From experimental philosophers in England to workshop managers
in Korea, practitioners across the seventeenth-century world developed new ways
of investigating nature while studying saltpeter (potassium nitrate), the chief ingredient of gunpowder. Contrary to global histories that emphasize circulation,
however, this early modern convergence had less to do with the fluid movement
of knowledge and technology than with the very moments when such movement failed. This essay argues that in Chosŏ n Korea (1392–1910) the problem
of adopting a Chinese method of manufacture—a “thing that did not work”—
proved productive in unexpected ways. In the process of vetting the foreign knowledge, the Korean saltpeterers (artisans and military officers) discovered solutions
that suited the local conditions. They also established a mode of experimentalism
that used hands-on trials to investigate the natural world, drew on the artisanal
techniques of “experiment” (sihŏm) and “prototyping” (kyŏnyang), and operated
in two languages—the vernacular, hangŭl script and literary Sinitic.