The history of explosives and propellants, also known generally as ‘energetic materials’, begins with the material known as gunpowder or black powder, whether the intended use was for civil applications such as rock blasting, military uses in demolition, shell filling (bursting charges) and construction projects, or military and civilian propellant charges for shotguns, pistols, rifles, or artillery. The individual inventor of black powder will undoubtedly forever remain unknown, but numerous writers such as Drinker (1878), Munroe (1888), Marshall (1915), and Davis (1941, 1943), have described what is known about its development and evolution: therefore, there will be no such discussion here. Suffice to say that until the discovery of nitrated explosive compounds such as nitrocellulose by Schönbein and Böttger (independently of one another) and nitroglycerin by Sobrero (all occurring in 1846), the only explosive available for any purpose was black powder.
The instantaneous release of energy from a relatively small volume of material can be viewed as an explosive event. This is achieved by changes in the chemical composition of the solid, liquid or gas, and the release of chemical energy. Depending on initiation conditions, charge geometry and chemical composition, this reaction can accelerate until a steady value (detonation) has been achieved, or decelerate (deflagration) and eventually die out. The distinction between true detonation and deflagration is not crucial at this stage, as both processes can lead to release of very large amounts of energy in a small fraction of a second. Most incidents involving dust or vapour cloud explosions (flour, sawdust, gasoline vapours, natural gas, etc.) involve only rapid combustion and not detonation. Most commercial explosives such as ammonium nitrate (AN)-fuel oil mixtures exhibit non-ideal behaviour, in that their sensitivity and severity of explosion falls off rapidly with decreasing diameter and lack of confinement. In this discussion, confined to condensed phase explosions, the words ‘detonation’ and ‘explosion’ are used synonymously and no distinction is made between commercial and military explosives.

IN both Great Britain and the United States the explosives industry has formed one of the most important nuclei round which the powerful chemical combinations now existing in these two countries have developed. A history of the British explosives industry, edited by E. A. B. Hodgetts, was published in 1909, under the direction of the Explosives Section of the seventh International Congress of Applied Chemistry; the present publication deals with the history of the explosives industry in the United States and Canada, and to some extent in Mexico and South America.