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Showing posts with the label cordite

KELP IS ON THE WAY: How American Kelp Helped Save the English Explosives Industry in World War I

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    Dr. Andrea Dragon          Each of the  hundreds of  millions of shells Great Britain fired from thousands of field guns, howitzers and mortars during World War I contained two explosives: cordite, a kind of nitrocellulose (what Americans call smokeless powder) to propel the shell out of the artillery piece and send it flying toward the target, and TNT, the shell's high explosive payload to blow up the target on impact.   In the early months of the war, the demand for cordite far exceeded the manufacturing capacity of Great Britain's explosives factories.  To meet production demands, in October, 1914, the British Army contacted representatives from DuPont and its 1912 spinoff Hercules, who were the leaders of New Jersey's established explosives industry, and signed agreements with them to produce nitrocellulose and cordite, load it and TNT into shells, and ship them from New Jersey ports to the Western Front....

The Maxim Machine Gun and Smokeless Powder

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Written by Andrea Dragon, Ph.D. Dr. Dragon investigates and writes about New Jersey's industrial history. Professor Dragon will be teaching a continuing education course on "New Jersey's Explosive History" at Rutgers - New Brunswick, starting on October 8, 2025. For details, see the course description at the end of this essay.    Hiram Maxim and his machine gun Hiram and Hudson Maxim:  Inventors of the Machine Gun and Developers of Smokeless Powder   New Jersey's eccentrically brilliant brothers, Hudson Maxim (1853-1927) and his cantankerous, womanizing older brother Hiram Stevens Maxim (1840-1916)  were both born into a poor, rural Maine family. Hudson claimed receiving his first shoes when he was sixteen. He rarely attended school and was self-taught. Astonishingly, Hudson Maxim's earliest claim to fame was as the author of a popular "teach yourself" book on penmanship. He also possessed a breathtakingly large ego, once bragging that he could write...