It should be noted - for those who visit Woolwich - that one of the pavilions of the Royal Chemical Laboratories has now been repaired and done up - it would be interesting to know exactly how this has been done, what relevance remains to its earlier role, what is to happen to it now, what will it be used for, and will there be any interpretation of its earlier importance - and who will write that??? Information would be wonderful - it has been claimed that they are the earliest purpose built industrial buildings remaining in Britain.
Everyone is urged to visit the very excellent gunpowder mills exhibition site at Waltham Abbey and to learn more about this important national industry and have a great day out. http://www.royalgunpowdermills.com/
I am publishing these here in order to further local, Borough of Greenwich, knowledge about the importance of work at the Arsenal and that it was not only a place where guns were made. If these synopses are seen as someone's copyright please email and they will be removed.
Sir Frederick Abel
(1827-1902)
The autumn meeting of the
Historical Group was held at Waltham Abbey, Royal Gunpowder Mills on Friday 8
November 2002 to commemorate the centenary of the death of Sir Frederick Abel.
The meeting started with the first Wheeler Lecture by
Professor Sy Mauskopf (Duke University) on Long Delayed Dream: Sir Frederick Abel
and the Development of Cordite. This is reproduced in full in Occasional Paper No 3 produced by the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Chemical
Archaeology of Explosives
Wayne Cocroft from
English Heritage talked on the history of the Royal Gunpowder Mill and the
surviving buildings and artefacts. He explained that archaeologically it is a
complex site with buildings from many phases. Apart from
redevelopment and adaption to changing requirements others were lost from
explosions. The first production of gunpowder probably dates to about 1665. The
site is well documented from 1787 when the government took over the site. Major William Congreve was the Comptroller of the Royal
Laboratory and was largely responsible for the success of this government
enterprise. He greatly improved the quality and reliability of the black powder
produced by rigorous control of the consistency and purity of the ingredients.
Many innovations in production methods were introduced; ideas which then
filtered down to the private gunpowder industry. The gunpowder mills were
worked by waterwheels until 1857 when steam powdered incorporation mills were introduced...
Guncotton was first
prepared in about 1846. In 1863 Frederick Abel developed a process for its
production using cotton waste that was used at Waltham Abbey. Later nitro-glycerine
was developed which, when combined with guncotton and a mineral jelly, were
blended to form the propellant cordite; patented
by Abel in 1889. Some buildings involved in these processes survive although
the nitrating plant was demolished in the 1990s. After an explosion in 1894 a
new nitro-glycerine plant was built. By the early 20th century a third of the
cordite produced in this country was made at the Royal Gunpowder Mills. Later
most of this production moved to Gretna. Cordite needs a solvent in its
production. During the First World War supplies of acetone were lost so
Woolwich developed cordite production using ether. Later Chaim
Weizmann developed a fermentation method for the production of
acetone at Holton Heath. The Quinan stove built in 1935
for drying guncotton used an innovative form of concrete construction.
The Royal Gunpowder Mills
were also involved in the production of other explosives; tetryl (N-mthyl-N, 2,
4, 6-tetranitroaniline) from 1910, picrite (Nitroguanidine) in the
1920s and RDX (cyclonite, hexahydro-1, 3, 5-trinitro-
1, 3, 5-triazine) in the 1930s. RDX was used in the bouncing bomb of the Dam buster’s
raid. Gunpowder production at Waltham Abbey finally ceased
in 1940-41 and the whole factory closed in 1945.
The site then became a Research and Development Establishment, finally closing
in 1991. The site was opened to the public in
2001.
Sir
Charles Frederick (1709-1785), FRS FSA, Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich, 1746-1782
Sir Charles Frederick
became Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich and Surveyor General to
the Board of Ordnance in the mid- eighteenth century, at a time when gunpowder
making was still a craft industry, and the government was reliant on private
contractors. In the theoretical vacuum
that then existed he had to undertake a process of self- education, serving what may be described as an
apprenticeship with the learned
societies of London, and presenting a dramatic 'masterpiece'
in the form of
the great firework display of 1749 in celebration of peace and victory, before becoming an acknowledged
master of his subject. Portraits of Sir Charles illustrate these three stages
of his career. Plans and paintings of the Royal
Laboratory also shown in the presentation of this paper raise questions about
the work undertaken there. This is especially the case with the production line of workmen filling round
shot of varying diameter with powder,
and sealing the shell with a plug that was presumably to be replaced by a fuse before firing. Proof testing was also carried out here, but this was
notoriously unreliable and it seems likely that the standardization of formula
and of grain size was used as a way of setting the minimum qualities required.
The central pavilions of the old Royal Laboratory still survive at Woolwich,
but these once fine buildings of the late seventeenth century have fallen into a sad state of dereliction.
When Sir Charles retired
in the early 1780s he had nudged the industry towards the more consciously
scientific approach of the last decades of the eighteenth century, through his
close attention to the processes of manufacture and his
encouragement of experimentation. But today
he is not so much underrated as unknown, perhaps because the end of his career was
marked by the political difficulties associated with the loss of the American colonies
and the criticisms then being voiced of the powerful and independent Board of
Ordnance, and because his successors were able to benefit from insights not
available to him. Historians too have not served him well, being generally more
interested in weapons and campaigns than in the critical matter of the supply
of gunpowder. Sir Charles's contemporaries however had no doubts about its significance,
for as a distinguished military man at
the Board of Ordnance wrote to him in 1757, with campaigns 'underway in
Europe, North America, India and at sea, 'all...Hope
of Success .. Is gone for nothing without
this material'.
It is to Sir Charles's
credit and a matter of historical record rather than triumphalism, that in the
third quarter of the eighteenth century, despite difficulties of supply and a
lack of understanding of the problems of internal ballistics, gunpowder was
produced in Britain on a scale and of a quality that enabled the country to
emerge on the world stage as a naval, colonial, and trading power.
Brenda
J. Buchanan (Chairman Gunpowder and
Explosives History Group)
Oswald Silberrad, superintendent of
research, Royal Arsenal,
Woolwich, 1901-1906
The paper resulted from
the speaker's work at the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of
Contemporary Scientists, Bath, on the archive of this little-known industrial
consulting chemist and the research laboratory that he founded.
The paper highlighted some of Silberrad's important contributions to munitions
research at the Royal Arsenal while he was still in his early twenties. An
experimenter of rare ability, Silberrad discovered a new means of detonating
high explosive shells by using a substance known as 'tetryl'. He also demonstrated that TNT worked well as a
high explosive shell filling, possessing advantages over the lyddite then in
use, and successfully developed and tested a 'flameless'
artillery propellant for small calibre guns. The archive contains part of Silberrad's unpublished memoirs,
which document this period of his career, in particular his difficult relations with the War Office which resulted in his
resignation as
Superintendent of Research. The paper
sought to show the value of an archival cataloguing project such as this in 'rescuing' a scientist and his work from relative obscurity. The
Silberrad Papers are held by the Science Museum- Library".
Simon Coleman National Cataloguing Unit
for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists (University of Bath)
The
Chemical Laboratories at the Royal Arsenal
Woolwich
Wesley Harry, historian
of the Royal Arsenal Woolwich, talked about the Chemical Laboratories at the
Royal Arsenal Woolwich. Sometime after 1665 the proof of ordnance moved from
Moorfields to Woolwich. By 1695 many new buildings had been erected including a
laboratory originally attached to the Tilt Yard at Greenwich. Various aspects
of the manufacture and testing of ordnance were concentrated onto the Woolwich
site in the 18th century. Frederick Abel was a professor of chemistry at the Royal
Military Academy and was appointed in 1854 Ordnance Chemist at the Royal Laboratories
at Woolwich. Another notable name there was James
Marsh who developed the Marsh test for arsenic. The chemical laboratories built in 1864 were the first custom built
chemical laboratory at the Arsenal. The room on the west side was the full
height of the two storey building. It was designed like this to disperse fumes
and gases produced at the benches. From
the gallery, off which were the offices, Frederick
Abel would lower a wicker basket containing samples and instructions to the Assistant
Chemist. The east wing contained a photographic department and library.
In addition to the ordnance work the laboratory was also concerned with forensic
science.
