probably have the properties you ascribed to nitroglycerine powder itself.
hmm a note on the issue of acid residual. see if this comment gets me shadow b&. from experience with guncotten its a bit of an art because after adding the nitro group(s) to the cellulose, you typically neutralize the acids with something similar to baking powder. if acids are bad for barrels, bases are much much worse, so its better to stay on the extra acid side of things. also with too much neutralization you get the accumulation of a crusty base salt film which can reduce the formability and burnability of gun cotton, so it makes sense that everyone was erroring on the side of leaving extra acid behind. also i think keeping water out of the gun cotton can dramatically reduce the effects of left over acid, but that seems impossible on something mass produced and on a ship getting knocked around and handled. salt water can get into anything on a ship over time.
the Forestall fire, involved bombs exploding [not just the detonators] . The bombs were very much past their life cycle.
the thing is a lot of us already know how to make cordite it's not hard once you have the gun cotton and the the gun cotton is the easy part .it's made from 58% nitroglycerin, 37% guncotton -nitrocellulose and 5% petroleum jelly these are mixed by weight. Using acetone as a solvent you can form it in to thin rods or cords or in to tiny pellets small enough to fit in the shell case of choice for your application . while it's easy to make getting enough of the elements needed to make it can be a pain when you want to make a lot . just a bit of warning incase anyone actually try's to make this remember to wash the acid out of the gun cotton after it's done and wash it very well or it will bite you in the butt later by making the cordite unstable.
Those heater tablets were probably hexane.
I‘ve worked in a company where there was a water soluble diluent/gelling agent and Nitroglycerin in a small concentration.
If there would have been a fire there, water would have dissolved the gelling agent and the crystals of NG would have dropped to the base of the drums.
We didn’t have many fires, but there was a Friday when a water main ripped open. I can vividly remember the drums on pallets being transported out of the area, the water had already seeped in to the cardboard and guess what the weather was like?
It was raining.
After about half an hour someone noticed the damp drums and had them moved in to the fire brigade station nearby.
Nothing happened, except that it wasn’t stored in the basement anymore 😉
I can’t believe you guys are making me google ratios to manufacture propellant for my home defense 16in battery
In chemistry class at a German school, we made nitrocellulose, and learnt in step-by-step detail why it works and how to manufacture it safely. It's weird that today everyone is so concerned about that kind of knowledge spreading to 'ordinary' people.
If I had to drink every time these dudes says something like “we are not gonna tell you aaaactually how to make this stuff” I would have died from a gun cotton explosion of my own.
Dudes.
We get it.