PASTEUR DISTRACTED BY GUNPOWDER. “He pressed on, however, ordering a new fermentation apparatus with the hope that greater precision would clear up his problems. It arrived in June of 1789, but by that time his duties overseeing Paris’s gunpowder supply in the middle of rising civic unrest made it hard to get work done.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786