What's up with "gun cotton"? I dropped by Google Trends...
google.com
...to see what's hot today, and the top hot search is "gun cotton." So I looked up gun cotton:
Nitrocellulose (also: cellulose nitrate, flash paper) is a highly flammable compound formed by nitrating cellulose through, for example, exposure to nitric acid or another powerful nitrating agent. When used as a propellant or low-order explosive, it is also known as guncotton.
en.wikipedia.org
More on guncotton here...
usgennet.org
...where it says:
Guncotton has several advantages over gunpowder. In the first place, it ignites at a temperature of three hundred degrees, while gunpowder requires a temperature of six hundred degrees to ensure ignition. In burning or exploding it leaves no solid residue, and therefore does not foul a gun barrel. Also, it is quite smokeless. Again, while gunpowder does not keep well and is ruined by damp, guncotton can be kept under water without being harmed. Nowadays guncotton can be compressed into hard cakes and handled with perfect safety, provided ordinary care is taken. Its explosive powers are tremendous. For instance, if you hang a ring of small cakes of guncotton round the trunk of a big tree and fire them, the tree comes down as if a giant hand with a single blow of a monstrous axe had chopped through it. Guncotton can be detonated, even when wet, by using a small primer of the dry material, and this fact has led to the adoption of guncotton as a charge for torpedoes or for submarine mines.
Google's top "Hot Trends" are usually triggered by a news story, but I'm not finding anything about guncotton.
Anyway, it's probably nothing, but sometimes you just wonder.
Edit: "Gun cotton" has dropped to #2 search now, behind "Betty Broderick." It'll probably be off the list by tomorrow. |
