This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Steve Mursky.

The early years of the development of gunpowder it was known as the Devil's Distulate because of its seemingly sinister properties.

So what, where do those properties come from?

Well, they come from the three principal ingredients of gunpowder, which are sulfur, charcoal,

and salt peter, three naturally occurring materials, which

when combined produce something much greater than the sum of their parts.

Stephen Restler, he served 34 years in the US Army. than the sum of their parts. Stephen wrestler.

He served 34 years in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and retired as a Brigadier General.

He spoke at sea aboard a Scientific American cruise August 17th off the coast of Scotland.

His subject was how fortifications had to evolve once gunpowder was widely in use.

Wrestler revealed a little basic chemistry about the constituents of gunpowder and how they're represented in a familiar uniform.

Sulfur a mineral found in nature, yellowish or golden color, burns at a relatively low temperature and that made it

in a material of intense interest in the middle ages where alchemists were

constantly looking for magical properties of materials.

Sulfur seemed to be one of those materials that had magical properties

because it was a stone that burned and it burned at relatively low temperature.

Charcoal, the product of the combustion of wood, typically hardwood in an oxygen-starved

environment, produces pure carbon, but not just any old pure carbon, pure carbon with a very

fine microscopic lattice-like structure that actually turns out to be absolutely essential

to the functioning of gunpowder.

And then finally, the third and really in many ways the most important ingredient in gunpowder

and that's saltpeter, the chemical composition is actually potassium nitrate and it's a

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