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Updated: June 13, 2025
For some reason the fuse used for the guncotton was defective, and half an hour elapsed before the explosion destroyed the howitzer. When it came it came very thoroughly, but it was a weary time in coming. Then our men descended the hill, but the Boers were already crowding in upon them from either side.
I took a lot of ticker paper tape, turned it into guncotton and got up an engine with an arrangement whereby I could feed this gun-cotton strip into the cylinder and explode it inside electrically. The feed took place between two copper rolls. The copper kept the temperature down, so that it could only explode up to the point where it was in contact with the feed rolls.
"For England!" completed Caradoc Smith, and fetched down a furious doubled-handed blow on the primer of the big steel chamber packed with guncotton. The crowbar landed with a crash! Both lads leaned against the machinery, limp, dripping cold perspiration. Caradoc was the first to speak. "Didn't have its war head in!" Leonard mumbled something through the slime in his mouth.
Unless some second malicious miracle of nature should reverse the direction of the west wind, by nine o'clock it was felt that the populous district to the west, blocked with fleeing refugees and unilluminated except by the disastrous glare on the water front, was safe. Every pound of guncotton did its work, and though the ruins burned, it was but feebly.
The shed stood in a lonely corner of the big Farnum shipbuilding yards at Dunhaven. Now, it was the Farnum yard in which the Pollard submarine boats were built, and this shed contained some two dozen Whitehead submarine torpedoes, each with its fearful load of two hundred pounds of that dread high explosive, guncotton.
Kennedy, that the little can he told you about started the fire?" "I'm sure of it, although I'll never be able to prove it." "How did it work?" "Well, I imagine a small roll of very dry film was put in to occupy a part of the space. Film is exceedingly inflammable, especially when old and brittle. In composition it is practically guncotton and so a high explosive.
Dip plain cotton into a mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids and let it dry, and we have that terrible explosive, guncotton. Or, take the cellulose of which cotton is composed, and add two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and we have sugar. But we are to remember that the difference here indicated is not a quantitative, but a qualitative one, not one affecting bulk, but affecting structure.
But it was a ridiculous nonsense, for having paddled to her, I was thrown into paroxysms of rage by repeated failures to scale her bulwarks, low as they were; my hands, indeed, could reach, but I found no hold upon the slimy mass, and three rope-ends which I caught were also untenably slippery: so that I jerked always back into the boat, my clothes a mass of filth, and the only thought in my blazing brain a twenty-pound charge of guncotton, of which I had plenty, to blow her to uttermost Hell.
It was found that our box-periscopes were always being smashed by the Turkish snipers; so one ingenious brain collared an officer's cane and scooped, out the centre. With tiny mirrors top and bottom, it was a very effective periscope, and soon most officers were minus their canes. Some very good bombs were made from jam-tins with a wad of guncotton, and filled up with all manner of missiles.
When the burning city seemed doomed and the flames lit the sky farther and farther to the west, Admiral McCalla sent a trio of his most trusted men from Mare Island with orders to check the conflagration at any cost of property. With them they brought a ton and a half of guncotton. The terrific power of the explosive was equal to the maniac determination of the fire.
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