It is a dark and foggy night in the the 9th century. Antoine Laurent says to himself “Man I’m getting old.” He was 28 years old when he started looking for his elixir of immortality.He found a powdery substance and said “This is my breakthrough.” He was the only one to work on the elixir because he wanted it all for himself. He mixed it with charcoal and saltpeter. Antoine lit the mixture on fire thinking it would melt into a liquid,but it didn’t, the mixture got ignited at the strike of the flame. It exploded and burnt his hands, his face and then his house. Everything he worked on in the house gone it all went up in flames. His final words were “This is not an elixir of immortality this is an elixir of death” (Whipps 1). The elixir of death…show more content… He sent out on a quest to find an elixir of immortality.The man had no inventions to push him to discover the elixir. Besides the fact he was getting old. When he was looking for the elixir he came across a powdery substance. He took the powder home and mixed it with saltpeter and charcoal. What he didn’t know was the saltpeter provided oxygen to the mixture while the charcoal and the sulfur acted as fuels when ignited. He lit the concoction of powders and it exploded and lit everything on fire. He caught his hands, his face and then his house went up in flames too. He didn’t think anything would happen, but obviously it exploded and all of his work just up in the flames. He worked alone so that nobody could steal his idea and take all of the credit. If he had some helpers with him they may have had been able to get out and save most of his…show more content… All of the wars before gunpowder were hand to hand combat, they were in the medieval ages and it made exploration possible, because right after gunpowder was discovered the first magnetic compass was made (Carr 1). WuDi was the emperor of China when all of this happened and he wanted it all to himself. He wanted to keep gunpowder a secret until the 1100s. The secret got out a lot sooner than he wanted, it got out in 700 A.D (Gunpowder 2). When the secret got out everybody was trying to find different uses for it. Well “While China was observing farm animals they gave gunpowder to one of the animals that had malaria and it cured the animal” (Carr 3). All the traces of gunpowder almost got lost in 142 A.D but a man named Wei Boyang wrote down the mixture (Gunpowder 1). If he hadn’t written down the mixture and his house burnt down we might not know what gunpowder is today. People today say that “Gunpowder is the deadliest weapon before the atomic bomb” (Whipps 1). If gunpowder was never discovered Pearl Harbor would have never happened. Since it was discovered, market has really industrialized which means they have made factories and lots of them to produce gunpowder based products (Webster’s
