I’ve found more fascinating US civil war stuff on IEDs. General Herman Haupt was a Union general and engineer with specific responsibilities for both repairing and destroying railways as the operational circumstances demanded. His reminiscences can be found in Archive.org. Here’s a description he makes of how to make and place an IED, (a torpedo, in the parlance of the time) and a picture of the said IED.
Here’s another interesting extract:
Depending upon your perception/definition it wouldn't really be "improvised" as this is a detailed, specific design. This would be similar to someone giving the recipe for C4 out and then saying that anyone who then used it was using an improvised explosive.
Agreed, its down to perception and definition. But I think how Haupt describes the components fits my definition of an IED – but very happy and comfortable if you disagree. Some modern IEDs are described in detail by the designer, in a similar fashion, and that goes back at least as far as Johann Most's anarchist devices described in his publications in the late 19th century, and probably earlier. If you made C4 from a recipe and initiated it somehow, I'd call that an IED. If you owned a manufacturing plant that created devices from a production line, I'd call that a munition. The boundaries are grey.