The Technology of Gunpowder Making in the Eighteenth Century: Evidence from the Bristol Region

NOTES AND REFERENCES

• Robert Hooke, 'Scheme for Determining the Force of Gunpowder' in Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols. ( London, 1756–7), vol. 1 p. 302; Benjamin Robins, New Principles of Gunnery: containing the Determination of the Force of Gunpowder (London, 1742); Charles Hutton, 'The Force of Fired Gunpowder and the Initial Velocities of Cannon Balls', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 68 (1778).
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• For a full account of this episode see Brenda J. Buchanan, 'Meeting Standards: Bristol Powdermakers in the Eighteenth Century' in Gunpowder: the History of an International Technology (forthcoming publication, Bath University Press, 1996). Unless stated otherwise documents referred to in the present essay are in the Strachey Papers, Somerset Record Office, DD/SH Box 27. I am at present preparing this material for publication by the Somerset Record Society.
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• P. N. Wilson, 'The Gunpowder Mills of Westmorland and Furness', Trans. Newc. Soc., vol. 34 (1963–4), pp. 47–65; B. J. Buchanan & M. T. Tucker, 'The Manufacture of Gunpowder: a Study of the Documentary and Physical Evidence relating to the Woolley Powder Works near Bath', Ind. Arch. Rev., vol. 5 (1981), pp. 185–202; B. J. Buchanan, 'Capital Investment in a Regional Economy: Some Aspects of the Sources and Employment of Capital in North Somerset, 1750-1830', unpublished Ph. D. thesis, Univ. of London (1992).
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• N. B. Wilkinson, 'An American Powdermaker in Great Britain, Lammot du Pont's Journal, 1858', Trans. Newc. Soc., vol. 47 (1977), pp. 85–96; Oscar Guttmann, The Manufacture of Explosives, a Theoretical and Practical Treatise on the History, Physical and Chemical Properties, and Manufacture of Explosives, 2 vols. (London, 1895).
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• H. Chatley, 'Far Eastern Engineering', Trans. Newc. Soc., vol, 29 (1953–4 & 1954–5), pp. 151–67; Joseph Needham with Ho Ping-Yu, Lu Gwei-Djen, & Wang Ling, Science and Civilisation in China vol. 5, part 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986).
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• Brenda J. Buchanan ed., Gunpowder: the History of an International Technology (forthcoming publication, Bath University Press, 1996).
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• Needham, Gunpowder Epic, pp. 2–3, 108, note c; J. R. Partington, A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 97–8, 313.
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• Roy S. Wolper, 'The Rhetoric of Gunpowder and the Idea of Progress', JnL of Hist. of Ideas, vol. 31 (1970), pp. 589–598.
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• Alex Roland, 'Science, Technology, and War', Technology and Culture, supplement to vol. 36 (1995), pp. S83—S99.
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• A. R. Williams, 'The Production of Saltpetre in the Middle Ages', Ambix, vol. 22 (1975), pp. 125–33.
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• R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power eds., Tudor Economic Documents (1924), part iii, pp. 10, 239.
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• See E. A. Brayley Hodgetts ed., The Rise and Progress of the British Explosives Industry (London, 1909). Cases selected from this volume include the following: Public Record Office (PRO), Chancery Lane, S. P. Dom. Charles I, vol. cc, no. 26, 1631; vol. cciv, no. 9. 1631; vol. ccxi, no. 79, 1632; vol. cclxv, no. 91, 1634; & CCXXViii, f. 126a, 1634. See also references in Victoria History of the County of Surrey (1902–12), vol. II, pp. 319–20.
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• PRO, S. P. Dom. Charles I, vol. ccxcii, f. 222, 1634, & vol. cclxxviii, no 4, 1634.
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• Waste matter was gathered in `Dungfields', like that so-named in a 'Survey of Enfield near London, 1572', J. Bumby, 'Gunpowder and Saltpetre Production in Enfield', (Edmonton Hundred Historical Society, Occasional Paper, nd), p. 46. For examples of opposition to the practice see PRO, S. P. Dom. Charles I, vol. cclxiv, f. 115, 1635, which shows that in Somerset some inn keepers paved their stables to prevent earth being carried out; and S. P. Dom. Charles I, vol. ccclxi, no. 8, 1637, which gives details of the complaint of Dean Christopher Wren, father of the architect and Rector of Knoyle Magna or Episcopi, Wiltshire, that digging in his pigeon house had so weakened the foundations that one of the 'massy stone walls' twenty feet high had fallen in.
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• See Williams, 'Production of Saltpetre', for Honrick's recipe and his own experiments. PRO, S. P. Dom. Charles I, vol. cccxxi, no. 33, 1636, reveals the competition for ashes between saltpetremen and soapmakers.
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• For early accounts of the processes involved see Agricola, De Re Metallica, ed. H. C. Hoover and L. H. Hoover (New York, 1950), pp. 561–4 & Denis Diderot, Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry, ed. C. C. Gillespie (New York, 1959), plates 150–8: for current debate on saltpetre see chapters by Gerhard Kramer and Bert Hall in Buchanan ed., Gunpowder
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• PRO, S. P. Dom. Charles I, ccccxviii, no. 69, 1639.
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• Scattered references to Baber's career at this time, and to the possibility of supplies from Wells in Somerset, may be found in transcripts of The Royalist Ordnance Papers 1642–1646 (Oxford Record Society, Part I, 1964 & Part II, 1975), ed. Ian Roy. See also Peter Edwards, 'Gunpowder and the English Civil War', Journal of Arms and Armour, vol. XV (1995), pp. 109–131.
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• PRO, S. P. Dom. Charles II, vol. xxix, no. 76, 1661, & vol. ccxxxii, no. 193, 1668.
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• Joan Day, Bristol Brass, a History of the Industry ( Newton Abbot, 1973), pp. 77, 82, 211–13; John Latimer, The Annals of Bristol, 3 vols. of which vol. 1, The Eighteenth Century (Bristol, 1893; Kingsmead Reprint, Bath, 1970), p. 244; H. T. Ellacombe, History of the Parish of Bitton (Exeter, 1883), p. 229.
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• I am grateful to Mr. Jur Kingma for information about the `kruitmolen' near the village of Oostzaan, north ofAmsterdam, depicted as a windmill on a map of 1693. It was owned by Admiral Philip van Almonde (1647–1711), vice-admiral of the expeditionary force of William and Mary, 1688; Richard Budgen, The Passage of the Hurricane from Bexhill to Newingdon-Level . . to which is added An Account of a New Engine to Work by the Wind (Presented to the Royal Society, 1730).
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• 'The Dictionary of Blue and White Printed Pottery 1780-1880' includes a plate showing a windmill, entitled'Powder Mill, Hastings', see Newsletter 30 of the Wind & Watermill Section of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1987), and Newsletter 3 of the Gunpowder Mills Study Group (1987); Begofia Bas, 'Fireworks for the Community: the Use of Windpower and Simple Techniques in Galicia' in Buchanan ed., Gunpowder.
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• PRO, E 190/1157/1; E190/1158/1; E190/1160/3; E190/1160/5. David Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America, vol. 1, The Years of Expansion 1698–1729 (Bristol Record Society, 1986), provides an outline of the ships involved, but with no reference to the cargoes of gunpowder which the present study of the documentary evidence shows them to have carried.
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• Saltpetre was imported by the East India Company from at least the early 1620s. For accounts of procedures in countries without access to this convenient source see Bengt Ahslund, 'The Saltpetre Boilers of the Swedish Crown' and Patrice Bret, 'The Organisation of Gunpowder Production in France, 1775-1830', in Buchanan ed., Gunpowder.
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• In particular, from 1751 to 1762 powder was supplied to Arthur and Benjamin Heywood of Liverpool, merchants and later bankers. In 1743 the former had written of the difficulty of recruiting sailors for 'a small ship now fitting out for the Gold Coast of Africa. . .', Anon, 'The Heywood Story', Three Banks Review, vol. 85 (1970), pp. 50–60.
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• Buchanan, Thesis, esp. pp. 259–79, 382–412. The influence of trade on gunpowder manufacture will be examined further in a paper presented to the 23rd Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology, Budapest, August 1996.
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• PRO, for example, E190/1160/3, 1702, Cowslip Brigantine & E190/1160/5, 1706, Berkly Galley. For a general study of the Elton family see Margaret Elton, Annals of the Elton Family, Bristol Merchants and Somerset Landowners (Alan Sutton Pub., Stroud, 1994).
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• Latimer, Eighteenth Century, pp. 256, 517. The Jacobite panic increased when a Bristol privateer brought in a Spanish prize carrying weapons and 100 barrels of gunpowder, thought to be destined for the Prince. A substantial building in Easton-in-Gordano may also have been a early magazine. I am grateful to Robin Styles for this information.
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• For a study of the site see Buchanan & Tucker, 'The Woolley Powder Works'. The documentary evidence was assembled by the former, the physical evidence and drawings by the latter. Little survives of the Augusta Mills, and I am grateful to Wayne Cocroft for the account by Geo. W. Rains, History of the Confederate Powder Works (Augusta, Georgia, 1882), see p. 21.
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• For a preliminary discussion of the use of edge runners and other advanced procedures at Woolley see B. J. Buchanan, 'A Comment on the Manufacture of Black Powder', Jnl. of Soc. for Indust. Arch., vol. 2 (Univ. of West Virginia, 1976), pp. 75–80.
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• On Chilworth see D. W. Warner, 'The Early History of Gunpowder Manufacture at Chilworth', vol. 1, Surrey History (1975), pp. 95–105 and Glenys Crocker, Chilworth Gunpowder (Surrey Industrial History Group, 1984), pp. 5–7. On Waltham Abbey, I am grateful to Malcolm McLaren, formerly librarian at the Royal Gunpowder Factory, for helpful comments on the possible meaning of the term 'dumb mills', used in a sketch published by John Farmer in The History of Waltham Abbey (1735). At the Faversham powder works, 'Pestil-mills' began to be superseded by edge runners in the mid-1730s, see Arthur Percival, 'The Faversham Gunpowder Industry', vol. 5, Industrial Archaeology (1968), pp. 9–10. This development may have been influenced by the visit on 15 July 1735 of two Americans connected to the family of the proprietor, who witnessed the grinding of saltpetre, charcoal and brimstone, but not it seems the incorporation of the gunpowder, under edge runners, for over dinner 'the making of powder by cyllinders to turn one against another' was proposed. Robert Hunter Morris, 'An American in London, 1735–36: The Diary of Robert Hunter Morris', Beverley McAnear ed., Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 64 (1940), p. 213.
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• Jenny West, Gunpowder, Government and War in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1991), pp. 168–9, 205.
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• A stamp mill was simpler and easier to construct, and it crushed and compressed the ingredients effectively. An edge runner mill required a greater capital investment, but in addition to the qualities described it could also grind, and mix the composition more safely, and thoroughly by the twisting, and shearing motion of its large stones as they revolved in a small circle, producing, it was claimed, a more homogenised powder. For comments on the introduction of 'roll mills' in northwest Germany in the eighteenth century, following the Dutch example, see Olaf Mussmann, 'Gunpowder Production in the Electorate, and the Kingdom of Hanover'; on the continuing use of stamps see Bret, 'Gunpowder Production in France' and Robert A. Howard, 'The Evolution of the Process of Powdermaking from an American Perspective', all in Buchanan ed., Gunpowder.
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• R. A. Buchanan and Neil Cossons, The Industrial Archaeology of the Bristol Region (David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1969), pp. 58–73, 141–5.
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• Terry S. Reynolds, Stronger Than a Hundred Men, A History of the Vertical Water Wheel (Johns Hopkins Univ. P., Baltimore & London, 1983), pp. 70–5. Examples of the likely early use of edge runners include: oil mills in southeast France in the eleventh century; sugar mills in Sicily in the later twelfth; mustard and poppy mills in central and northern France in the thirteenth; a mortar mill in Augsberg in the early fourteenth; and pigment mills in northern France in the mid fourteenth century. After 1500 the edge runner mill was also applied to the preparation of snuff, pipe clay, china and cement.
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• Partington, Greek Fire and Gunpowder, p. 328; Jean Vanes ed., The Overseas Trade of Bristol in the Sixteenth Century (Bristol Record Society, 1979), pp. 72–3, shows that goods lost to the Dutch by a Bristol ship returning from Danzig in 1586 included 25 barrels of powder; The Diary of Sir James Hope, 24 January-1 October 1646, vol. 9 (Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, 1958), pp. 156–8. Sir James was an enquiring traveller, interested in the processes he observed such as gunfounding and charcoal making in Kent and sulphur extraction near Liege, and in the people he met such as the Dutch chemist Frans Rooy, who had made saltpetre in Edinburgh, and whose acquaintance he renewed in Amsterdam. It is this breadth of experience which makes the Diary such a remarkable source of information on seventeenth-century technology, and gives credence to Sir James' reference to the use of edge runners in powder mills. The link with oil mills may be even more apposite than it seems, for examples of these functions succeeding each other in early mills are easily found but cannot be pursued on this occasion. And the fact that Sir James describes the use of a press after the braying of the oil seed suggests a further link to be made.
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• John Strachey, 'Observations on the Strata in the Coal Mines of Mendip', Phil. Trans. Royal Society, XXX, 360 (1719), 968. See Mr. Schroter on ways of increasing saltpetre and Mr. Hooke on schemes for determining the force of gunpowder (both of 1663) in Birch, History of the Royal Society, vol. 1, pp. 173, 302; also 'The History of Making Gunpowder' in Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1667), pp. 277–83.
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• West, Gunpowder, Government & War, pp. 156, 169, 203; The Hon. George Napier, 'Observations on Gunpowder', Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. II, Science (1787–88), quoted by George Kelleher, Gunpowder to Guided Missiles, Ireland's War Industries (John Kelleher, Cork, 1993), pp. 26, 295; Edward M. Patterson, Gunpowder Terminology and the Incorporation Process (Faversham Society, 1986),
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• Patterson, Gunpowder Terminology, pp. 16–17; Herbert Blackman, 'The Story of the Old Gunpowder Works at Battle', Sussex Arch. Collns., vol. 64 (1923), p. 118. The circular stones of black marble were about 61/2 feet in diameter and 16 inches thick, each weighing approximately 6 tons.
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• The Goldney family were prominent Bristol Quakers, merchants, and bankers, with shares in the Coalbrookdale works. Thomas Goldney (1694–1768) maintained a record of his business and private dealings from 1742 to 1768, now at the Wiltshire Record Office (WRO), Goldney Account Book, ref. no. 473/295.
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• Papers relating to the Littleton works are in private hands, and I thank the owners for allowing me to see them. Moreton Mill is now submerged beneath the Chew Valley reservoir, and although an excavation was carried out before the flooding, it was judged that 'The chief interest of the site lies in the plan of the mediaeval house', and the powder mill was not investigated. P. A. Rahtz & E. Greenfield, Excavations at Chew Valley Lake, Somerset (HMSO, 1977), p. 114.
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• Goldney Account Book, WRO, ref. no. 473/295. From the total figures given by West, Gunpowder, Government & War, p. 156, it may be calculated that at Faversham in the early 1760s, the cast iron beds and runners were an average of 21/2 tons and 31/2 tons respectively, a little weightier than those in the Bristol region apart from the Woolley heavyweights. The runners had been turned in the lathe at the mill site, and not before leaving the foundry as in the Bristol case. It is not known whether the working surfaces were grooved as recommended by Napier, see Kelleher, Gunpowder to Guided Missiles, p. 26. Weight and dimensions seem not to have changed much over time: one hundred years after the Woolley runners of 5 tons were installed this was also the chosen weight of those set up at Augusta, where the resulting compression during incorporation was found to be so effective that the hydraulic press was used only in the making of fine grain powder, Rains, Confederate Powder Works, p. 24; and 6 to 7 feet seems to have been thought an efficient diameter, from those awaiting erection at Chilworth in 1735, see Morris, 'An American in London', p. 215, to those functioning into the nineteenth century at Battle, see n.39. The effectiveness of the heavy runners may help to explain the absence of references to a press at Woolley and Littleton.
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• Needham, The Gunpowder Epic, p. 111. Information in the table is from the Strachey Papers; Robins, Principles of Gunnery, p. 120; West, Gunpowder Government and War, p. 28; Bishop Richard Watson, Chemical Essays, vol. II (Cambridge, 1781), p. 16.
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• Needham, The Gunpowder Epic, pp. 108–11,342-65; H. W. L. Hime, Gunpowder and Ammunition, their Origin and Progress (London, 1904), pp. 196–7. See also the survey by Partington, Greek Fire and Gunpowder, pp. 323–9.
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• Buchanan, 'Meeting Standards: Bristol Powdermakers in the Eighteenth Century' in Buchanan, Gunpowder A similar attitude may be seen in the relations between the Board of Ordnance and their gun founders. David Crossley & Richard Savile, editors of The Fuller Letters 1728–55. Guns, Slaves and Finance, vol. 76 (Sussex Record Society, 1991), p. xviii, remark upon 'the favour in which the Office of Ordnance held its traditional suppliers and their expertise'.
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• Benjamin Robins, New Principles of Gunnery, p. 60.
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• J. Ingenhousz, 'An Account of a New Kind of Inflammable Air or Gas and a New Theory on Gunpowder', Phil. Trans. Royal Soc., vol. 69 (1779); West, Gunpowder, Government and War, pp. 171,183-5; O. F. G. Hogg, The Royal Arsenal, its Background, Origin, and Subsequent History (London, 1963), pp. 465–93.
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• Buchanan, 'Meeting Standards' in Buchanan ed., Gunpowder; West, Gunpowder Government & War, Appendix 3; and Crocker, Chilworth Gunpowder, pp. 6–7.
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• Estimates for the Bristol region are based on the Strachey papers. Further information on the export of powder has been assembled but not yet fully analysed. On Faversham see West, Gunpowder Government and War, p. 164; from information in Crocker, Chilworth Gunpowder, p. 7, it may be estimated that in the early 1790s output there was about 3,000 barrels per year.
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