early as 1340, gunpowder had been produced in Germany. Clumsy blunderbusses too had been made, with bullets of stone and iron. The British won a battle with firearms, but they could not really shoot, winning merely by the sound of their guns. The invention has been attributed to a German monk, Berthold Schwarz. He is supposed to have ground a mixture of saltpeter, sulphur and charcoal in a mortar, whereupon the mortar exploded. Perhaps he was an alchemist whose avarice the Devil sought to cure in this manner, without betraying how much of the Devil the powder itself held. But, in the legend, the monk grasped the significance quickly and well, like his successor Nobel many years later, as peaceful a man as the monk. Around 1400, at any rate, other unknown inventors in Germany had built cannon and also small arms of bronze, loaded with bullets of lead—for a manuscript dated 1405, now in Göttingen, pictures them. Soon afterward a Frankish nobleman, in a work entitled Belliphents, the Sturdy Warrior, founded the literature of firearms. The fifteenth century was not yet over when the Germans had invented the lateral touch-pan, the matchlock, rifled barrels (in Vienna), the flintlock (in Nuremberg). A hundred years later the snaphance-lock was constructed by German gunsmiths.
Thus the Germans, at about the same time, dropped two decisive inventions into the swirl of world events, in an epoch of general crisis and change like that of today. Here were two manifestations of the German character, directed to the two aspects toward which it aspired. Savagery, revenge and lust for destruction drove the German to find a terrible means for attack. Thirst for knowledge, aspiration and common sense led him to the book. The new weapons of war and of the spirit issued from German hands at the same time.
They were soon to dash.
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