What if: Napoleon's Dynamite (was replaced with picirc acid)?

This POD is inspired by the thread Napoleon's Dynamite.

How would a similar, story play out with pricric acid , also known as 2,4,6-trinitrophenol (TNP) instead of Dynamite?

In OTL Peter Woulfe (1727 – 1803) an Irish chemist and mineralogist, reported in 1779, the formation of a yellow dye when indigo was treated with nitric acid. He was also apparently really into alchemy. Now lets say he used the newly discovered TNP in his alchemical research and discovered that TNP plus lead gets you Lead picrate. Its first historical use was actually as an alternative of fulminate in percussion caps. Now here fulminate is discovered as OTL in 1800. This should give Lead picrate. a little headstart.

Woulfe did publish his findings in OTL/ITL in french which should allow Lavoisier to notice them. Roughly at the same time Antoine Lavoisier was in charge of the French Gunpowder Commission.
He took over this duty in 1775 when he was made one of four commissioners of gunpowder appointed to replace a private company, similar to the Ferme générale. The private venture had proved unsatisfactory in supplying France with its munitions requirements. As a result of his efforts, both the quantity and quality of French gunpowder greatly improved, and it became a source of revenue for the government. His appointment to the Gunpowder Commission brought one great benefit to Lavoisier's scientific career as well. As a commissioner, he enjoyed both a house and a laboratory in the Royal Arsenal. Here he lived and worked between 1775 and 1792.

So this discovery falls in the height of his explosive activity. Now lets say he starts a systematic, well funded picrate salts. He not only finds that most of them are somewhat explosive but that piciric acid itself, under the right circumstances (activated by a first step explosion) explodes itself. The great thing about priric acid is that it is usually pretty inert, without this outside influence. It can also be cheaply mass produced once people find out that you can substitute indigo with phenol. Both the factors made pricric acid a successful dye before it became a weapon.

Now with this stuff out of the way. How would/could play things out?

Source:
All information is taken from wikipeda article (English and German)
 
Could you dumb it down a bit? Leave the chemistry. I studied chemistry, but the English terms mean nothing to me.
France gets better gunpowder. How does it compare to the OTL gunpowder? Why is it better?
 
It's not 'better gunpowder', it's something like smokeless powder WAY early, or, at worst, percussion caps a generation early.

Were phenols available in tonne lots? Because if you're going to use this as a 'gunpowder' equivalent, you're going to need it in those quantities.

But, yes, this is a fascinating PoD, and I'm surprised no one else has jumped on it.

We've had lots of 'WI Guncotton invented early' kinds of threads, but they all founder on the necessity for ultra pure acids, otherwise your nitroglycerine or guncotton or whatever, goes off when you look at it funny.

If picric acid is middling stable, that changes everything.

IF you can make it in quantity.
 
It's not 'better gunpowder', it's something like smokeless powder WAY early, or, at worst, percussion caps a generation early.

Were phenols available in tonne lots? Because if you're going to use this as a 'gunpowder' equivalent, you're going to need it in those quantities.

But, yes, this is a fascinating PoD, and I'm surprised no one else has jumped on it.

We've had lots of 'WI Guncotton invented early' kinds of threads, but they all founder on the necessity for ultra pure acids, otherwise your nitroglycerine or guncotton or whatever, goes off when you look at it funny.

If picric acid is middling stable, that changes everything.

IF you can make it in quantity.
As a chemist I can say that picric acid is way easier to produce than TNT. Nitric acid with phenol can get you to DNP pretty rapidly and a little additionnal acid (sulfuric or more concentrated nitric) is all you need to reach the picrates.
Nowadays Phenol is synthetized by oxidation of cumene by H2O2, but this is a fairly recent method of synthesis. Impure phenol was first synthetized from bitumen by distillation according to Wiki. Since France has lots of coal especially with the Austrian Netherlands, this should not be a problem.
However, phenol was not made pure until the 1840s. This will complicate a bit the whole shebang but not much.
 
It's not 'better gunpowder', it's something like smokeless powder WAY early, or, at worst, percussion caps a generation early.

As far as I understand it your are correct. For general clarification I found this tibbit form wikipedia helpful:

"In engineering applications, deflagrations are easier to control than detonations. Consequently, they are better suited when the goal is to move an object (a bullet in a gun, or a piston in an internal combustion engine) with the force of the expanding gas."

Detonations of higher explosives like TNT, picric acid and dynamite on the other hand just happen too fast and too violently to be used in guns. So it is probably not useful as a gunpowder itself.

However there is some diffrent kind of potential.

Low and Sulfur free Black Powder

There is the interesting fact that technically sulfur's main role in gunpowder Saltpeter/Charcoal/Sulfur) is to decrease the ignition temperature. For example working powder canlook like this: 100 parts saltpeter + 24 parts coal..

The first man, I am aware of, to systematically study the properties of low and zero sulfur gunpowder was Le Blond, Guillaume (1704-1781). However he and his contemporaries found the qualtity of such mixes rather lacking. An in depth description can be found in the link below, unfortunatly only in German.

Geschichte der Explosivstoffe Bd.2 (1896) / History of Explosives
Chapter I. Salpeterpulver mit verringertem Schwefelgehalt/ Black Powder with lower sulfur content.
http://archive.org/stream/Geschichte...21896_djvu.txt

and here

http://www.musketeer.ch/blackpowder/recipe.html

Once you have a very small lead pricrate explosion ingniting the powder you can leave the sulfur out.
 
Just an interesting little ancedote I found:

The australian dwarf palm Xanthorrhoea, was harvested in the past to make Botany Bay Gum. However just before the Great War, the gum was suddenly in demand by the Germans. It can be nitrated to make 246 trinitrophenol, or picric acid.

books

books


Source:
http://lateralscience.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/main-page.html
 
I'm not a specialist, but the rediscovery of picric acide and invention of Mélinite in the 1880s provided for a smokeless substitute to blackpowder.
That is an advantage with less powder wasted and also with more discretion, suprises, something Napoleon was adept of. Also, that could improve the range of artillery and the efficiency of siege guns and even naval guns ...
 

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Another interesting question is: what if Napoleon hired Robert Fulton to build a steamboat for him?
 
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