Today at the Hagley Museum we learned how gunpowder and black powder were made. Making the powders was fairly simple; the recipe consisted of sulfur, potassium nitrate, and charcoal. These compounds were ground together using large metal wheels, which weighed eight tons and were powered by a turbine that used water to provide them with energy. When learning about the powder mill, our tour guides taught us the importance of making the mill by a large enough, vast enough body(s) of water. The water served as the most efficient way of getting energy and was the easiest to re-route all over the mill. The whole powder mill got its energy from the water, and the best part is that the process didn’t hurt the water in any way.
While walking the two-mile stretch through the museum, we got to see dams put in place to divert water into smaller areas for easier collecting, water wheels, steam converters, old fashioned “extension cables” made from gears and pipes that were used to get water up hills or to other places a bit further away from the man-made rivers, and many other really cool sights. Near the end of our tours, we explored the area of the powder mill that was responsible for mixing and creating both types of powders and got to learn a bit of the history of why each powder mixing building/station was built and constructed the way it was.
Since gunpowder and black powder were highly explosive, there were quite a few explosions that happened at the powder mill. Many of the buildings impacted by these explosions, as we see at the museum, were left in ruin. About 288 explosions happened over a course of about 100 years — about three a year. Because of all these explosions, many workers came up with solutions to help decrease the amount of damage the explosions caused. They created three-walled buildings and flimsy roofs to help direct the explosions outwards to the river. Each wall was six or seven feet thick and many buildings were built into the hills to help improve the sturdiness of the buildings.
After each of our tours, we went back up to eat lunch before we began our fun construction activity. We were tasked to create windmill blades and test them to see whose could run the most efficiently and create the most wind power. There were five teams, and over a course of about 40 minutes, we got to let our creativity flow. After every team got to test their windmill blades, we saw that one team had 901 rotations/min. In the end, we all enjoyed our time at the museum and have many great memories to take back as we continue through this IL journey.