Great Junk Creators–Gunpowder Guy

Yes, this is going to be another tribute to a junk creator somewhere in history.

Here’s to the man who decided that bat guano (yes, the above picture is, indeed, bat droppings–notice the interesting similarity to mouse droppings) was more than just defecation or cave wall spackle. He certainly wasn’t the first–the Chinese beat western civilization, hands down (I mean, they had grenades while we were still bashing each other with swords in the middle ages…). And he certainly wasn’t the last–but he saw a junk creation opportunity (and who can pass one of those up, I mean, come on!) and he took it.

In a Wikipedia article, “Gunpowder” (the source for this information was apparently a much longer, and harder to read article found here, –or paste this: http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/tech/cannon.htm–trust me, the Wikipedia is easier to read) bat guano, thanks to whoever decided it was worth something, was used for a long time to make explosives for the United States:

In the United States, saltpetre was worked in the “nitre caves” of Kentucky at the beginning of the 19th century…Tourists at Mammoth Cave, KY to this day are shown the vast deposits of bat guano, as well as the historic machinery use in its extraction and conversion to usable saltpetre for gunpowder from Revolutionary times right up to World War I.

While I did not find a specific junk creator credited with first using bat guano, I did find this excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Saltpeter or paste:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltpetre (Saltpetre for you British and Canadian readers…assuming anyone read this post after they saw the image…)

Potassium nitrate could also be harvested from accumulations of bat guano in caves. This was the traditional method used in Laos for the manufacture of gunpowder for Bang Fai rockets.

So, making use of bat fecal deposits caught on, and (just like it always has) junk creation gave people something useful from something other people would throw away or avoid.