I’d like to advise any sensible person not to look for mousetraps on the internet. Some are bizarre, some cruel, and some very weird and unpleasant, sometimes all of those things at once.
But this one is explosive so, hey, I have an obligation to show it to you.
I am fortunate to have “inherited” an archive of historical material from “IJ” which I am slowly cataloguing. I can’t help but to dive in on some of the historical documents which although perhaps not connected with IEDs and EOD have a broader historical interest in those interested in explosives. One particular set of documents relate to the latter part of the 1800s when the UK was undergoing a period of regulatory development of controls on the production and storage of explosives. Until then it appears that safety and good practice were unregulated and the industrial expansion of the explosives industry was little constrained, and as a result a number of accidents occurred. This led to investigations by military officers (first Lt Col Boxer RE in 1864, and later by 1874, Major (later Colonel) Majendie RA. I have often mentioned Colonel Majendie in earlier posts as he was really the first “formal” practitioner of both Improvised Explosive Device Disposal and what is now called Weapons Technical intelligence in relation to IEDs.
As I looked at the early reports by Col Boxer and Maj Majendie I was struck by some similarities in a major explosion that occurred in Erith and the recent explosion in Beirut. I propose no particular comment here on the Beirut explosion other to say that I was disappointed at the volume of technically illiterate comments in the news media. But it is interesting to see how two events in 1864 caused the establishment of suitable regulatory control. The two events, which I’ll discuss below, and a number of other explosions in the latter part of the 1800s heightened public and government awareness of the safety issues in the manufacture and storage of explosives, and the appointment of Majendie as the lead government authority on the matter of explosives also provided him, inadvertently but happily, with the powers to investigate IEDs.
The first incident in 1864 was the explosion of the “Lottie Sleigh” a sailing barque carrying 11 tonnes of gunpowder on the River Mersey on 15 January 1864. A sailor aboard knocked over a lamp causing a fire. All the crew “baled out” and were picked up by a ferry. Shortly afterwards the unmanned vessel exploded. No-one was killed but the damage on both sides of the Mersey was significant. Thousands of windows were broken and doors were blown open in both Birkenhead and Liverpool and most of the gas lamps in the streets of Liverpool were “blown out”. The explosion was heard 40 miles away. Subsequently insurance companies were involved in complex process to assess liability. Here’s a pic of the vessel exploding:
Later that year, on October 1st two storage warehouses containing a total of 50 tonnes of gunpowder exploded at Erith on the Southern Bank of the Thames, not far from Woolwich. No cause of the explosion has ever been established. The explosion was felt 50 miles away. The store was adjacent, like in Beirut, to some docks,
This quote helps us understand the significant devastation:
Everything within its reach was annihilated. Man and matter perished together, shivered into a thousand fragments and whirled into space. People know there used to be a magazine in the Erith marshes, but there is now only a yawning crater there. The very ruins are lost. A visitor to the spot went to look for a cottage which he
remembered ; it had been ” swept entirely away, as with a broom.” Every witness whose evidence could have thrown light on the catastrophe has been hurried out of the world by that tremendous thunder- clap. Those immediately concerned can hardly be returned as killed-they are “missing”-that is to say, their very bodies have disappeared.
Property was damaged 20 miles away but only 10 people died.
These two explosions caught the imagination of the public and communities adjunct to “powder stores” up and down the country. There seems to have been a campaign by many of them to write to the Home Secretary to request oversight of the storage of explosives, and so Lt Col Boxer RE was tasked with inspecting many of these sites up and down the country. In effect this became the first Report of the Chief Inspector of Explosives, a report which became annual under Major Majendie 10 years later and which provide today a treasure trove of historical research. I have copies now from 1864 and then from 1874 till recent reports.
The Erith explosion has a number parallels with the Beirut explosion. Lessons can still be learned 150 years later. Alas, this was not the last explosion in this vicinity. There was an explosion at Woolwich in 1883, and another in 1907. In World War One (1917) there was a massive explosion of 50 tons of TNT in Silvertown docks on the North bank of the Thames nearby. Weirdly there was another explosion at a factory in Erith 4 months ago.
I have somewhere a catalogue of such accidental explosions in history, a remarkable number, which perhaps I’ll pull together in blog post – going back hundreds of years. Bottom line – every explosive store should be sited and managed on the presumption that it will explode. Major Majendie’s report of 1874 is a fantastic “tour de force” of the explosives industry of the time and the needs of detailed explosive regulations – I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in explosive storage.
In my last post I discussed a massive electrically initiated command wire IED from the Crimean war in 1856. This article is about a massive command-wire device in Charleston during the American Civil War in 1863. I’ve been finding stuff on explosive devices during that conflict for a few years now, but this one is new to me, possibly because it failed to explode. Importantly I think this IED was the biggest ever seen in the USA – perhaps my US colleagues would care to comment.
This Confederate device was constructed using an entire ship’s steam boiler as a container. It was packed with 5000 pounds of blackpowder (other reports suggest 3000 pounds) and sunk in 6 fathoms of water 1500 yards off Fort Sumter, just outside Charleston, South Carolina. Insulated electrical cables led from the boiler to an electrical charge generator in the Fort, defended by Confederate Forces. There had been a series of naval bombardments of the Fort over several months. On 8 September 1853 the Federal Navy approached the Fort again to bombard it. The flagship “New Ironsides” placed itself directly above the device and fired nearly 500 rounds at the Fort. Every attempt was made to initiate the device but it failed to function. After 90 minutes the Ironsides moved off. The device had been in place for 4 months before it was attempted to fire. The man responsible for testing the circuit daily was put in irons, although he claimed he had circuit tested it the previous day. Probably there had been an ingress of water or there was insufficient voltage. But 5000 pounds of powder exploding a few feet underneath a battleship would have been quite an attack.
Here’s a report on the laying of the device, which suggests that the resulting cable length was over a mile longer than expected – perhaps the power source was insufficient to cope with that:
The torpedo was successfully sunk on the spot located by General Ripley, but while running the cable the steamer (Chesterfield) ran out of steam, and, unable to hold against the tide and wind, went aground near Fort Sumter. On the increase of the flood we had to run back a long circuit reach Cummings Point and land the cable. It resulted from this accident that we played out 2 miles of cable, instead of 1, as expected.
Here’s a couple of diagrams of the explosive device, which I think are contemporary:
The boiler, full of powder, is probably still there…
There is some mention of the use of powder filled boilers being used unsuccessfully on the James River by the Confederate explosive expert Captain Maury at an earlier time during the Civil War. Apparently the boilers were not anchored well and moved in the current, parting the electrical cables. Captain Maury’s electricity generator apparently “weighed nearly a ton” which also made the devices awkward to deploy. Maury was later sent on a mission to England to procure better electrical power sources (in modern parlance, “IED components”) from the scientist Sir Charles Wheatstone.
Fort Sumter in August 1863, a month before the incident:
Here’s the USS New Ironsides, the target of the IED:
I have found some new material on underwater Confederate devices used to prevent Federal ships moving up the James River subsequent to Captian Maury’s boilers, but I need time to check this new material against other records. I’ll put up a post at some time in the future when I have time.
In one of those strange “mirrorings” in history the following year it was Union forces who considered use of a massive IED against Fort Sumter. Union commander ,Major-General John Foster had in mind a plan to level Fort Sumter by way of a large explosive device. “As soon as a good cut is made through the wall,” Foster wrote to Washington on July 7, 1864, “I shall float down against it and explode large torpedoes until the wall is shaken down and the surrounding obstructions are entirely blown away.”
Later that month Union naval forces had made a “cut” in a protective wall and pushed an explosively-laden barge towards Fort Sumter. But due to miscommunication and bad weather the attack was abandoned. Other attempts were then made in August 1864 by land forces using improvised rafts, laden with explosives and initiated with timing devices. These were to be pushed into place by boat. Here’s one contemporary report:
On the night of the 28th ultimo, a pontoon-boat, fitted up for the purpose and containing about twenty hundredweight of powder, was taken out by Lieut. G.F. Eaton, One hundred and twenty-seventh New York Volunteers, boat infantry, and floated down into the left flank of Fort Sumter. The garrison of Sumter was alarmed before the mine reached them, and opened upon our boats with musketry, without, however, doing them any injury.
The device exploded, but in the wrong place and too far away to cause significant damage. Then:
On the night of the 31st ultimo six torpedoes, made of barrels set in frames, each containing 100 pounds of powder, were set afloat with the flood-tide from the southeast of Sumter with the view of destroying the boom. They probably exploded too early and only injured perhaps two lengths of the links of the boom, which are now not visible.
Another attempt was made the following night on 1 September 1864, the device exploded but again causing no significant damage.
Here’s a drawing of the devices being launched:
I also have found some new interesting technical material about very large submerged electrically initiated devices used in the defence of Venice, in 1859, that appear also to have used Samuel Colt’s “Camera Obscura” command post technique – again to follow when time permits. I continue to view Samuel Colt’s amazing explosive device initiation command post of 1836 as one of the most remarkable things I have ever come across in all my research.
I think I have a final piece of the jigsaw here, that links the IEDs used by Lawrence of Arabia, with IEDs used by Jack Hindon in the Boer War and now, the final piece, with a specific IED designed in the US Civil War.
My intent here is to show how a specific IED design, improvised from commonly available battlefield materials, that used the weight of a target train on a gun lock trigger mechanism to explode a charge, seems to have begun in 1864, and that design, or very close approximations of it were then seen in the Boer War decades later, and again in WW1 more than ten years after that. It is of course possible that the design was independently invented – but my supposition is that it was not, and the concept was known by those who deal with explosives in one form or another. The attack mode proved useful in what we would call today “guerilla warfare”, often associated with a firearms firing on the resulting shocked and disorientated survivors.
In bringing these together in a historical sequence I am in part repeating earlier blog posts. In uncovering the details I worked backwards but now I’m laying this out in sequential historical sequence, covering a period from the early 1860s to WW1. I’m specifically looking here at attacks on railways where the weight of the train causes a trigger on a gun “lock” to be initiated – components of firearms were of course used in other sorts of IEDs over many centuries and I have blogged about that here, but that’s outside the scope of this post.
1. US Civil War. Union IEDs designed to attack Confederate trains. As I have blogged before IEDs (then called “torpedoes”) were used extensively by both sides in the US Civil War, with perhaps the Confederates making most application of them. After the end of hostilities the Chief Engineer of the US Army, Brigadier General Delafield collated numerous reports on various Torpedoes used in the conflict and put them into a historical context, examining the efficacy and appropriateness of use. I find it intriguing that Delafield, in the decade prior to the US Civil War was one of the US Army’s observers in the Crimean War which saw extensive use by the Russians of IEDs. In the collated reports is a letter written to Brigadier General Delafield by 1st Lieut Charles R Suter, Chief Engineer in the “Department of the South, Hilton Head, South Carolina, on 26 October, 1864. The letter reads as follows:
By direction of Major General Foster, I have this day forwarded by Adams Express, a box containing a railroad torpedo, tools and drawings showing its use.
This torpedo was devised by Charles F Smith, 3d U.S.C.T.
We have not yet been able to try them on the enemy’s railroads, but they have been thoroughly tested in experiments. The magazine holds 20 to 30 pounds of powder, and this is sufficient to blow a car off the track besides utterly destroying it. Two magazines can be used with one lock and by regulating the length of the powder train, any car of the passing train may be blown up. The accompanying tools are simple and light. The idea of the inventor was, to send small parties of men, 3 or 4 in each, with these torpedoes and return. Each magazine is a load for a man. Another man can carry the lock and another the tools.
The manner of laying these torpedoes is as follows: –
The spikes are drawn from three consecutive ties on one side. A hole is then dug, and the lock placed as indicated in the drawing. The rail is then sprung up and iron wedges placed on the adjacent ties to keep the rail from springing the lock by its own weight. When thus secured, the lock is cocked and capped, and the box closed. The magazine is then buried in the proper place, and the connection made. By using a little care in excavating and carrying off the superfluous earth to some little distance, the existence of the torpedo would never be suspected. The bottom of the arched rail should just touch the lever. Any shock by the bending down the rail pulls the trigger and explodes the torpedo.
In our experiments, a torpedo of 18 pounds was exploded by giving a car sufficient impetus to run over it. The car was entirely destroyed, and rails, ties and fragments of the car were thrown in every direction. One rail was projected 40 feet.
These torpedoes can probably be used with success in some of the larger armies. Their greatest efficiency lies in destroying the locomotive, which cannot be replaced, whereas a torn up track can easily be relaid. the magazine should be tarred before being used.
I am, General,
very respectfully,
Your obd’t serv’t
CHAS R SUTER
1st Lieut, U S Engineers & Chief Eng’r D.S.
Here’s the accompanying diagram:
The diagram shows a “lock” from a firearm, with a lever engaging the trigger system. This has been “pre-packaged” is a small box with the initiation mechanism causing a fuze to be lit. The fuze is then connected to two containers (“magazines”) placed under adjacent sleeper ties.
Despite much research I cannot find a report of a “gun-lock” initiated railway IED in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, five years after the end of the US Civil War. But railway IEDs were used, initiated by the weight of a train on the fuze removed from an artillery shell and was the subject of my last blog post here.
2. The Boer War. Gunlock initiated IEDs were used by the Boers against British Trains in the Boer war in 1901. Here’s a diagram of the adapated Martini-Henry gun lock. The similarities of the US Civil war design of 1865 are clear.
Pictures of actual gunlocks from these devices are at this page
3. WW1 – Lawrence of Arabia and Bimbashi Garland’s attacks on Turkish trains in Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia’s campaign against the Ottoman Turks in the Arabian peninsula in WW1 often attacked the railway lines running south. The IEDs that Lawrence used were pretty much identical to the Boer devices, but had been developed by his ordnance specialist “Bimbashi Garland” and former Ordnance Corps laboratory technician who had been co-opted in the Arab Bureau because of his interest in archaeology. I have no doubt that Garland was aware of the Boer methodology and simply used the same technique. Details are here.
In summary then I think it is clear that the use of a gunlock placed under a railway line to initiate an explosive charge began in 1865, with the invention by Charles Smith, for the Union Army. This technique somehow found its way to the Boers in 1901, and then was copied again by Garland and Lawrence of Arabia in 1917.
There is much focus today on “augmented reality” technology and a fair proportion of this is in the defence world. Systems like the Google Glass project and a number of others can be used or adapted to add visible data and tactical information and analysis to a soldier, overlaying that data on what he is seeing. Very hi-tec. So I was surprised when during some research I came across the details of a genuine Augmented Reality technology being used for a defence fire control system in the 1860s over a 150 years ago.
During the 1860’s a room-sized camera obscura was used to conduct military research in Belgium. The system was set up to project a “live view” of the River Scheldt in which an electrically initiated underwater mine had been placed. That view was projected onto a large table. The operator of the camera obscura marked the position of the submerged mine on the viewing table, in effect as a data overlay with the image. An enemy ship passing over the mine could therefore be seen and as it approached and when in the optimal position, the mine could be exploded by remote control. The experiment was repeated in Venice in 1866 by Austrian engineers who then held the city, with more elaborate steps to pinpoint the location of the mine, and in this case a series of mines. As a small boat laid each mine, the operator recorded that position and marked it on the image table. The boat then did a full circle, I’m guessing 20ft around each mine position, and the operator recorded that circle on the viewing table, in effect becoming a specific kill zone, for each individually activated mine, presumably numbered, overlaid on the live image. This ingenious arrangement was never tested in action.
Doing some more digging on this subject I have found oblique references to the connection with Samuel Colt the American inventor. Colt did indeed develop systems for initiating observed river mines in the 1830s, and this poor diagram, dated 1836 labeled “Submarine Batary first thorts 1836”, drawn by Colt, seems to indicate a reflecting lens which might project an image onto some form of viewing screen. To me that looks like a version of a camera obscura.
This second diragam, an overhead diagram, might be interpreted as a viewing position with a lens in the building at the very top, which projected a view of the scene over a set of terminals for initiation.
This third diagram, again by Colt begins to make sense, perhaps. Note the large lens in the upper right, I think reflecting the camera obscura image onto the actual reflective control panel. Thus the image is projected onto the switches. I think….
Colt was incredibly secretive about his inventions, but I think there is a very good possibility Colt had invented something similar to (and possibly more sophisticated than) the 1866 Austrian camera obscura system, but 30 years earlier, or at least had the concept in his head. Due to Colt’s obsessive secrecy I can’t be quite sure. It is possible that as well as protecting the commercial rights to the system with this secrecy, Colt was also very aware that the observation towers housing the “camera” had to be placed on prominent, well visible, high ground – making them potential targets for the dastardly British fleets which his systems were designed to combat. There were plenty of good reasons to keep the observation system secret. So it is intriguing to wonder how a system, somewhat similar ended up on the River Schelde some years later.
It would be interesting to replicate Colt’s augmented reality fire control system of 1836, wouldn’t it?