The re-granulated powder sold after the Civil War was better quality, because it came from the captured Confederate powder works, instead of Du Pont. The confederacy was short of everything but powder. The Confederacy had the most advanced powder works in the world. Politically connected Du Pont made sure the Confederate powder plants were rendered unusable, so nobody could step in and ruin their virtual monopoly. The complaints after the rebel powder ran out eventually forced Du Pont to make better powder.
Hungry Horse
Not so. Some years back I ran into a man working on a book on the Confederate powder works. They had found actual plant records. Up until that point we had only what Raines had written on the plant.
The Confederate powder works simply followed the latest technology used in England at that time. the one change was in the preparation of the charcoal and sulfur mixture going into the wheel mills. Raines set up to steam the combined ingredients before using them in the wheel mills. That was based on the then idea that during the powder milling process you were impregnation the "pores" in the charcoal with the potassium nitrate solution. The idea of having to drive the saltpeter solution into the pores of the charcoal was standard writings up until I set up a simply show and tell experiment for the curator of industry at the Hagley museum. The simple fact is that the sulfur and charcoal particles are hydrophobic. meaning hates water. So the problem in the powder manufacturing is to insure an intimate physical contact between the particles in the finished powder. During the milling, or stamp milling, of the powder you are applying a shearing force on the particles. Necessary to strip away the very thin film of air that each minute particle covers itself with during the combining of all three ingredients.
My exhibit was simple. A large glass test tube with distilled water in it. Then add the ground charcoal, or sulfur into the tube. Neither would disperse or sink in the water. If you pushed it down with a glass rod the mass simply formed a huge air bubble around the mass. Classic hydrophobic behavior. Then a rubber stopper with a piece of tube was used to seal the test tube. Then slowly draw the air out of the tube. A point is then reached where there is not enough air for the ingredient particles to use as a cover. The charcoal, or sulfur, particles then disperse and slowly sink to the bottom of the tube as individual particles that cling together.
What Raines steaming did was to prevent the formation of an air film encapsulating the individual particles. This allowed Raines to reduce the milling time required that would be normal without steamed powder. But it did nothing in any way to change the performance of the finished powder.
At the end of the civil war there were no large stocks of powder from that plant to be found. The plant had a very limited production capacity. Getting raw materials other than charcoal had always been a problem. Cave saltpeter (calcium nitrate) converted to potassium nitrate was limited in amounts produced. The Confederate powder works still depended on getting saltpeter through the blockade from England.
