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Entry 105 of 240Invention

The Discovery of Gunpowder

c. 850 CE/East Asia/Tang China
Today Tang ChinaSpan Tang dynasty · 618–907 CE

Chinese alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality instead stumbled on its opposite: gunpowder, a mixture that would go on to kill more people than any substance in history. For centuries the Chinese used it mainly for fireworks and simple bombs, but the recipe crept along the trade routes, and in European and Ottoman hands it became the cannon and the gun. Gunpowder would eventually shatter the medieval order of knights and castle walls — the same kind of rupture the atom bomb would one day be.

◆ Worth knowingGunpowder was invented by people seeking a potion for eternal life — one of history's darkest ironies — and early Chinese manuals warn alchemists that mixing these ingredients had a nasty habit of burning down their beards and houses.
◆ The mechanismMilitary-technological disruption

A weapon or tactic upends the prevailing balance of power and renders an old defensive or offensive order obsolete.

Also: Trade-route shift

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