The first printed gunpowder formulae (Wujing Zongyao)
The Wujing Zongyao (Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques) is a military encyclopaedia of Song China, compiled under Zeng Gongliang and completed in 1044. In it, for the first time in print, gunpowder formulae are written down with the weights of the ingredients: saltpetre, sulphur, charcoal, plus resins, oils and arsenic compounds. Gunpowder here is still an incendiary: it fills bombs for throwing engines, fire arrows and smoke projectiles.
Before this book gunpowder lived in the workshops of alchemists and arsenals. A written recipe with proportions can be repeated without knowing the master.
Needham stresses the gap: the formula was printed two hundred years before the first mention of the mixture in the West, and when the mixture did appear there, no proportions came with it.
Why this date
reliable. The military encyclopaedia Wujing Zongyao was completed in 1044; Needham names it the first book in which gunpowder formulae appeared in print.
What it grew from
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First record of a saltpetre, sulphur and carbon mixture flaring up
prerequisite for · Confidence: high
The mixture found by alchemists around 850 is the same mixture whose formulae were first printed in a military encyclopaedia in 1044.
Link sources
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 7 (1986), 7
Without doubt it was in the previous century, around +850, that the early alchemical experiments on the constituents of gunpowder
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 8 (1986), 8
once the alchemists started mixing them in all possible combinations, gunpowder was sure to be found one day. If its first formulae did not appear in print until +1044
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 7 (1986), 7
Node sources
- Needham J., Ho Ping-Yü, Lu Gwei-Djen, Wang Ling. «Science and Civilisation in China», vol. 5, pt. 7: «Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic», Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 8 (1986), 8
If its first formulae did not appear in print until +1044