24
MARSHMALLOW MUZZLELOADER
Guns1 were the first machines to harness the power of combustion to make stuff go. If you want to do a little armchair international psychoanalysis, consider this: The Chinese discovered gunpowder around 800 AD and used it to make medicine and fireworks. Arabs and Europeans created their version of gunpowder about 500 years later and promptly built guns.
This Marshmallow Muzzleloader isn’t all that different from an internal combustion engine: A cylinder is filled with a mix of combustible vapor and air that, when ignited with a spark, drives a piston forward. In this case the cylinder is the chamber of our gun (see Figure 24-2), the fuel is breath spray, the spark plug is made from a camera flash, and the piston ...
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