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Essay On Gunpowder

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Gunpowder has been around for centuries, over millennium. How has gunpowder effected Warfare, and life as we know it? It could easily be argued that one of the most important inventions or discoveries in history has been gunpowder. Gunpowder permanently altered the way humans wage war. Gunpowder was to blame for the rise and fall of Empires (Schroder, M. 2012) The discovery of gunpowder was discovered in 850 A.D. by accident. Gunpowder also called black powder is considered the earliest explosive invented. The Chinese alchemists of the ninth century were considered to be a major force behind the early development of gunpowder. They first used the substance to treat skin diseases and to kill insects before people realized it would be …show more content…

2017). From there, the Moors and the Ottoman Turks created their own forms of firearms. The Moors fought the Europeans in Spain for control of the area, and not even a year after that war the first firearms were finished in Italy. Soon after that the first cannons began to appear, the earliest to appear was from the Turks, they created the bombard. Which were these huge cannon, bigger than one could imagine. The bombards would blow down castle wall this was one of the key weapons that caused the city to fall. With it, fell the recipe of another type of gunpowder, which was mostly used as an early form of flame thrower (Sammon, J. 2012). During the Mid-15th century gunpowder stared to get better. Austrians and the Spanish had begun to use pikes and guns together. This flexibility allowed them to experiment with muskets on the battlefield; one of the uses of them was muskets on the sides, and the pikes in the middle. It was believed that the pike was a superior killing weapon, and the muskets were only useful to scare the enemy. To counter the pike and musket formation, a form of carbine was invented. This was used by people on horseback. The use of horseback carbines was so useful; the use of the lance went extinct within 100 years (Pike, J. 2014). For a few centuries guns got slowly better, but no major progress was made. However, when Gustav Adolph came to

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