72 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020
IR
A^ BLOCK/^
NATIONAL^ GEOGRAPHICIMAGE^ COLLE
CTION^the handle of the passenger-side
door. “BEHIND YOU.”
My brain shrieked: Black
powder is impact-sensitive.
We are a bomb.
I hit the brakes and we
came to a heated stop
several feet from the
crash. The truck behind
me was so close I could
see the wide-eyed fear
in the driver’s eyes in my
rearview mirror.
He should have been far
more terrifi ed.SEVERAL DAYS LATER, I drove
cautiously over the red dirt paths
crisscrossing Pitt Farm. Crouching in the
long grasses at the end of the pier, I tightened
the small access panel that shielded the interior of
our six-foot test submarine from splashing water.
I had christened it the CSS Tiny, and stenciled the
moniker onto its stern.
I’d been struggling with a problem: It wasn’t my
fi rst day at the pond, and throughout our testing,
the gauges I was using would work fi ne when we
tested them beforehand but failed inside the boat
during the test. The readings still didn’t make sense.
Some degree of pressure transmission through the
hull was almost inevitable.
After one of these failures, I asked the undergrad
helping me to hit the bow with a rubber mallet to
help me test the gauge. Unfamiliar with nautical ter-
minology, he brought the mallet down squarely on
the stern instead. I stared at him for a moment, pro-
cessing the realization that not everybody knew the
diff erence between bow and stern.
Then I had my eureka moment.
I grabbed the mallet and smacked the bow hard.
The pressure reading inside the boat jumped. I hit
the stern. Nothing. I understood then why the inter-
nal gauges kept failing: They could only read pres-
sure waves traveling from one direction. They were
facing the bow and wouldn’t read pressures coming
from any other direction.
I had assumed, because the charge was attached
to the ship’s bow, that much of the pressure would
naturally transmit from that direction. It turned
out it was coming in from another direction, and I’d
been missing it because I had pointed my gauges the
wrong way.
Once I realized what was wrong, I borrowed a
new set of underwater gauges from other Navy
engineers—and these gauges were omnidirection-
al. That meant they could measure waves coming
from any direction. The new gauges worked like40-foot sub, so while I didn’t
plan to sink it, if something
unexpected happened, the
boat would be easy to re-
trieve. Bert was worried
about the pond’s fi sh sur-
viving the blasts. I told
him that fi sh are surpris-
ingly robust, because fi sh
don’t have bubbly lungs that
would halt the blast wave and
tear apart. Unless they tried to
eat the charge, they should be
fi ne. Bert nodded, then gestured
through the kitchen’s sliding door to-
ward the silver pickup truck outside.
“Well,” he said, “let’s drive out there and see if
the pond has got what you need.”
The pond was beautiful, both in the traditional,
picturesque sense and also in terms of my scientifi c
perspective. “It’s all yours if you think it’ll work for
what you need,” Bert said, watching me sidelong as
we stood on the wooden pier, looking out over the wa-
ter. I tried to suppress my joy and instead just fi rmly
shook his hand.
“It’s perfect. Thank you.”
NICK DECIDED HE WAS UP for a lengthy drive to
a mysterious munitions warehouse deep in the
country. Brad Wojtylak, an agent with the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, had
called ahead so I could legally buy black powder in
bulk. The warehouse was full of industrial shelving
stocked to the brim with powder, ammunition, tar-
gets and security boxes aimed at helping doomsday
preppers bury and hide their gold and bullets. We
carefully lodged 20 pounds of freshly purchased
black powder—the maximum amount permitted in
one vehicle—in the trunk of my little Pontiac.
We were on the highway heading east when the car
in front of us started spinning in erratic circles. I nev-
er saw what caused the accident. Something sparked
the coupe two cars forward to hit the concrete barri-
er that divided our left-hand lane from westbound
travelers. The coupe begun to turn doughnuts down
the highway, catching the front end of the next vehi-
cle in the line, metal and plastic and glass fl ying off
like whirling shrapnel.
A moment before the chaos, I had noticed in the rear-
view mirror the grille of a massive truck pressed nearly
up against us, and now my eyes were glued to the mir-
ror despite the rapidly shrinking distance between us
and the melee ahead. Nick had the same thought I did,
and spoke only two words while digging his fi ngers into
Hunley Cmdr.
George Dixon
died with this
coin in his pocket.
Two years earlier,
the gold piece
had defl ected
a Union bullet,
so he had it
inscribed “My
life preserver.”The Hunley
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