Standing Well Back
1710-1720

18th Century TPU, 19th Century Grave Robbers

I’ve blogged before about the use of flintlocks and other gun-lock mechanisms used as initiators in IEDs between the end of the 16th century and the middle of the 19th century.   Some recent digging has made me think that the integration of a timing mechanism with a flintlock mechanism was a widely used system, perhaps not regularly within an IED but widely enough that it’s use must have been well known, even if only as a potential initiation system.  Here’s some images of a couple of peculiar alarm clocks which I think make the point well. The operator sets a time on the clock which when reached released a spring loaded trigger on a flintlock.  A small amount of powder is then initiated which also ignite the wick of a candle which then by a linked spiring stands up in the box. These are I think from the period 1715- 1740 or thereabouts. Nowadays we’d call these a Time and Power Unit (TPU)

 

I have also found a “set gun” which attached a flintlock to a tripwire, used as a deterrent for both for both poachers and grave robbers. Here’s an image of one of these.

 

To be clear I’m not suggesting any of these are IEDs, just that such a mechanism could have been used at the time to initiate explosive devices.  The set guns were outlawed eventually but in 1878 an inventor, Mr Clover of Columbus, Ohio then came up with a “coffin torpedo” to deter grave robbers who opened a coffin with something like a shotgun cartridge, initiated by the opening lid.  “Torpedo” was the name given to IEDs at that time.

In 1881 a Mr Howell invented two “Grave Torpedos”, much more like IEDs and images from the patent application is shown below. These were much more like an American Civil War land mine, placed on top of a coffin with a plate above it, designed to be initiated when the grave robbers dug down.

 

 

These were effective – a grave robber was killed by the device and an accomplice wounded:

1580-1590

Things that have happened before

The press are pretty awful at describing any given terrorist attack as something “new”.  I hope this site and the blog posts associated with it show that very often there is nothing new under the sun.  Tactics, technology, targets all repeat themselves in one form or another, and history is forgotten time after time.  Partly this is because of the “shock” affect of terrorism, which can indeed be stunning, and partly because people (journalists and politicians included) are lazy.

In an effort to counter these, as readers of previous blog posts will have seen, I research and collect early examples of certain kinds of improvised explosive devices, It’s time to summarize a few here, some  of which I’ve written about before and otehrs I will write about when time permits.

a. Letter bombs – I have details of letter bombs from 1581 (Poland) and this one from 1764 (Denmark). A Colonel Poulsen, living in Borglum Abbey, received a box through the mail. “When he opens it, therein is to be found gunpowder and a firelock which sets fire unto it, so he became very injured”

  b. Vehicle bombs. The Wall St bombing in New York in 1920 is often wrongly cited as the first.  There was a famous vehicle bomb in Yildiz, Turkey in 1904 and the attempted assassination of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1800, in Paris using a vehicle bomb. The concept was well known and various designs were circulated in military documentation much earlier. I’ve got some copies of those diagrams.

c. IED shrapnel coated in acid or anti-coagulant.  This was trumpeted as a new horrific tactic a few years ago – but the Stern gang attempted such techniques in 1942 (along with exceptionally sophisticated “come-on” tactics) in an assassination attempt on a British Palestinian policeman.  The tactical design of this attack is extremely interesting, very thorough, and I’ll post details in a few weeks.

d. Multiple VBIED attacks – attacks in Iraq ten years ago using multiple vehicles against a target such as a hotel were labelled as “new”. But British Army deserters used three trucks to blow up Ben Yehuda St in Jerusalem in 1948, each allegedly containing a ton of TNT and additional material. Their intended target was a hotel. I’m building a full post on this.

1770-1780

An American terrorist in England

A friend of mine asked me my opinion on the most significant terrorist attacks in history. Here’s one which had pretty significant implications.

“John the Painter ” aka James or John Aitken, aka Jack the Painter, aka John Hill aka James Hinde was born a Scotsman but adopted America as his cause.  A petty, and not so petty, criminal he made his living as a painter and clearly his daily dealing with turpentine and flammable liquids prompted a thought.  He was also seized with enthusiasm for the cause of Independence for America, having arrived there in 1775. He became a prototype lone wolf terrorist.

In 1776 he knocked on the door of the leading American diplomat in Paris, France, Mr Silas Deane, and with a little encouragement described a plot to set on fire the key naval dockyards in England, thus crippling the British Royal Navy. He showed Deane his incendiary device:

Producing a portable infernal machine of his own invention, he explained his scheme. The machine consisted of a wooden box to hold combustibles, with a hole in the top for a candle, a tin canister, no larger than a half-pound tea can and perforated for air, to cover it; the whole to be filled with inflammable materials—hemp, tar, oil and matches. The candle, having been lighted, would burn down until it ignited the inflammable materials, and these exploding would scatter the fire for yards around.  

Deane gave him a little encouragement and a little money and sent him on his way.  On returning to England, John the Painter successfully burnt down the Rope House at Portsmouth Naval dockyard. He also set a number of fires in Bristol.  This created the public impression that gangs of American revolutionaries were active in the country. The King himself offered a reward for his capture and demanded daily briefings.

 

In an early form of Weapons Intelligence Investigation a failed device of the same design was discovered in an adjacent building to the burnt down rope house and subsequently witnesses attested that John the Painter had had it made in Canterbury.   John the Painter was hunted, arrested and tried – the transcript of his trial is available on line in Cobbett’s State Trials.  The device is described very clearly on a number of occasions by witnesses. An intriguingly thorough trial even down to the calling of a witness from whom he had bought matches.

He was duly transported to Portsmouth where he was strangled at the gates to the Naval Dockyard then hoisted up the 64 foot mizzenmast of the HMS Arethusa [specially unbolted and placed on land for the occasion]  then they eviscerated his body, tarred it, hauled it back up the mast and left him to waft in the wind for years as a warning to all and sundry.

The mast was the highest gallows in England’s history. 20,000 people attended the execution (quite a number, given the population of Portsmouth was 13,000)

So, why was this so significant in its implications? Here’s why:

  1. The fires in Portsmouth and Bristol caused terror across England. Vigilante groups patrolled the streets of ports.  Thus the arson attacks really did terrorize the nation.
  2. The attacks turned the public opinion – there had been significant support for the American revolution, especially in Bristol, but this public support was turned on its head. Had this not occurred, and more negotiated independence may have been achieved. Who knows what that may have looked like?
  3. The public mood allowed the production of the 1777 Treason Act and for years after the death sentence for murder in the UK had been abolished in 1965, the death sentence was still permitted for treason, and explicitly included in the list of treasonous acts was arson in the naval dockyards.

 A newspaper of the time stated:

“Of all bad characters, an incendiary is the foulest. He acts as an assassin armed with the most dreadful of mischiefs, and in executing his diabolical purposes, involves the innocent and the guilty in the same ruin.” 

18th Century

Woosh, Bang, Ohnasty!

This is just a follow up to my last post.  I’ve been searching for more details of Emmet’s rockets and other IEDs in Dublin in 1803 . The more I read about Emmet’s uprising the more I see strong similarities between the current Syrian revolution and Dublin.

To get the current context, have a trawl through the “Brown Moses” blog here :

Note the current context of home made rockets and “DIY” IEDs being produced in workshops.   Now, Dublin of 1803 wasn’t all that different:

  • Rebels were inspired by revolutions taking place elsewhere.   In Ireland it was the American revolution and the French revolution that inspired a group of Irish nationalists. Today the Syrian rebels are inspired by the other Arab spring revolutions.
  • Emmet established five improvised munition workshops across Dublin.  My instinct tells me that these looked very similar to some of the workshops seen producing improvised weaponry in Aleppo.  In Syria, here’s a range of home made weapons and IEDs
  • In Dublin Emmet produced the IEDs and munitions with a team of 40 people across his five Dublin  workshops. Interestingly the workshops were well disguised behind false walls. I described the IEDs in my last post, below.

I’ve been trying to find more details of the design of rockets developed by Emmet. Rockets had become something of a flavour at the time – The French had been using rockets on the battlefield for the previous few decades, but with limited effect. Then in the Mysore wars in India the British found themselves attacked by effective rockets with explosive warheads, to their great consternation.

The British captured a number of  Mysorean rockets  in 1799 and examined them (another example of early technical intelligence activities).  Emmet would have been aware of their impact on the British military.

As mentioned in the earlier post Emmet met the American Robert Fulton in Paris at about this time, and Fulton too had expertise in rocketry which he may have passed on.

The key development here, which the Mysore rockets utilized, was to use a metal case for the rocket body. Until then the bodies where generally paste board (as in modern fireworks).  A pasteboard body limits the internal pressure possible and therefore the size and range fo the rocket.  But much higher internal pressures are possible with metal bodies. Both the Mysore rockets, Emmet’s rockets and the very slightly later British Congreve rockets all used a metal body.

How much the British Congreve Rocket system was influenced by Emmet’s rocket designs is unclear – but very interestingly there is a report that one of Emmet’s assistants, a Mr Pat Finerty, subsequently went to work at Woolwich where Congreve’s rockets were under development after the events in Dublin.  Congreve’s rocket was described as an improvement on, but similar in design to Emmet’s.   Here’s a diagram of an early Congreve rocket, which is therefore likely to have been broadly similar to Emmet’s rockets.

Note that there is a warhead at the front, and the warhead at the front is initiated by a burning fuze running the length of the outside of the rocket body. The rocket motor and the warhead fuse would have been lit simultaneously.   The stabilising “stick” is not shown in this diagram.  Congreve rockets would have been initiated by a flintlock mechanism, but Emmets probably with a simpler burning fuze. Here’s a picture of a Congreve flintlock mechanism. the string is a lanyard to the release spring , I think which releases the cock hammer.

Emmet’s rockets were intended to be deployed to be fired at cavalry, and also as signal rockets – I’m not sure if that entirely makes sense, given the fuzing mechanism – they would make much more effective indirect fire area weapons, perhaps fired into British garrisons.   Nonetheless horizontally fired munitions (although not technically rockets) aimed at the British Military were being used by Irish terrorists some 200 years later.  As such I think Emmet’s rockets have an important place in history.  I also think that although they had been used on the battlefield before, this was the first use of such technology by freedom fighters/ terrorists.

The truth is however that Emmet’s revolution was nothing short of a shambles, and the rockets and the explosives beams and the grenade IEDs barely got used, if at all. Emmet’s purported notes after the failed uprising gives a frank and candid account:

  • Emmet describes his detailed plan for the deployment of pikemen, “beam” IEDs and rockets across Dublin, in detail. He describes the plan for deploying caltrops and anti-cavalry boards with nails in them, chains across streets, deployment of grenades and stones to throw, and muskets.  But the deployment never actually occurred, because the United Irishman expected to man the positions, from Kildare and Wicklow failed to arrive.  There was evidence of confusion and poor communication between the revolutionary elements, and possible the spreading by British agents of incorrect information.  Emmet expected several thousand rebels supporting him, but eventually had less than a hundred, and even these he couldn’t control, a good proportion of then being “with drink”.
  • Due to a lack of funds, scarcely any of the expected blunderbusses were bought
  • The man designated as being responsible for preparing the fuzes for the “exploding beam” IEDs “forgot” to prepare them and went on an errand to Kildare.
  • An accidental explosion at one of the IED workshops prevented much of the material being stored there being available.
  • The slow matches used to initiate grenades and beam IEDs were prepared incorrectly and would not function.
  • The same person responsible for the slow matches then “lost” the grenade fuzes.
  • Other material such as scaling ladders and irons to chain up streets were not prepared in time.
  • Emmet describes the eventual disaster as “a failure in plan, preparation and men”

There is a strong suspicion that some of the failures were “helped along “ by British agents.

In a future post I’ll look at the evolutions of Congreve’s and later rockets.  Nowadays rockets are almost invariably fin stabilized – have a look at this one spotted recently by Brown Moses – but for some time the “stick method” was used by Congreve and subsequent rocket designs and of course remains in modern fireworks.

I find it fascinating that rockets have returned to the revolutionaries arsenal.

18th Century

EOD Tool from late 1700s

 

Here’s an interesting partial diagram of an EOD tool from the late 1700’s used to remove fuzes from shells.  I’m on the hunt for more of these.

 

 

Also for those who didn’t see an earlier post, here’s a link to an earlier post on an earlier EOD tool.

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