Drebbel, Cornelius

Drebbel, Cornelius Jacobszoon (1572-1633) Dutch inventor since about 1604 in London he designed and built telescopes and microscopes and he also built the first navigable submarine in 1620. 

Accdg to Davis (Ref 4, p 401) and Perez Ara (Ref 4, p 567), Cornelius Drebbel, die Dutch inventor and chemist of the 17th century, while being in the service of British Navy, devoted considerable time to the prepn of FG and used his material as a detonator in petards and torpedoes used in the English expedition of 1628 against the French port of La Rochelle... 

The history of silver fulminate is just as long as the history of mercury fulminate. It was probably also discovered by the alchemists Cornelius Drebbel and Johann Kunckel von Lowenstem in the seventeenth century [11, 26] even though some other authors mention BrugnatelU in 1798 [29, 35, 92] or Edward Howard a few years later [15, 35, 92, 93]. 

Credit for this innovation is attributed to Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604 -1670) in 1651, which is the earliest known reference to saltpeter (nitre), the other essential ingredient of gunpowder, as such a catalyst. Glauber s discovery may have been anticipated by the legendary inventor (noted for his woric on microscopes and the submarine) Cornelius Drebbel (1572 - 1633), who has been claimed to have built a plant to manufacture sulfuric acid, but there is no proof of this. 

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