September 19, 2008

History of Gun Powder

Gunpowder was not invented overnight, as far as historians can tell, it was a gradual process over hundreds of years to get from the initial discovery of an unknown explosive substance, to the sophisticated black powder that we know today. In 142 AD, during the Han Dynasty, a man named Wei Boyang wrote the first recorded text regarding gunpowder. He wrote about a concoction of three powders that would “fly and dance” violently in his “Book of the Kinship of the Three”, which detailed the experiments made by the early alchemists. It’s impossible to be absolutely certain that he was talking about gunpowder, but there is no other explosive known to scientists that uses three powders.