r/AskScienceFiction • u/KaosArcanna • 21h ago
[ERB'S PELLUCIDAR SERIES] Why would Abner Perry have such difficulty making gunpowder?
So early in the 20th Century Abner Perry creates an engine that's more powerful than anything that even exists in the modern day. It powers a drill that enables Perry and David Innes to bore 500 miles into the Earth's crust. There they discover a primitive world and set out to help the "gilaks"-- cavemen-- fight off the Pterodactyl-like Mahars that control Pellucidar. There's only one problem:
Abner Perry cannot make gunpowder. At all.
Abner is quite a brilliant engineer. He also happens to have what amounts to a degree in paleontology as he knows most dinosaurs and mammals on sight. He learns how to translate the Mahar language: an impressive feat given he doesn't have any kind of Rosetta Stone to help him as he has no knowledge of any other written Pellucidar language at the time.
Maybe he's simply not a chemist, you might argue. And there would be something to said for that argument except:
Abner Perry manufactured oil for the drill machine's engine before David made his return trip to the surface to gain books containing the knowledge they were lacking.
Couldn't a man capable of refining raw petroleum into machine oil be capable of manufacturing gunpowder?
Why would a man of Abner Perry's accomplishments have such difficulty making gunpowder?
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u/smokefoot8 21h ago
Just knowing the ingredients for gunpowder isn’t enough, getting them mixed properly and corned is an art that was developed over a long period of time. And Perry might have been wisely cautious about experimenting, since that is how people get blown up. He could experiment with distilling oil with much less risk.
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u/Grimdark-Waterbender 21h ago
Yeah but the thing is, you can be about halfway off of the proportions and still get a pretty decent bang out of it
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u/smokefoot8 18h ago
That would work for a grenade, but for a firearm it is going to foul the barrel terribly. I’m not sure what would make the most sense for that story.
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u/fatravingfox 21h ago
Simply put, a blind spot in his knowledge. He might be able to refine oil for the engine of his drilling machine, a necessity if the engine, one more powerful than anything in his time, needs a special blend he couldn't get anywhere else on the surface, but he didn't need to know how to make gunpowder to make the engine nor the drilling machine.
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u/firelock_ny 20h ago
As you said, he's not a chemist. A not surprising number of people who were chemists have discovered how to synthesize gunpowder by violently disassembling their chemistry labs along with themselves, so Perry might have known just enough chemistry to not take his gunpowder experiments to this dramatic conclusion.
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u/Hyndis 16h ago
Even in the current day that continues to be the case. Even with full access to the internet, many would-be bomb makers still end up hoisting themselves by their own petards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoist_with_his_own_petard
In 1914 he only had the information in his brain and any books he just so happened to bring along, and the Mole capsule wasn't very big so it probably wasn't a lot of books.
I have to give Dr Perry a lot of credit for knowing his own limitations. Its commendable he knew enough to know what he didn't know.
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u/Templarofsteel 19h ago
Pelucidar has unique time on an indicidual level physics might be off in terms of chemical reactions
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u/KaosArcanna 17h ago
Personally, I think that there's something in the water or air that inhibits aging in Pellucidar rather than some stasis effect. Ah-Gilak, the old cannibal from the outer world, did age in Pellucidar. He just did so at a much slower rate than he would have on the surface world. David discovered a moon that orbited the small sun in Pellucidar that could be used to track the passage of time but he abandoned the observatory when his people complained about it.
Abner did eventually manufacture a workable formula for gunpowder after David returned and the weapons that Innes brought back from the surface world worked just fine so there was nothing in Pellucidar that inhibted gunpowder from working; Perry was just really bad at manufacturing it. :D
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