Standing Well Back
Command IED

Early history of command wire electrically initiated IEDs

In some of my previous blogs I wrote about the first command wire IEDs occurring in the US Civil War, then had to correct myself as I found earlier examples in the Crimean war and then again earlier incidences by both Immanuel Nobel and Samuel Colt.

Well, I keep finding other perhaps earlier references as I dig into this and follow this “historical alley” and it’s really quite interesting and clearly things go back further in time than I had appreciated.  Here’s some extracts from what I’ve been digging up.

It starts with some further exploration into the efforts of Samuel Colt, the American industrialist and arms inventor. Separate from his efforts developing small arms, Colt for many years attempted to get the US government interested in a system for defending the US coastline which he referred to as his “Submarine Battery” which were essentially water-borne command initiated sea mines.  I attempted to try and find the inspiration for Colt’s efforts and the science on which he based his submarine munition technology.

I have in earlier blogs discussed the parallel work of Immanuel Nobel (father of Alfred Nobel) who developed command initiated sea mines for the Russian Navy at about the same time. It would appear that another 19th century military industrialist, this time the German Werner von Siemens was also developing very similar technologies perhaps a few years later in 1848, compared to Colt and Nobel who worked on their versions in the early part of the same decade. What is unclear is if these three entrepreneurial military technology developers were aware of each other’s developments.  Siemens’s devices were used to protect Kiel from Danish naval attacks in 1848.

But pertinent to the subject of electrical initiation of IEDs is a letter written by Benjamin Franklin in 1751 to Mr Peter Collinson of the Royal Academy in England which states

I have not hear’d, that any of your European Electricians have hitherto been able to fire gunpowder by the Electric Flame. We do it here in this Manner.

A small Cartridge is filled with Dry powder, hard rammed, so as to bruise some of the Grains. Two pointed Wires are then thrust In, one at Each End, the points approaching each other in the Middle of the Cartridge, till within the distance of  half an Inch: Then the Cartridge being placed in the Circle (circuit), when the Four Jars (galvanic cells) are discharged the electric Flame leaping from the point of one Wire to the point of the other, within the Cartridge, among the powder, fires It, and the explosion of the powder is at the same Instant with the crack of the Discharge

I wonder if we can call this the first electrically initiated IED? Albeit manufactured with pure science in mind rather than as a weapon.

Inspired directly by Franklin, the Italian Allessandro Volta wrote to a colleague in 1777 describing how he had fired muskets, pistols and an under-water mine by means of his electrical piles. I suspect this was the first electrically initiated IED actually intended as a weapon.

Volta’s Italian compatriot, working on a telegraph, Tiberius Cavallo then took a step further in 1782 in the following manner

The attempts recently made to convey intelligence from one place to another at a great distance, with the utmost quickness, have induced me to publish the following experiments, which I made some years ago. The object for which those experiments were performed, was to fire gun-powder, or other combustible matter, from a great distance, by means of electricity. At first I made a circuit with a very long brass wire, the two ends of which returned to the same place, whilst the middle of the wire stood at a great distance. In this middle an interruption was made, in which a cartridge of gunpowder mixed with steel filings was placed. Then, by applying a charged Leyden phial to the two extremities of the wire, (viz. by touching one wire with the knob of the phial, whilst the other was connected with the outside coating) the cartridge was fired. In this manner I could fire gunpowder from the distance of three hundred feet and upwards.

I think this may effectively be the first command wire initiated IED.

The next issue to be dealt with was waterproofing electrical cable and a variety of attempts were made using a range of substances including india rubber, varnish and tarred hemp. The Russians appear on the scene. Baron Schilling Von Canstadt was a Russian diplomat in Bavaria who took great interest in scientific developments. On his return to St Petersburg in 1812 and driven by war with France, Schilling Von Canstadt developed electrically initiated charges that could be fired across a river, the cable running through the water, with a carbon arc initiator. These were demonstrated in 1812 but do not appear to have been adopted by the Russian Army. Later after the Russians entered Paris after Napoleon’s defeat he undertook a number of similar experiments crossing the Seine.   Here’s a description of him demonstrating a command wire IED to Tsar Alexander I

Once Baron Schilling had the honor to present a wire to the Emperor in his tent. He begged his Majesty to touch it with another wire, whilst looking through the door of the tent in the direction of a very far distant mine. A cloud of smoke rose from this exploding mine at the moment the Emperor, with his hands, made the contact. This caused great surprise, and provoked expressions of satisfaction and applause.

His successor, Tsar Nicholas I was fortunate to escape serious injury in 1837 when an electrically initiated charge was used on a demonstration to destroy a bridge but the demonstration went wrong and the charge detonated prematurely or with larger effect than expected.

The next on the scene were the British. Colonel Pasley of the Royal Engineers was inspired by a newspaper report of the accident in Russia and working with the electrical scientist Wheatstone developed insulated cables and platinum filament exploding detonators around 1839.

Also in the 1830s, American scientist Robert Hare developed “galvanic techniques” for quarry blasting.

Enough for now – some time in the future I’ll return to Colt’s submarine battery, but will state here that as a 15 year old boy in 1829 it appears he had his first success in initiating an explosive charge under water.

1880-1890

The Tsar and the suicide bomber

I have been promising for some time a blog post about the 1881 assassination of the Tsar by suicide bomber in St Petersburg, the site of which I visited a few month ago.  I think that this incident is particularly interesting for the following reasons:

  1. It was a suicide bombing by any definition and thus invites comparisons with modern suicide terrorism
  2. It seems to have sparked and inspired the revolutionaries of the time, demonstrating what was possible – for the next 25 years revolutionaries around the world sought to repeat the impact of the incident
  3. The design was enabled by the development of dynamite in the late 1860s and it would appear by Russian military experience of fusing from the sea mines I discussed last week

The late 1870s and early 1880s were politically a time of great drama. In Russia Anarchists and Nihilists were active and some sought the use of violence to achieve their goals in the light of poor harvests and industrial recession.  The Nihilists objected to the status quo of the ruling class and the capitalist control of the economy and in that at least there are some very modern echoes. One particular group, the Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) decided to target the Tsar.  One of this group’s early attempts to assassinate the Tsar was in Moscow in 1879  – the terrorists dug a tunnel from a house and planted three large command initiated IEDs under the railway on a track (by digging a tunnel under a road from a nearby house) that the Tsar was predicted to use. The attack failed as did an attempt a year later when explosives were planted in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg by an employee Stephan Khalturin who was able smuggle the explosives in bit by bit. The picture below shoes the aftermath.

 

I can’t find details of the construct of this device but I believe it was a timed IED. The Tsar delayed a reception dinner thus missing the explosion, but many people were killed or badly wounded in the incident. Amongst the dead were all the members of the Finnish Guard in a room below the intended victims.

In an early example of an “attack the Network” C-IED effort the Russian secret police, the Okrhana, was established in the light of the failed bomb attacks (along with the rise of left wing revolutionary groups) and they were the archetypal “secret police”, running double agents, agents provocateurs, surveillance and interception of communications. They also operated internationally.

On the 13 March the Tsar once again overruled the advice of his security staff and took his carriage on a well known and predictable route through St Petersburg from Michaelovsky Palace to the Winter Palace. Once again this is a story of terrorists exploiting the known and predictable routes of their target. An armed Cossack sat with the coach-driver and another six Cossacks followed on horseback. Behind them came a group of police officers in sledges.

All along the route he was watched by members of Narodnaya Volya, who had carefully planned a triple IED attack. On a street corner near the Catherine Canal a woman terrorist gave the signal to two of the conspirators to throw their bombs at the Tsar’s carriage. The bombs missed the carriage and instead landed amongst the Cossacks. The Tsar was unhurt but insisted on getting out of the carriage to check the condition of the injured men. While he was standing with the wounded Cossacks another terrorist, Elnikoff, stepped forward with a shout and threw his bomb on the ground between himself and the Tsar.

Alexander was mortally wounded and the explosion was so great that Elnikoff also died from the bomb blast.  The device used is quite interesting – he is a contemporary description and an image.

 

 The infernal machine used by Elnikoff was about 7 1/2, inches in height. Metal tubes (bb) filled with chlorate of potash, and enclosing glass tubes (cc) filled with sulphuric acid (commonly called oil of vitriol), intersect the cylinder. Around the glass tubes are rings of iron (dd) closely attached as weights. The construction is such that, no matter how the bomb falls, one of the glass tubes is sure to break. The chlorate of potash in that case, combining with the sulphuric acid, ignites at once, and the flames communicate over the fuse (ff) with the piston (c), filled with fulminate of silver. The concussion thus caused explodes the dynamite or “black jelly” (a) with which the cylinder is closely packed.

You will note some similarities, in principle, with parts of the initiating system from the Russian sea mines of the Crimean war that I posted last week.

In all, I think that this terrorist attack is one of the most significant in history – the first “suicide bombing” to gain international attention, and certainly an attack that inspired revolutionaries the world over.  My friend Greg Woolgar, who is about to publish a much needed book on the Victorian Bomb disposal expert and first proponent of IED exploitation and technical intelligence, Colonel Majendie, tells me that the good colonel visited St Petersburg in the aftermath to seek intelligence on the device.

1830-1840

Electrically Initiated Command Wire Devices – the first?

In an earlier post I suggested that the first electrical command wire initiated device appeared in the American Civil War. This was incorrect, as I believe the truth is that such things were first developed by the Russians in the 1830s as electrically initiated sea mines  and later used in the Crimean war by the Russians  .  A “forgotten theatre” of that war was a series of naval engagement in the Baltic as the British and its allies blockaded Russian ports. The Russians protected their ports with ingenious improvised sea mines and a number of these were electrically initiated.

These first “galvanic” initiated mines were developed by Engineer-General Karl Shilder, who was a senior engineer in the Russian Navy – and he had a chance encounter with Alfred Nobel’s father, Immanuel Nobel in the late 1830s.  Immanuel Nobel had developed the concept of a rubber backpack containing explosives for use by the military as a contact initiated explosive mine. He failed to gain interest from the Swedish military so took his ideas to the Russians.  Shilder was on a committee set up by the Tsar to investigate electrically initiated mines. Nobel suggested his contact mine as an alternative and subsequently the idea was presented and demonstrated to the Tsar who rewarded Nobel with 3000 Roubles.  Nobel set up a facility to develop the concepts further and succeeded in a trial in 1842 to blow up and sink a three-masted ship – gaining a further substantial financial prize from the Russian government.

When the Crimean war began Nobel’s mines and other command-initiated devices were used extensively on land and sea, and in particular to protect the Russian naval port of Kronsdtadt on an island in the approaches to St Petersburg.  A British operation to recover and exploit this new foreign technology was mounted and Russian mines was recovered and carefully tested.   Other British attempts to exploit the Russian technology were less successful – a number of senior British naval officers, including the commander, Admiral Dundas were badly wounded when examining recovered Russian devices.  Here’s a diagram of a Russian contact mine, a description of some early naval EOD actions, technical device exploitation and a fascinating account of the stupidity of senior officers, twice in one day – all in one:

They are made cone-shaped of strong zinc, about two feet deep, and fifteen inches wide at top. The bottom holds the powder, about eight pounds; the top is full of air, to keep it up; a strong tube (B B B) goes through the top, and reaches the powder; a small tube about the size of a lead pencil is hung in the centre of the large one (D D) – it pivots on its centre; and fixed in the bottom of the large tube, in the little chamber of priming-powder (C), is a small glass tube (+), sticking up into the bottom of the small tube. You will see that if anything pushes the upper end of the small tube on one side, as I have tried to show in figure 2, as it is pivoted in the centre, it must break off the glass tube, which is filled with some ignitible stuff, which fires the priming-powder (C), and of course explodes the machine. Now the two thin tubes of iron on the top (A A) slide to and fro, out are kept away from the tubes by slight springs. On being touched by a ship’s side, or even pressed with a finger, they shove the small tube aside, as in figure 2, and explode the machine. How any were hauled into boats without exploding seems marvellous; but some lost their tubes when canted up to be hauled in; others had been put down with caps on the tops, which prevent their going off. These ought to have been removed; but the parties putting them down had been so afraid of them, they had preferred leaving them safe for us to risking removing the caps themselves. I don’t know what the Grand Duke will say if he knows this! Admiral Seymour and Hall got one up, and hauled it over the bows of the gig. How the little slides were not touched is wonderful. It was then passed aft; and the master of the fleet joining them, they, thinking it was damaged with wet, got discussing the way to set it off. Stokes touched the slide, shoved the tube a little on one side, but evidently not enough to break the glass tube. They then took it to Admiral Dundas, and again they all played with it; and Admiral Seymour took it to his ship, and on the poop had the officers round it examining it. Hall, being in the act of hoisting a second one, was on the quarter-deck. Some of the officers remarked on the danger of its going off, and Admiral Seymour said, ‘Oh no; this is the way it would go off,’ and shoved the slide in with his finger, as he had seen Stokes do it. It instantly exploded, knocking down every one round it. As Hall looked round he saw the captain of marines, a son of Sir John Louis, carried down the ladder, with every bit of clothes burnt off him and covered with blood. He then heard, ‘The admiral is killed.’ The latter was lying insensible, his face covered with blood; but he soon recovered, though very seriously injured in one eye and the head. The poor captain of marines had pieces of the machine in his legs, besides the burns. Pierce, the flag-lieutenant, much hurt, a piece of iron going through the peak of his cap, and knocking it into the mizzen-top, but not touching his head; a young volunteer also. The signalman holding it up at the time not very much hurt, though burnt; and one lieutenant and the chaplain, though next to Admiral Seymour and close to it, only had their hair singed, and were not hurt at all. Two or three men also slightly wounded. It is a wonderful escape, for pieces of it flew down the main hatchway; and we know that the Russians getting one into a boat exploded it, and killed seventeen men. Admiral Seymour is much less hurt than was first supposed, as he is able to sit up to-day; but concussion of the brain is what they fear. He can see a glimmer of light with the eye, so it is hoped he will recover the sight. The marine officer’s is the most dangerous case, but it is hoped he is doing well also.

The extraordinary thing is that the same evening Admiral Dundas and Pelham were examining a tube; so Caldwell went and got an empty machine (that had been cut open) to put the the tube in, to examine how it explodes. While they were close round. it, the admiral shoved the slide, and the tube exploded, shooting up in the middle of them, and hurting the admiral’s eyes so much that they were looking inflamed and bloodshot yesterday morning when he was explaining all this to me. 

Moral of the story – don’t let senior officers fiddle with recovered devices.  In future blog posts – How the US Army studied the Russian experience of contact and command wire initiated devices and did or didn’t employ them in the American Civil War – and the strange story of another US-Russia connection regarding command wire IEDs.

 

Update on Sunday, October 30, 2011 at 6:32PM by Roger Davies

I should make clear that the Russian experiments only just preceded perhaps more successful US experiments in electrical mine initiation.  In 1841 – 1843 Samuel Colt demonstrated successfully on a number of occasions electrically initiated sea mines on the Hudson and then Potomac rivers sinking a number of target ships. Later developments were undertaken by Maury, a confederate naval officer in the 1860s

Update on Friday, September 28, 2012 at 6:14PM by Roger Davies

see later post  http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/9/26/siemens-tangents-command-wire-ieds-of-1848.html

1880-1890

The curious case of Professor Mezzeroff – IED expert, terrorism proponent and New York liquor salesman

Strange things occurred in the late 1800s  It was a time when the recent development of dynamite and other explosives coupled with the not unrelated fevers of Irish nationalism and anarchy became ever more febrile.  The Irish Republican Brotherhood joined the mix of fashionable secret societies and gained a significant following in the US where it became the “Fenian Brotherhood” and “Clan na Gael”.     Large quantities of arms were acquired  and the Fenians even organized raids into Canada from the USA with the US government curiously ignoring their efforts initially probably because of antipathy towards  the UK for its less than fulsome support for the Union during the Civil War.

In the 1880s a new face appeared on the scene, calling himself “Professor Gaspodin Mezzeroff”.  Claiming a Russian background he portrayed himself as a scientist/chemist and explosives expert imbued with the experience of Russian nihilism… but one who embraced the Irish republican cause.  He lectured extensively at public meetings, raising money and advocating the use of dynamite by terrorists to further the political cause of the Irish republicans.

O’Donovan Rossa, a key Irish republican activist and leader,  advertised courses in IED manufacture, (for $30) taught by Mezzeroff, and Mezzeroff’s meeings were widely reported in the press of the time.  Certainly he came to the attention of the British and their nascent “Special Irish Bureau” of the London Metropolitan Police.

Mezzeroff was decribed as “ a tall, sharp-faced man with curly hair arranged around his pate and a ‘grizzly moustache’, Habitual wearing of black clothes and steely spectacles rounded off the sinister effect of a character straight out of Dostoevsky or Conrad. His origins were mysterious, although he had the accents of an Irishman.  At a public meeting in 1885 in New York to pronounce the death penalty on the Prince of Wales, Mezzeroff was introduced as “ England’s invisible enemy” and he dared the US congress to make laws preventing Irishmen from using dynamite in England – an act recently suggested by General Abbott of the US Army Engineers .

Mezzeroff issued pamphlets with IED designs and certainly IEDs constructed in the US were shipped clandestinely into England, and used in a number of attacks.  An amusingly skeptical, indeed hilarious report of one of Mezzeroffs meetings from the New York Times is worth reading, here

Mezzeroff’s IED designs are curious and worthy of examination, perhaps in a future blog. One included an exploding cigar and indeed I have a contemporaneous photo of such a device from the Scotland Yard museum that I found in a  book published in 1902.

Mezzeroff published a letter in an anarchist pamphlet “The alarm” stating:

“and I won’t stop until every workingman in Europe knows how to use explosives against autocratic government and grasping monopolies.“

He claimed to always carry an IED:

“I take it through the street  in my pocket; I carry it about in horse cars – if you carry two or three pounds (of nitro-glycerine) with you people will respect you much more than if you carried a pistol.”

As it happens, Mezzeroff was a pseudonym.  It was an elderly New Yorker ,a gentleman called Richard Rogers by some sources or “Wilson” by other sources, who by day ran a liquor shop in New York. Another pseudonym was “Dr Hodges”.

Mezzeroff ran a bomb making school in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn and a number of his graduates went on to short if partially successful IED planting campaigns in the UK. By 1886 however the public interest in such things waned, especially with the implication of an IED causing the events that led to Chicago’s “Haymarket massacre”. It is clear too that the US government became much less tolerant of these exhortations to violence.

As for Mezzeroff, he disappeared from view, probably returning to his real name (whatever that was) and liquor selling shop.

I should also note that there is a fascinating side story about British intelligence operations in the USA against the Fenian bomb makers – numerous paid informers, secret agents, “dirty tricks”, intercepted IEDs and sting operations –  a real “defeat the network” campaign and including a report from the Pinkertons agency describing how, when operating undercover on behalf of the British consul-general in New York, they were shown a number of IEDs made by a Patrick Crowe of Peoria, Illinois. More on this to come.

1890-1900

X-raying IEDs – in the 1890s

I’m grateful to my colleagues Leslie Payne and Greg Woolgar for pointing me in the direction of early attempts at X-raying IEDs in France at the end of the 19th century.  Below are some examples of IEDs and x-ray images which seem to be derived from  “The Manual of the perfect Anarchist”, a French publication being circulated in anarchist groups at the time.

First device – A booby-trapped box, containing a glass ampoule of sulphuric acid placed in a sugar/potassium chlorate mix. The acid is released when the box lid is opened, because a thread attached to the base of the lid releases the ampoule enclosure somehow (my French language skills are not quite good enough for a clear translation…) Note the presence of shrapnel, which look like hobnails.

 

 

 

2. In the second box  a thread on the lid again breaks the sulphuric acids ampoule as it is opened. Note the nails as well as the pins which fasten the wooden box together.  Again the main charge is sugar chlorate

Although both these devices contained sugar chlorate mixes, a common explosive used as a main charge at the time was mercury fulminate – not an easy material to make and construct an IED of.

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