HMX was actually discovered on accident by a man named W. E. Bachmann. In 1940 Bachmann and another professor named John Sheehan developed an easier and more practical way of making another high explosive called RDX. Bachmann realized that whenever he made RDX using his new process there was always a byproduct. The byproduct happened to be HMX and soon enough Bachmann had figured out that his byproduct was also a very powerful explosive, more powerful in fact than RDX. Bachmann had to figure out the molecular structure of this new explosive in order to produce it, which took him 3 years. In 1943, when he figured out HMX's structure, Bachmann found a way to mass produce HMX by adapting his RDX making process. This allowed HMX to be put into military use where it has remained since. So far no useful properties of HMX, aside from its explosiveness, have been discovered.