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Devil's Porridge
Devil's Porridge was the name given to a mixture of nitroglycerin and gun-cotton used to produce cordite at HM Factory, Gretna, a World War I munitions factory, described as The largest factory in the world, which was located in southern Scotland, next to the Solway Firth, Dumfries and Galloway. The factory was nine miles long, and stretched from Eastriggs (Scotland) in the west, to Longtown (England) in the east.
The name was penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in a 1918 article following a visit to the factory, when he wrote "The nitroglycerin on the one side and the gun-cotton on the other are kneaded into a sort of a devil's porridge". The actual material was Cordite RDB (Research Department formula B), a mixture devised when acetone supplies ran low during World War I, limiting production of the more usual Cordite MD (MoDified). A high explosive, cordite is used by the military as a smokeless propellant in guns and rockets. The name follows the final appearance of the material, which is extruded into rods, similar to uncooked spaghetti, and then bundled. By varying the material geometry, the burn rate for different applications is easily controlled. See the cordite link below for a full technical description.
World War I began in 1914, by 1915 the British Army was suffering a severe shortage of shells. Distilled from wood, a limited resource, supplies of acetone needed for the production of cordite were running low. The problem was overcome by the adoption of a formerly neglected process which allowed acetone to be prepared using a fermentation process, using grain as the base material, and this led to the construction of HM Factory, Gretna to meet the Army's demand.
External links
- The Devil's Porridge web site and exhibition
- Scotsman article, October 14, 2005
- The Shell Scandal, 1915
Aerial views
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