by Alfred Nobel as an industrial explosive, but even then it was unsuitable as a propellant: despite its energetic and smokeless qualities, it detonates instead of deflagrating smoothly, making it more liable to shatter a gun, rather than propel a projectile out of it. Nitroglycerine is also highly sensitive, making it unfit to be carried in battlefield conditions. A major step forward was the invention of guncotton, a nitrocellulose-based material, by German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 1846. He promoted its use as a blasting explosive and sold manufacturing rights to the Austrian Empire. Guncotton was more powerful than gunpowder, but at the same time was once again somewhat more unstable. John Taylor obtained an English patent for guncotton; and John Hall & Sons began manufacture in Faversham. English interest languished after an explosion destroyed the Faversham factory in 1847. Austrian Baron Wilhelm Lenk von Wolfsberg built two guncotton plants producing artillery propellent, but it too was dangerous under field conditions, and guns that could fire thousands of rounds using black powder would reach the end of their service life after only a few hundred shots with the more powerful guncotton. Small arms could not withstand the pressures generated by guncotton. After one of the Austrian factories blew up in 1862, Thomas Prentice & Company began manufacturing guncotton in Stowmarket in 1863; and British War Office chemist Sir Frederick Abel began thorough research at Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills leading to a manufacturing process that eliminated the impurities in nitrocellulose making it safer to produce and a stable product safer to handle. Abel patented this process in 1865 when the second Austrian guncotton factory exploded. After the Stowmarket factory exploded in 1871, Waltham Abbey began production of guncotton for torpedo and mine warheads. Improvements In 1863, Prussian artillery captain Johann F. E. Schultze patented a small-arms propellant of nitrated hardwood impregnated with saltpeter or barium nitrate. Prentice received an 1866 patent for a sporting powder of nitrated paper manufactured at Stowmarket, but ballistic uniformity suffered as the paper absorbed atmospheric moisture. In 1871, Frederick Volkmann received an Austrian patent for a colloided version of Schultze powder called Collodin, which he manufactured near Vienna for use in sporting firearms. Austrian patents were not published at the time, and the Austrian Empire considered the operation a violation of the government monopoly on explosives manufacture and closed the Volkmann factory in 1875. In