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Updated: June 2, 2025
"But what I see ahead, or feel as though I see, is some kind of disaster. Now, you'll think I'm a sailor-croaker, won't you, Jack?" "Disaster?" repeated Jack, slowly. "Well, to be sure, we've the outfit on board for a disaster, if we wanted one. Two real torpedoes that hold, between them, four hundred pounds of gun-cotton or danger-calico, as Williamson would call it. But cheer up, old fellow.
"We found there enough gun-cotton to blow the 'Benson' into inch pieces. It was a fearful crime to plan." Jack Benson and Hal Hastings heard, but did not change color. There was no sense in losing nerve over a disaster that had been averted in time. "The first thing to do, of course," continued Lieutenant Commander Kimball, "is to send instant word to Messrs. Trotter and Packwood.
There were no bayonets, but that was a detail. At the word the gunners were off, and there in the darkness in front of the storming party loomed the enormous gun, gigantic in that uncertain light. Out with the huge breech-block! Wrap the long lean muzzle round with a collar of gun-cotton! Keep the guard upon the run until the work is done!
"I'll tell you what it is," said the boy abruptly, and in a solemn voice, "it's something as has to do with science. There's something soft inside it, I can feel. P'raps there's something alive in it I shouldn't wonder. Oh! P'raps there's gun-cotton in it. I'd take care how I carried it if I was you, Mary, or p'raps it'll go off and blow you to bits!"
Young students in chemistry, when they learn that nitrogen is distinguished by the weakness of its affinities for other elements, and its consequent great inertness as a chemical agent, are often astonished to find that its compounds such as nitric acid, nitre, which gives its explosive character to gunpowder, nitro-glycerine, gun-cotton, and various other explosive substances which it helps to form are among the most remarkable in nature for the violence and intensity of their action, and for the extent to which the principle of vitality avails itself of them as magazines of force, upon which to draw in the fulfillment of its various functions.
This fact caught the attention of my mother at once. "How can it go off when wet?" she exclaimed, turning her bright little eyes in astonishment on her young companion. "Ha, that is one of the strange peculiarities of gun-cotton," replied Firebrand, with an amused look; "you don't require to keep it dry like powder.
"I hope to heavens . . ." "Put it on the stretcher carefully, boys." His subaltern was speaking to the two men who had arrived with a stretcher. "Have you got the slab of gun-cotton?" "Corporal 'Amick 'as gone to get it at the store, sir. He's a-going to meet us at the quarry." "Right-ho! Walk march."
"He would not have access to the formula, would he?" "The man that has access to such secrets never is the man who actually delivers," he explained; "he has a confederate. Snodgrass is the confederate, we think." "Is this secret colloding process of gun-cotton so tremendously valuable?" she asked. "It's a secret for which any nation would give millions of dollars.
When nitro-glycerine was first combined with gun-cotton in small quantities, camphor was often added, to lessen the rapidity of combustion which the nitro-glycerine was supposed to impart and also to render the compound more plastic, and to tend to prevent the decomposition of the low grade gun-cotton.
The charge of gun-cotton was calculated to give the projectile a velocity sufficient to carry it past the 'dead-point, where the gravity of the earth upon it was just balanced by that of the moon, and enable it to fall towards the moon for the rest of the way. The sudden shock of the discharge on the car and its occupants was broken by means of spring buffers and water pressure."
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