Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

' 2’81 WHERE GUNPOWDER IS MADE. INNOCENT enough are the ingredients of gunpowder—saltpetre, charcoal, and sulphur. Everyone knows them and everyone can obtain them. Even school- boys purchase them, mix them together, and have—accidents ! Many a man is going about to-day bearing the marks—in the to the charge and lit it, expecting to have rabbit broth for dinner that day. It was his own face, however, that was nearly cooked. Another time a small box of gunpowder in pound canvas bags was put in a wash-house out of the way. A cat upset the box during the night, and part THE CHARCOAL FACTORY : CHARGING THE CYLINDERS. shape, it may be, of an absent finger, or indeed an absent hand, or damaged eyes, or something worse—of some youthful frolic with these simple and everyday substances. If schoolboys will have gunpowder to play with, they will be well advised if they altogether cease to make it themselves ; they will, however, be still better advised if they abolish it entirely from the category of their playthings. Grown people as well as boys are often guilty of under-estimating the danger attach- ing to the use of gunpowder. Not long ago a man put about a couple of pounds of powder into a hole that he had just seen a rabbit enter. He attached a fuse 36 of the gunpowder was spilt among some coal lying on the floor. Next morning the servant lit the copper fire, and an explosion occurred ; she was seriously burnt, and died three clays afterwards. She had shovelled up with the coal the spilt powder. Where- ever there is gunpowder there is danger— a fact that those into whose hands* it comes do not always seem to appreciate. If the general public are thus thoughtless, fortunately those engaged in the manufacture of the explosive are not. Ever present in their mind is a sense of the clanger that lurks around them, and everything they do is done subject to the observance of all the precautionary rules that knowledge and