The Failure of French Gunpowder

For any student of military history, it frequently seems that more ink has been spilled over French failures in the Napoleonic Wars than the blood spilled on the battlefield.  This will not stop me, however, from pointing out that the centrally planned economy of revolutionary France resulted in the production of inferior gunpowder that seriously hampered both the French Army and the French Navy,

Gunpowder began as a happy accident in medieval China, when alchemists chasing immortality mixed charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, discovering the recipe for very mortal fireworks.  By the 900s, the stuff powered fire lances, bombs, and rockets; by 1044, writers of Chinese manuals were jotting down secret formulas like proud cookbook authors.  The idea zipped along trade routes to the Islamic world, where engineers refined siege craft, and then to Europe in the 1200s, where monks and monarchs promptly asked, “Does it make castles go away?”

Early European “serpentine” powder was a fussy, dusty blend that separated into useless components at the worst moments—think salad dressing with a temper.  Around 1500, makers started “corning” it into grains, giving a more predictable bang for the buck, and handheld guns and big bombards multiplied.  The 1600s brought flintlocks, paper cartridges, and generals who standardized calibers so that cannonballs finally fit the cannon.  In the 1700s, European chemists like Lavoisier tidied French production, while Britain built Waltham Abbey into a gunpowder campus and imported ultra-pure Indian saltpeter by the shipload.  By the time the Napoleonic Wars rolled around, Europe had turned black powder into an industrial science—equal parts chemistry, logistics, and earplugs—setting the stage for continent-wide warfare that flashed—and boomed—from Portugal to Moscow.

From the very beginning of the war in the late 18^th century, the British had an advantage: they imported high quality saltpeter from India.  The French, on the other hand, created a huge domestic program to make and gather salpêtre—building nitre beds (nitrières) per official manuals, and ordering citizens to scrape “nitrous earth” from cellars, stables, barns and rubble for sale to the gunpowder administration. Chemists like Lavoisier/Guyton de Morveau helped standardize and teach the process and authorities used requisitions to keep supplies flowing—so wartime French saltpeter was largely home-produced rather than imported.  The poor-quality homemade saltpeter was hygroscopic—it literally pulled moisture out of the air—not only making the powder less effective but leaving a residue fowled the barrels of the weapons.

To produce the gunpowder, the three ingredients are combined in a process called corning.  In broad strokes, English corning in the Napoleonic era was a tidy, factory-forward affair: mills like Waltham Abbey first compressed the damp “mill cake” into dense press-cakes, then broke and sieved those cakes into consistent grain sizes—an assembly line for bang that prized uniform density and repeatable burn from batch to batch.  The British then polished the powder by tumbling it in a wooden barrel with a small amount of graphite.  This glazing helped prevent clumping and made the powder even more resistant to moisture, while at the same time preventing the buildup of static electricity that could spontaneously detonate the gunpowder.

By contrast, French corning was carried out across a patchwork of state poudreries, but with techniques that varied more between sites: the official instructions emphasize milling and granulation steps, and in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic scramble some works pressed before granulating while others effectively corned from damp cake as equipment and throughput allowed—producing fairly good powder, but with more variability in grain density than Britain’s heavily standardized press-then-corn routine.

There was a significant difference in how the gunpowder was stored.  The British standardized in 25-, 50-, and 100-pound barrels equipped with copper hoops.  The French had a wide variety of barrels, some weighing more than 200 pounds and all them made with iron hoops.  If two barrel hoops bumped together, the resulting spark could ignite all the powder in the magazine.  Perhaps this is why French powder works blew up at least four times during the war.

By the 1790s, plenty of French powder men could see why British stuff went “boom” so politely while French powder frequently either didn’t blow up or blew up prematurely, but the obstacle wasn’t brains…it was bureaucracy.  In France’s centrally-run system, every tweak to grain size, press pressure, or glazing seemed to require a memo to Paris, two committees, and a stamp the size of a wagon wheel.  Nitre inspectors had quotas, poudreries had fixed procedures, and purchasing officers couldn’t just splash out on new presses or hire extra coopers because a clever foreman had an idea: they needed approvals, inventories, and—oops—another approval. Add wartime scarcities and blockade headaches, and even sensible changes moved at the speed of a courier on a muddy road.  Meanwhile the British, who sunk capital into a factory model earlier, could swap dies, retool, and standardize faster than you could say “pass the priming flask.”  The French knew where they wanted to go, but the central planning machinery kept tapping the brakes.  So they made lots of perfectly serviceable powder—sometimes very good indeed—but catching up to Britain’s consistency and scale meant loosening paperwork, freeing procurement, and investing mid-war—none of which a bureaucracy excels at.

The results of this difference in quality were evident in the field.  The French army used a 12-pound field gun.  Due to the increased power of British gunpowder, they achieved nearly the same result with a 9-pound cannon.  Since the British gunpowder produced less fouling, the British army could fire the cannon more frequently than their enemy, while using fewer horses to maneuver the guns. 

For the British Navy, there was an even bigger advantage.  After the Battle of Trafalgar, French captains estimated that because of the difference in powder strength, the British guns could hit targets 15-20% farther than French guns, with a corresponding effect on hull penetration.  The British could score hits while still out of range from return fire.  And when those shells hit, they did more damage than the French shells.  Due to a combination of cleaner barrels and better discipline, British ships fired 50% faster that their French counterparts.

Britain decisively won the Napoleonic Wars.  Better gunpowder wasn’t the only reason, but it contributed.  And the French centrally-planned economy, as it usually does, created more problems than solutions.

Going Bananas

Back in 1964, Roy Drusky released a song with the unlikely title of “Peel Me a Nanner”.  The song, a minor hit, is a playful, tongue-in-cheek take on a heartbroken narrator who is lamenting a failed romance, using the whimsical imagery of bananas, peanuts, and a coconut tree to add humor. The full chorus goes:

Peel me a 'nanner, toss me a peanut, I'll come swingin' from a coconut tree
Peel me a 'nanner, toss me a peanut, you sure made a monkey out of me. 

 

I mention this because this week I’m going to talk about bananas, and I can’t stop humming the damn tune.  This is probably an early warning sign for the onset of dementia.

 

With apologies to both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Chiquita Banana Lady, bananas are not native to either Africa or Central America.  Bananas originated in Indonesia and quickly spread across Asia and Africa along trade routes.  By the 16^th century, the Portuguese had introduced the fruit to Central and South America, where bananas became an important food source since the fruit grows year-round and is easy to spread.

Bananas were not available in the United States until the last decades of the 19^th century because even if the fruit was picked before it was ripe, it would ripen and spoil before it could reach the consumer.  Finally, by the 1870s, with the use of railroads and steamships, green bananas could be picked and rapidly shipped to American ports, the fruit ripening during the trip.  It didn’t take long before the entire process had been  standardized into a well-oiled machine that was controlled by large corporations like United Fruit and Standard Fruit (which later became Chiquita and Dole).

 

Since Americans almost exclusively consume only one variety of yellow banana, it might come as a shock for you to learn that there are approximately a thousand varieties of bananas and that bananas come in almost every color from red to gold and from blue-green to black.  Long ago, the banana importing companies decided to specialize in one variety—the yellow Big Mike (Gros Michel) banana—because it ripened relatively slowly, and had a thick resilient peel, which protected it from bruising during long sea voyages to Europe and North America.  Its dense, large bunches facilitated efficient shipping, and its sweet, creamy flavor and firm texture made it appealing to consumers.  To consumers on both continents, the Big Mike was the banana.  

 

Plantations specialized in the Big Mike, and shipping boxes were built to accommodate their size.  Cargo ships were built to precise specifications to accommodate those boxes and to keep the cargo holds at precisely 55 °F—the temperature that keeps a green Big Mike from ripening from three to four weeks.  After the bananas were unloaded, special processing warehouses would expose the still green bananas to a mild amount of ethylene gas at 63 °F that would rapidly ripen them, turning them into the yellow color consumers expected.  (If your banana is still too green to eat, you can ripen it overnight by putting it in a paper bag with an apple or a tomato.)

 

Everything was perfect…until in the 1950s, when a soil fungus called, “Panama disease” (technically Fusarium oxysporum, Race 1) began devastating Big Mike plantations in Central America.  When a disease shows up in most plants, the answer is to search for the few plants in the plantation that are resistant, then replant the field with the offspring of the resistant plants.

 

You can’t do that with bananas.  You see, all of the bananas you have eaten in your life were clones.  You may have noticed that the bananas you eat are “seedless” (those little black specs you see are undeveloped seeds that can’t germinate); all the banana plants are cuttings—technically pups—from another banana plant.  Genetically, all the Big Mike banana trees are the same plant, so if one of the plants is susceptible to the fungus, they all are.

 

You can imagine the panic in the boardrooms of Chiquita and Dole.  Stopping the spread of the fungus across Central and South America was (and still is) impossible.  The companies spent a small fortune convincing us that their long yellow fruit was the perfect thing to slice up and put on our cornflakes, so it was going to be a little difficult to now convince the public to switch to a short red fruit that they claim is a banana.

 

Fortunately, there was a similar variety of banana, the Cavendish.  It was about 10% smaller, and the bunches were about a third smaller, but it would fit in the boxes, ripen the same, and most importantly—it was yellow.  If you didn’t know better, you could mistake a Cavendish banana for a Big Mike…At least until you ate it.  The Cavendish banana is not as sweet as or as creamy in texture as Big Mike and it is much milder in flavor.  Anyone who has eaten both will tell you that the Big Mike is a much better banana.

 

Unfortunately, grocery stores in the United States stopped selling the Big Mike by 1960.  I know I ate bananas in the 1950’s, but I don’t remember it.  But, in the 1990’s, I found a specialty shop in San Pedro Sula, Honduras that sold long fat Big Mike bananas.  Boy, is there a difference.

 

Now that the Cavendish is literally the top banana—there is a bit of a problem.  These bright yellow beauties, which we’ve all munched for decades, are now facing their own extinction, under assault by a new strain of Panama disease, (Fusarium oxysporum Tropical Race 4)—a fungus with a flair for drama.  It’s like a bad comedy plot where the star keeps tripping over the same banana peel!  This soil-dwelling troublemaker clogs the banana plant’s roots, turning lush green leaves into sad, wilted props, and it’s spreading faster than gossip at a garden party.  And once again, since Cavendish bananas are clones that are all genetically identical, they’re like one big, unhappy family with zero immune system variety.

 

Scientists are scratching their heads as they race to save the day.  They’ve tried everything from funky soil treatments to breeding new banana buddies, but the Cavendish just pouts and says, “I’m too pretty to change!”  Some suggest a wild banana remix—think funky flavors and colors—but good luck convincing the world to swap its morning smoothie staple.  It could happen, all the bananas shown at left are real.  Meanwhile, farmers are doing a hilarious dance, rotating crops and praying for a miracle, and banana companies, like Chiquita and Dole, are probably sweating bullets behind their corporate smiles.

 Barring a scientific breakthrough, it is likely that, in the next few years, we will see an extensive advertising campaign trying to convince us that a banana doesn’t have to be yellow.  Or alternatively, that the new and improved yellow banana that tastes like wet cardboard is better for you.