Other Uses
Besides its use as an explosive, gunpowder has been occasionally employed for other purposes; after the Battle of Aspern-Essling (1809), the surgeon of the Napoleonic Army Larrey combated the lack of food for the wounded under his care by preparing a bouillon of horse meat seasoned with gunpowder for lack of salt. It was also used for sterilizing on ships when there was no alcohol.
Jack Tars (British sailors) used gunpowder to create tatoos when ink wasn't available, by pricking the skin and rubbing the powder into the wound in a method known as traumatic tatooing.
Christiaan Huygens experimented with gunpowder in 1673 in an early attempt to build an internal combustion engine, but he did not succeed. Modern attempts to recreate his invention were similarly unsuccessful.
Modern fireworks and firecrackers use gunpowder as lifting charges, but usually use flash powder for their bursting charge.
Beginning in the 1930s, gunpowder or smokeless powder was used in rivet guns, stun guns for animals, cable splicers and other industrial construction tools. The "stud gun" drove nails or screws into solid concrete, a function not possible with hydraulic tools. See Powder-actuated tool. Shotguns have been used to eliminate persistent material rings in operating rotary kilns (such as those for cement, lime, phosphate, etc.) and clinker in operating furnaces, and commercial tools make the method more reliable.
Near London in 1853, Captain Shrapnel (presumably a grandson of the inventor of the Shrapnel shell) demonstrated a method for crushing gold-bearing ores by firing them from a cannon into an iron chamber, and "much satisfaction was expressed by all present". He hoped it would be useful on the goldfields of California and Australia. Nothing came of the invention, as continuously-operating crushing machines which achieved more reliable comminution were already coming into use.
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