Roger Bacon knew about gunpowder roughly 200 years before Europeans started shooting each other with it in any serious organized way. That gap between "someone wrote it down" and "someone built a weapon around it" is one of the more interesting stretches in firearms history — and it's easy to forget how much institutional friction sat in the middle of it.

We have an example of these things in that children's toy which is made in many parts of the world... From the violence of that salt called saltpetre [together with sulphur and willow charcoal] so horrible a sound is made by the bursting of a thing so small... exceeding the roar of strong thunder, and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning.

He's describing a firecracker. Not a projectile. Not a weapon. Just a loud bang and a flash — and he's documenting it the same way you'd document anything else worth understanding. That's basically the same instinct that gets a shooter taking notes at the reloading bench when something unexpected happens with a new powder charge.

The proportions supposedly decoded—a 7:5:5 ratio of saltpeter to charcoal to sulfur—produce a mixture with roughly 41% nitrate content, which is too low to be explosive, burns slowly, generates heavy smoke, and would fail to ignite inside a gun barrel.

The cryptogram theory got torn apart by actual chemists, not just historians. Forty-one percent nitrate content isn't going to push a ball down a barrel — anyone who's messed with black powder loads knows the oxidizer ratio is doing the heavy lifting, and you need it right. The fact that six or seven separate researchers independently called this out over decades should probably have killed the theory, but here we are.

He had to borrow money from friends, pawn goods, and write in secret from his own superiors.

The man pawned his belongings to write what became the oldest recorded gunpowder recipe in Western history — and he wasn't even trying to write about gunpowder. He was building a case for reforming university curriculum. The firearms connection was almost incidental to the larger project, which is a strange thing to sit with.

A lot of us have an idea of how knowledge about guns and ammunition moves — forums, gun shops, word of mouth at matches, YouTube at 11pm. What's the most useful piece of shooting knowledge you ever picked up from an unlikely or unexpected source?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team