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Paul Vieille: The French Chemist Who Made Smokeless Powder Work

admin · 2026-03-16T23:03:53.126Z

Most shooters who handload have spent time thumbing through an IMR powder chart without giving much thought to where that whole family of powders came from. The answer traces back to one French chemist in a Paris government lab in the early 1880s — and it's worth understanding what he actually solved. Load it into a gun and you didn't have a propellant — you had a pipe bomb. That's not dramatic writing, that's accurate. Nitrocellulose had been sitting there since 1846 — nearly four decades ...

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Paul Vieille: The French Chemist Who Made Smokeless Powder Work

Paul-Marie-Eugène Vieille was born on September 2, 1854, in Paris, France, and died there on January 14, 1934. In a working life spent largely inside a government laboratory, he solved one of the central technical problems of 19th-century warfare: ho

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