A spill wiped up with a kitchen apron led to guncotton
Around 1846 the chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein spilled nitric and sulfuric acid on his kitchen table in Basel. He mopped it with a cotton apron and hung it on the stove door to dry. Once dry, the apron vanished in a flash. His recipe became the first widely used way to make guncotton.
Others had come close. Henri Braconnot made a combustible substance from starch or wood fibres and nitric acid in 1832, and Théophile-Jules Pelouze, who taught Alfred Nobel, treated paper the same way in 1838. In 1846 a Brunswick professor, F. J. Otto, independently produced guncotton and published first, to the dismay of Schönbein and his collaborator. That same year collodion, a solution of the substance in ether and alcohol, was already being used to dress wounds.
Industrial production proved perilous. A factory at Faversham in Kent began making guncotton in 1847, with little understanding of the chemistry, and a serious explosion followed. Unwashed material could hold leftover acid that made it ignite on its own at room temperature. Frederick Augustus Abel patented the first safe method in 1865, stretching washing and drying to 48 hours repeated eight times. Guncotton generated about six times the gas of an equal volume of black powder, with less smoke, and Jules Verne used it to fire a projectile at the Moon in fiction.
The same chemistry built early plastics and photography. Alexander Parkes made Parkesine, the first human-made plastic, in 1855, and John Wesley Hyatt improved it with camphor into Celluloid. Frederick Scott Archer's wet collodion process of 1851 bound light-sensitive silver onto glass plates.
Today it turns up in nail polish, guitar and furniture lacquers, table tennis balls, laboratory membranes and magicians' flash paper, which burns with no ash. In space it disappointed: in 2014 the Philae comet lander's harpoons failed because 0.3 grams of nitrocellulose charges did not fire.
Source: Nitrocellulose
