Abstract
WE regret to record the death of Mr. Edgar Reginald Deacon on August 29. It may be recalled that during the early months of the Great War there was a serious shortage of high explosives; in particular, the supply of T.N.T. (trinitrotoluene) available was totally inadequate to meet the enormous requirements. It was early in 1915 that Deacon, whose province at the Research Department, Woolwich, had been the study of high-explosive munitions, made the suggestion that by mixing the available T.N.T. with ammonium nitrate it could be made to go much farther without loss of efficiency, a fact which he demonstrated experimentally. At the outset he suggested the mixture of equal weights of these materials, this mixture having the advantage that it could be filled into shell by casting in a manner similar to that hitherto used for lyddite. Within two months he had worked out the more difficult problem of preparing and filling a mixture of 80 parts of ammonium nitrate and 20 of T.N.T., which contained too much ammonium nitrate to be cast. This advance made it possible to fill five times the number of shell hitherto possible with a given weight of T.N.T.
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Mr. E. R. Deacon, O.B.E.. Nature 138, 578 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138578a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138578a0