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vulcan 5 (2017) 29-41 brill.com/vulc Fair Chance and not a Blunt Refusal New Understandings on Nobel, France, and Ballistite in 1889 Yoel Bergman Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel [email protected]; [email protected] Abstract Newly found documents demonstrate that Alfred Nobel’s 1887 patented smokeless Ballistite gunpowder was tested by the French Army in 1889, yielding unimpressive results. This and other technical reasons were the basis for final 1889 French rejection rather than political motives, as claimed by Nobel, repeated by an influential 1962 biography, and echoed on a current Nobel website. Nobel offered Ballistite to the French military in late 1887, but was refused by 1888 since the French smokeless pou- dre B of 1884 was already employed and Ballistite was considered erosive and unsafe to produce. However, letters from French officials (and the intervention of the French Minister of War) confirm that Ballistite was indeed tested by the French military in 1889. Ballistic results in the 8 mm Lebel rifle were unfavorable and this seems the final technical reason for the rejection, rather than French interests in promoting their supposedly inferior propellant. This case study highlights the question of balance be- tween technical and social history of military technology. The latter, examining social factors often ignored in various past military technological histories, have shown to shape inventions. In this case, though, the author of the influential Nobel biography has missed the complex technical history of the issue, relying on the personal and political for explaining the decisions. Keywords Nobel – Ballistite – Poudre B – smokeless powder Alfred Nobel filed his very first Ballistite patent in any country in Paris in late 1887. His attempts to market Ballistite in France following the approval of the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/22134603-00501003Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:39:43PM via free access <UN> 30 Bergman patent were reviewed by a few authors, resulting in the notion that France’s refusal to accept the new Ballistite in late 1887 to early 1888 was the final word on Nobel’s attempts in that country. Paul Tavernier, a renowned French pow- der engineer and historian provided a technical narrative. He wrote that Nobel was already late with Ballistite in 1888, since Poudre B, invented in 1884 in France, was already planned for adoption by the military. According to Taver- nier, Poudre B was also judged as less erosive to barrels than Ballistite since it contained only nitrocellulose, whereas Ballistite also contained the highly en- ergetic nitroglycerine. Handling the nitroglycerine during the manufacturing process also posed risk to personnel and equipment involved (Tavernier 1950, 245). In Erik Bergengren’s 1962 biography on Nobel, the final French rejection of Ballistite seems also to have been made soon after he received his 1887 patent: “The French gunpowder monopoly … to which Nobel first offered his patent, rejected it because they felt fully covered by their own product” (Ber- gengren 1962, 105). Both Tavernier and Bergengren did not indicate whether Ballistite was actually tested in any caliber by the French, as part of the rejec- tion, while Bergengren left the implication that it was rejected for economic/ national reasons hanging as the explanation. Nobel did however sign a contract with the Italian government in 1889 for the supply of Ballistite. Italy was seen as a rival to France and Nobel’s relation with the French public became strained. Bergengren writes: Thus it came about that the first government to accept Ballistite was the Italian. At Nobel’s direction, a large factory department was erected in Avigliana for its production and a contract for delivery of 300 tons was signed in 1889. Soon afterwards the Italian government wanted to acquire for itself the rights of manufacturing Ballistite, so Nobel li- censed his Italian patent to the government for the price of a half a million lire. As Nobel lived and worked in France, this action was not without its consequence of course. Influential people belonging to the French gun- powder monopoly’s administration had for a long time been following, with suspicion and ill-will, Nobel’s loud ammunition tests with mortars and rifles at a firing range rented from the state at Sévran-Livry. Ballistite was seen as a dangerous rival to the Vieille (Poudre B) powder, politics intervened and French passions were aroused. A violent press campaign was started against Nobel (Bergengren 1962, 106). The contract for supply with Italy was concluded as early as 1 August 1889 and on 16 September the patent acquisition agreement with Italy was signed. Downloadedvulcan from Brill.com09/28/2021 5 (2017) 29-4 01:39:43PM1 via free access <UN> Fair Chance and Not a Blunt Refusal 31 (Schuck & Sohlman 1929, 118). This implies that after mid-1889, re-examinations, either through field tests or other procedures were very unlikely. Likewise, re- examinations were unlikely to have been made between 1888 until mid-1889, since according to Bergengren, the ill-will towards Nobel has persisted for a long time. Bergengren’s one-sided account may have stemmed from his natural sym- pathy to Nobel, whom he quotes saying following the rejection that “for all governments a weak powder with strong influence is obviously better than a strong powder without this essential compliment” (Bergengren 1962, 106). This accusation seems to have been made following the final rejection of 1889, since Nobel complained similarly to the Russian Minister of War that in 1890 about the “inertia of the State (French) engineers with regards to my powder”. ( Bergman 2014, 48). The current Nobel Prize organization website presents a similar pro-Ballistite view (Lemmel, 1998). The complete rejection in 1887 and the total rift between Nobel and the French were first questioned after hearing the work of Patrice Bret, who had indicated that the final French rejection took place in 1889 (Bret 2002, 7). An- other indication came from a 1893 report by the inventor of Poudre B, Paul Vieille. He wrote that the he tested two Ballistite samples from Nobel during the 1880s, but without indicating the dates of receipt and tests (Vieille 1893, 362, 363). Since the samples contained the stabilizer aniline, I had previ- ously proposed that the samples were probably sent in 1889 (Bergman 2009, 45, 53). This would have been surprising, since it meant that Nobel was given an opportunity to be tested as late as 1889 and that the 1887 rejection was not fi- nal. But this was an estimate based on logical deduction, not textual evidence. More direct evidence came in late 2011 through the discovery of several letters concerning Nobel, France, and Ballistite from 1887–1890 which seem to rep- resent only a small part of the correspondence between the two sides during the period. These documents seem to have been unnoticed by Noble’s pr evious biographers Schuck and Sohlman (1929) and Bergengren (1962). One addition- al 1887 letter to Nobel found during this research does not concern Ballistit e directly, but underscores the high esteem in which Nobel was held by the French establishment at the time. Two other additional letters demonstrate Nobel’s ties with the Russian mili- tary on Ballistite, a fact also not found in past sources. (For Russian story, see Bergman 2014). One of these two letters was sent by Nobel to the Russian Min- ister of War on 31 August 1890 updating him on Ballistite’s progress in different countries. In it, he was trying to demonstr ate his success in marketing the new propellant, but actually reveald the difficulties he was finding with Ballistite in vulcan 5 (2017) 29-41 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:39:43PM via free access <UN> 32 Bergman Germany, France, and in Russia. With regard to France, Nobel wrote that the government had purchased some Ballistite for the use of the gun developer Gustave Canet, working at the time for a private company in southern France. My previous argument for that decision was that it was a French government initiative to help Canet, who was selling abroad, to compete with foreign sup- pliers that had already started using smokeless powders in their ammunition, since the French government was unwilling to sell Poudre B to the private sec- tor as late as 1889. Among the options that it offered in 1890 and 1892, was to manufacture Poudre B of a lesser quality or to manufacture Ballistite-like pow- der, without taking responsibility for the high erosion to the gun barrels that it attributed to Ballistite (Bergman 2014, 41–62). The letters between Nobel and the French military on Ballistite examined below, however, can explain the technical background as the main motive for Nobel’s rejection by the French government in 1889. The intricate story of France, Ballistite, Nobel and his agent Paul François Barbe in 1889 joins the story of Nobel, Italy, and Ballistite in the same year (Bergman 2011, 57–67) and shows that Nobel was at once an inventor, a shrewd entrepreneur, and an in- dustrialist (Lindqvist 2001, 17, 28), and far from being a political victim. In his article on “Why the social history of military technology,” Bart Hacker (2008, 1–2) argued that studies focusing only on the development and usefulness of a military technology, may miss very important questions on its social context. Indeed, in many cases social and cultural factors do affect military technological changes and these have often been overlooked in the past. The repercussions of the invention on the social side may turn out to be important in the construction of a comprehensive historiography.