Fanos Eugene Turpin
Fanos Eugene Turpin (c1848-1927)
1927 Obituary[1]
"The Late Mr. Fanos Eugene Tubpin.—The name of the French chemist Turpin, who died on January 24, at Pontoise, aged 79 years, is connected with melinite, the explosive which is essentially picric acid. But picric acid and its explosibility were known long before the French Army filled grenades with fused picric acid, according to Turpin’s French patent of 1885. Welter had obtained a very bitter acid substance, known as Welter’s Bitter or picric acid, about 1770 by treating silk and resins with nitric acid. The formula and identity of this substance, which was also used as a yellow colouring material, with trinitrophenol, prepared from carbolic acid, (phenol) were established by Laurent in 1843. Powders containing picric acid had already been described when Sprengel, and later Turpin, observed that picric acid was itself explosive. Turpin’s original melinite (called so because it stained everything yellow) was picric acid soaked with guncotton solution. Then Turpin used the acid alone, employing mercury fulminate and some crystals of the acid as primers. As picric acid was relatively stable, and could apparently be heated and burnt without exploding, if not in a confined space, the manufacture of melinite and similar compounds, known as lyddite in England, was not put under restriction. But several disastrous accidents happened, some during the war, the mass exploding after having burnt for a quarter of an hour or more, either because the gases evolved were confined, or because some of the very highly-explosive picrates had been formed. Thus, picric acid and picrates fell into disfavour, and Turpin himself, who tried, together with others, to make these explosives less dangerous, was discredited for a time in France, because some of his inventions were said to have gone abroad."