标题：Rodney Carlisle, Powder and Propellants: Energetic materials at Indian Head, Maryland 1890-2001 Second Edition (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2002).
摘要：The title Powder and Propellants is slightly misleading. Rodney Carlisle has written an engaging business history of a little- noticed naval establishment, the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. This volume describes, not just the chemical formulations of gun and rocket propellants (which do appear in some detail throughout the book, helpfully defined in the extensive glossary), but also the strategic requirements, bureaucratic obligations, personal ambitions and community needs that shaped the establishment from its earliest days. Its anonymity was assured right from the start, when the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance established in 1890 its Proving Ground in Cornwallis Neck, a "quiet backwater" where guns could be test-fired without interfering with river traffic, but close enough to the factories at the Washington Navy Yard that "gun barrels could be loaded… in the morning, and arrive at the Indian Head dock by the evening of the same day" (pp. 8-9). Yet the roads and railways were so scarce that a telegram would take two days to reach headquarters, and the establishment was regarded as "so remote as to deserve hardship pay, like the Philippines" (p. 33). The earliest managers, junior officers like Robert Dashiell and Joseph Strauss, not only had to test the hundreds of guns, shells and powder lots required by the rapidly expanding U.S. fleet, they did so while literally carving a proving ground out of marsh and forest, recruiting a workforce from the farming communities nearby, creating a town where none existed (complete with post office and school), and along the way developing a series of improvements in breech loading mechanisms and smokeless gunpowder
