The base is a kind of guncotton called by chemists pyroxylin, which is mixed in wood alcohol.
After the guncotton and the wood alcohol have been thoroughly stirred up, the mixture looks like a thick syrup, but it is about as dangerous a syrup as ever was brewed, for its ingredients are those of the most powerful explosives.
The guncotton is made by treating flax or cotton waste with sulphuric and nitric acids.
The explosive charge of two or three hundred pounds of wetguncotton is called the “war-head.
This is like a Whitehead in every respect except that instead of a charge of guncotton it carries in its head a short eight-inch cannon loaded with an armor-piercing shell and a small charge of powder.
A similar series was carried out with the guncotton in the condition in which it was directly obtained from the ester reaction.
The structureless guncotton prepared as above described is of quite exceptional character, and entirely distinct from the ordinary fibrous nitrate or the nitrate prepared by precipitation from actual solution in an undiluted solvent.
There is, however, no solution of the guncotton and practically no tendency of the grains to cohere.
In a slightly diluted acetone of such composition, the guncotton is instantly attacked, the action being quite different from the gelatinisation which precedes solution in the undiluted solvent.
This probably explains the presence of free acid when guncotton is purified by long-continued boiling in water without any neutralising agent being present.
The following results may be cited, obtained by boiling a purified 'service' guncotton (sample C) with a 1 p.
Guncotton alone in the colloid state burns very slowly if in moderate-sized pieces, and when subdivided or made into thin rods or strips it is still very mild as an explosive, partly from a chemical reason, viz.
On contact with the guncotton a jelly is formed which stiffens as the evaporation of the gelatinizing agent proceeds, and finally hardens when the evaporation is complete.
Guncotton is converted into a gelatinous form by several substances, such as esters, e.
Later a mixture of two varieties of guncotton gelatinized together was used.
In fact guncotton in the colloid state may be hammered on an anvil, and, as a rule, only the portion struck will detonate or fire.
The Vieille powder, invented in 1887 and adopted in France for a magazine rifle, consisted of gelatinizedguncotton with a little picric acid.
Very many substances and mixtures have been proposed for smokeless powder, but the two substances, guncotton and nitroglycerin, have for the most part kept the field against all other combinations, and for several reasons.
The guncotton was hung against the plate and detonated.
It is made of guncotton and nitroglycerine and acetone is one of the chemicals required in its manufacture.
In the second place, it is possible that a distance of three or four feet between charge and ship would rather augment than diminish the effect produced in the case of such an explosive as guncotton when sufficiently immersed.
In the first place, the detonation of guncottonis practically instantaneous, so that impact and explosion would be simultaneous.
At any rate, experiments some years ago with smaller quantities of both dynamite and guncotton showed that when exploded 4 ft.
I was engaged in the magazine in opening boxes of guncottonand getting more primers and detonators ready for action.
Guncotton 50 Barium nitrate 50 =TOXOL= is a high explosive, a mixture of trinitro-xylene and trinitro-toluene.
The variety of cellulose most used for this purpose is cotton, and the product obtained from it is frequently called nitrocotton, three special varieties of which are collodion cotton, pyrocollodion and guncotton (q.
It contains guncotton and sodium nitrate, and sufficient moisture to render it safe to handle without diminishing its strength.
It was made by incorporating guncotton with nitro-benzene to a hard mass.
It contains no guncotton but may contain potassium nitrate, sodium chloride, naphthalene, and various other substances.
It is a sort of Cordite MD, with a little of the guncottonreplaced by potassium nitrate, and is in the form of flat strips.
It consists of guncotton mixed with a nitrate and compressed into blocks or cylinders, but a small percentage of a nitro-compound has sometimes been added.
It was originally adopted in 1888, and is made by mixing nitroglycerine with guncotton and mineral jelly (a sort of crude vaseline), and incorporating them together with the aid of acetone, which gelatinises the guncotton.
From these experiments it appeared that the guncotton and cotton-powder were practically equal as producers of sound.
These are some of the physical reasons whyguncotton might be regarded as a promising fog-signal.
Well, we both lay down and I fired ten rounds at theguncotton with my rifle, and he did the same with a pistol, but it wouldn't work.
Well, to blow a bridge up we use guncottonand a wire fuse.
The prelude to this third bombardment of Santiago was a second trial of the Vesuvius at midnight on the fifteenth, when she sent three more 250-pound charges of guncotton into the fortifications.
The Gathmann shell had a soft nose, which collapsed on the plate at the instant before the explosion of the shell, so that the guncotton might explode fairly against the side of the plate.
I stretched a clothes-line from the speaker's platform to a distance of about thirty feet to my right, and on this I hung my guncotton clothes, only a few feet away from the front of the audience.
For the same reason that the five tons of Sir Frederick Abel's guncotton detonated, this huge heap of cordite also detonated.
Before going for it to the guncotton dry-house, I instituted a search for a suitable vessel in which to carry it.
The compound consisted of fulminate of mercury with gelatinated guncotton and nitroglycerin.
So, on this occasion, the guncotton took a notion to explode after it got fairly on fire, which did not take very long.
He gave instructions to a machinist to do the job, telling him to remove the guncotton first.
Holding in one hand the wad of guncotton the size of his head, he applied a match to it.
There were perhaps a hundred pounds of dry guncotton in the room at the time, spread out in pans.
We were barely out of the room when the guncotton burned with a flash, wrecking the building and setting fire to the fragments.
They could have forced their explosives farther in the burning section, but not a pound of guncotton could be or was wasted.
Every pound of guncotton did its work, and though the ruins burned, it was but feebly.
Engines pumping brine through Fort Mason from the bay completed the little work that the guncotton had left, but for three days the haggard-eyed firemen guarded the flickering ruins.
A charge of compressed wet guncotton may be exploded, even under water, by the detonation of a small primer of the dry and waterproofed material, which in turn can be started by a small fulminate detonator.
When quite dry guncotton is easily detonated by a blow on an anvil or hard surface.
Air-dried guncotton will contain 2% or less of moisture.
The gaseous mixture obtained by burning guncotton in a vacuum vessel contains steam, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, nitric oxide, and methane.
It is not necessary for the blocks of wet guncotton to be actually in contact if they be under water, and the peculiar explosive wave can also be conveyed a little distance by a piece of metal such as a railway rail.
A small charge of dry guncotton will, however, detonate the wet material, and this peculiarity is made use of in the employment of guncotton for blasting purposes.
Another heat test, that of Will, consists in heating a weighed quantity of the guncotton in a stream of carbon dioxide to 130 deg.
The explosive wave from the dry guncotton primer is in fact better responded to by the wet compressed material than the dry, and its detonation is somewhat sharper than that of the dry.
Immediately after the discovery of guncotton Schonbein proposed its employment as a substitute for gunpowder, and General von Lenk carried out a lengthy and laborious series of experiments intending to adapt it especially for artillery use.
Schonbein of Basel published his discovery of guncottonin 1846 (Phil.
The employment of guncotton as a propellant was possible only after the discovery that it could be gelatinized or made into a colloid by the action of so-called solvents, e.
Dry guncotton heated in ammonia gas detonates at about 70 deg.
Guncotton is simply ordinary cotton which has been treated with nitric and sulphuric acids; when this is done it becomes highly explosive.
The projectile is loaded with 250 pounds of guncotton or TNT but the warhead is not loaded at all.
And suddenly Guncotton produced his will-o-the-wisp trick, which completed the illusion.
There is something in that," answers Guncotton seriously.
And Guncotton adds: "My manuscript is safely in London.
The nitration is not carried so far as to produce the guncotton used in explosives but only far enough to make a soluble nitrocellulose or pyroxylin.
The trouble with the dissolved guncotton was that it could not be molded.
The higher nitrates are known as guncotton and form the basis of modern dynamite and smokeless powder.
One day while working in the laboratory he cut his finger, as chemists are apt to do, and, again as chemists are apt to do, he dissolved some guncotton in ether-alcohol and swabbed it on the wound.
Collodion, as I have explained in previous chapters, is a solution in ether and alcohol of guncotton (otherwise known as pyroxylin or nitrocellulose), which is made by the action of nitric acid on cotton.
Why not solve both difficulties together by dissolving the guncotton in the nitroglycerin and so get a double explosive?
But Hyatt, hearing that camphor could be used and not knowing enough about what others had done to follow their false trails, simply mixed his camphor and guncotton together without any solvent and put the mixture in a hot press.
They had no artillery or guncotton or materials for a siege, but they hoped to scale the wall and annihilate the garrison that held it.
However, by creeping along under cover of the wall, Captain Shepherd and Lieutenant Garstin were able to lay the guncotton and light the fuse for another explosion.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "guncotton" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
