GUNPOWDER Gunpowder is the oldest of all explosives. It was used by the ancient Chinese, Arabs, and people of India first. But exact directions on how to make it were not known to the western World until 1242, when Roger Bacon of Oxford University, in England published a book in which he told the ways to make gunpowder. Today gunpowder is not used as much as more powerful explosives After Roger Bacon published his formula for gunpowder, Berthold Schwarz, a German monk, developed it as a practical explosive in the thirteen hundreds. Schwarz is said to have invented a firearm which exploded shells by th