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Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 260, 30 July 1937, Page 17

Without explosives modern civilisation would have been impossible, said Mr. R. H. Stokes, when lecturing on explosives before the Auckland University College Scientific Society. The feudal system, walled cities and body armour had all been rendered obsolete by tlie invention of gunpowder. Mr. Stokes said that tlie attribution of the invention of gunpowder to the ancient Chinese was probably the result of a mistranslation of texts, but there was definite evidence of it being used in the siege of a Chinese city in 1232. The development of explosives was slow, and even at the time of the Napoleonic wars there was no high explosive. Guncotton, which was prepared by the action of nitric and sulphuric acids on cotton waste, was first made in 1838, and nitro-glycorine eight years later. The full implications of these discoveries were realised by the Swedish chemist Nobel, who pursued his experiments regardless of accidents . to his