JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Shells as far as the eye can see, at the National Filling factory at Chilwell, Nottinghamshire. Even though I enjoy calculating estimates at vast quantities of things (like all of the life that has existed on Earth, from multi-cellular onwards, how many Legos it would take to build a Dyson sphere around our Solar System, what distance the Enterprise has covered under the command of Capt Picard, that sort) I really can’t get a comfortable picture of the vastness of this factory to estimate the number of pounds of explosives under that roof.
Given that the factory produced about 19 million shells during WWI, I think it would be a safe guess that some 1 billion pounds of explosives were processed through the factory–and perhaps several billion. But it is difficult to say what we are looking at in these photos, except to say that the number is “big”.
[Source” John Hughes-Wilson, The First World War in 100 Objects, Firefly Books, 2014.
[“Female munitions workers guide 6 inch howitzer shells being lowered to the floor at the Chilwell ammunition factory in Nottinghamshire, U.K.”–Source: “British official photographer : Nicholls, Horace – This is photograph Q 30040 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums.”]
[Source: http://www.iwmprints.org.uk/image/1100193/milner-e-the-interior-of-the-filled-shell-store-at-the-national-shell-filling-factory-at-chilwell-nottinghamshire-15-may-1917]
[Source: http://www.iwmprints.org.uk/image/1100192/milner-e-shells-awaiting-filling-with-explosives-in-a-store-of-the-national-shell-filling-factory-at-chilwell-nottinghamshire-21-november-1916]