Flash and Blast

Anne Kelly Lane; David McMahon. Peril in the Powder Mills: Gunpowder and Its Men. West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2004. 111 pp. $18.95.

Reviewed by Christopher P. Munden.

When the Revolutionary War broke out in the mid-1770s, there were only a handful of gunpowder mills in North America. The revolutionary government was forced to import about 90% of its explosives from France, at great expense. Though more mills began production by the war’s end, the quality of gunpowder they produced was well below that of their European competitors. During a stay in the United States, E. I. du Pont as so disturbed by the low quality of American gunpowder that he returned to his native France determined to accumulate the finances and know-how to set up a mill in America. The mill he started on the banks of the Delaware River heralded the beginning of an important industry in 19th-century United States, one that was to have profound effects on the development of the modern chemical enterprise.

In their short book Anne Kelly Lane and David McMahon explore the workings of the gunpowder industry, with sections examining safety (a key concern, for obvious reasons), marketing, transportation, explosions, leading gunpowder companies, and important figures and families. The book is nicely illustrated with photographs, product labels, and advertisements. The text is well written and informative, but at times thin, repetitive, and inconsistently organized. Nevertheless, there is much of interest to a lay audience. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the gunpowder industry in the late 19th century: it reads like a history of the period’s corporate monopolistic practices. The key companies formed a gunpowder trust to fix prices and force competitors out of business, but many members of this trust were themselves subsumed by DuPont, whose 1876 purchase of major rival Hazard Powder Company was kept secret for a decade. Interestingly, it was the breakup of DuPont’s explosives monopoly during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration that forced the company to diversify into new areas of chemical manufacture—areas in which it would find great success.