THE CHEMICAL DEPARTMENT AT
WOOLWICH ARSENAL
The autumn meeting
of the Historical Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry was held on Friday 8
November 2002 to commemorate the centenary of the death of Sir Frederick Abel.
This was held jointly with the Gunpowder and Explosives History Group. 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. The text of this lecture
has been published
copies can be got from Dr Gerry Moss, Department of Chemistry, Queen Mary.
We hope, in any case, to publish extracts
(with permission) in future newsletters.
Four other papers given at the conference have an interest to historians
in Greenwich and Woolwich – these were:
The Chemical Laboratories at the Royal Arsenal Woolwich by Wesley Harry,
historian of the Royal Arsenal Woolwich.
Wesley talked about the Chemical Laboratories at the Royal Arsenal
Woolwich. Some time 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.
The Chemical Archaeology of Explosives, Wayne Cocroft, English Heritage
Wayne’s talk mainly concerned production at the Royal Gunpowder Mills,
Waltham Abbey, where guncotton was first prepared in about 1846. In 1863
Frederick Abel had developed a process
for its production using cotton waste that was used at Waltham Abbey. Later
nitroglycerine 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. Cordite needs a solvent in its production. During the
First World War supplies of acetone were lost so Woolwich developed cordite
production using ether.
Sir Charles Frederick (1709-1785), FRS FSA, Comptroller of the Royal
Laboratory at Woolwich, 1746-1782, Brenda Buchanan
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 gram 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.
Oswald Silberrad,
superintendent of research, Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, 1901-1906. Simon Coleman
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.
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