Which chemical element/compound is not included in gunpowder?

when in our early teens we made gun powder substituting sugar for charcoal; had a piece of bamboo to use as a tiny cannon to shoot small stones

quicksilver, I didn't know you could use sugar. Maybe my rockets would have worked with it.

Learned the formula when I was about 12. Spent a lot of time trying to launch tinfoil rockets with little success. My mother was suspicious when I wanted to buy potassium nitrate, sold in the grocery store back then, possibly as a diuretic. It also had a mythical reputation for being put in food for soldiers and prisoners because it supposedly reduced the male sex drive. I'm pretty sure that's what she was thinking of. I told her it was for an experiment with my chemistry set and she bought it for me. Don't tell anyone I'd taken a little bit from a jar earlier to test the formula :-)

Thanks, Mr. Spock!

Had to try and remember if it was Potassium nitrate or chloride but somewhere in my brain the right answer came out!

Aha. Very interesting And I'm first to comment