Word: nitric
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Last week the Gopher Ordnance Works was in rush-rush production, making nitric acid for much-needed gunpowder...
...great 18th-Century British chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish (discoverer of nitric acid, the chemical composition of water, etc.) was so unsociable that he "was known to flee from a company of strangers uttering a queer cry like a frightened animal"; he was also so unworldly that when asked for a handout for a sick employe, he offered...
Unlike TNT, which calls for ammonia, sulfuric and nitric acids and toluene, hexamine requires no critical materials. Its basic raw ingredients are coke, air and water. Total production in U.S. in '1941 was 4,000,000 lb. New factories built since then have multiplied that output many times. But before war came, hexamine was a minor industrial product. Its chief uses then were in the manufacture of plastics and as an ingredient in an antiseptic for the urinary tract...
Under older methods, nitrocellulose (made by treating cotton or wood fibers with nitric and sulfuric acids) is forced through "macaroni" machines, chopped into grains of various sizes. This smokeless powder is necessarily handled dry in many stages of its manufacture, and in large quantities...
Essentials of the complicated new process for extracting the vanadium: the phosphate rock is dissolved in sulfuric acid; then nitric acid is added to precipitate the vanadium in powder, then cake form. This will be marketed to alloy-steel makers as vanadium pentoxide...