Standing Well Back
1850-1860

Chinese River IED of 1857

Here’s an interesting story about a failed IED attack on a British Naval vessel in 1857. Britain was at war with the city of Canton in China in what was called the “Opium War”. Two British naval vessels, the “Niger” and the “Encounter” were patrolling the Pearl River. A couple of months earlier two small boats had exploded next to the Niger, so a strict policy of look-outs and challenges was being enforced to keep small boats at bay.  At 4 am on 7th January 1857, a look-out on the Encounter spotted a man in a small boat sculling towards the ships. He challenged him and on not getting the appropriate response, shot him dead.  A ship’s boat was launched and they recovered two large explosive charges, each with over a half a ton of explosives. The charges consisted of sealed wooden barrels weighed down with stone so that they only just floated. Protruding from the barrel was a gunpowder filled tube to a small platform on which glowing embers were placed. The embers were kept separate from the gunpowder in the tube by a metal tray or slide attached to a piece of string. The render safe procedure used was to splash water onto the embers.  The plan was that the two barrels linked by rope would float down and the rope fastening them together would catch the bow of the Encounter, then pushing the barrels close either side of the ship. Then the boatman would pull the string to pull out the slides on each barrel, causing the glowing embers to ignite the gunpowder.

Here’s a picture of one of the two charges:

The tactical design has great similarities to British IED attacks in 1804 on the French, although the initiation system is somewhat exotic.

20th Century

The Ingenious Bombs of Harry Orchard

A colleague put me on the trail of some interesting devices used in Colorado at the turn of the last century and I’ve found some interesting details about some very unusual IEDs.  In balancing the interests of readers and my natural disinclination to inspire any bomb makers I’m going to be a little vague about certain aspects of the design, so bear with me.

The perpetrator of the attacks was a man who called himself “Harry Orchard” but he had an awful lot of other aliases.  Orchard was involved in what are now called the Colorado Labor Wars, a struggle between mine owners and miners in Colorado in 1903 and 1904.

The dispute became more and more violent, and in that time and in that industry explosives and knowledge about their use was easily available.   Harry Orchard first became embroiled with this as a striker and then as a bodyguard to the miner’s leadership. He was a man with few scruples at the time.

IEDs had been used prior to 1903 by both sides – the mine owners had blown up the offices if a “Private Assay Office’ which catered for miners taking gold out of the mine for private sale – a practice called “high grading”.  And a mine workers association had blown up a mill in 1899. There were other incidents using explosives.

Orchard may have worked for both sides of the dispute – planting and laying IEDs in support of miners and also, for pay, for the mine owners as provocative acts.  In one attack Orchard assassinated the former Governor of Idaho, Frank Steuenberg.  There are a few sources about the various attacks that readers can find but for this post will concentrate on his IEDs.   The IEDs were constructed in a way that makes me think he was not an experienced “blaster, with experience from the mines.  In principle most of his devices used a very unusual and dangerous initiation system.  This largely involved using a bottle of acid, placed on its side over a sensitive component in an explosive train.  The acid bottle had a cork in it, and the cork was attached to fishing line.  Orchard then created a number of mechanisms to “pull” the cork, releasing the acid, which caused the explosion.

  • To create a command-initiated device, he ran the fishing line to a safe spot, and waited for his target to approach, then physically pulled the line, puling the cork from the bottle.
  • To create a booby trap, victim-operated device, he stretched the fishing line across the likely path of a victim, leaving the IED hidden beside the path.
  • To create a timed IED he attached the fishing line to the “key” at the rear of an alarm clock. When the alarm sounded (Orchard removed the bell) the key which wound the alarm element rotated, and wound the fishing line in, eventually puling out the cork from the acid bottle.

Orchard had a couple of other designs:

  • One used a pistol, aimed at explosives with fishing line attached to the trigger – for both a command pull and for a booby trap.
  • Another device was  a handful of blasting caps wrapped in burlap and then pitch so it eventually looked like a lump of coal, then the device was thrown onto the coal bunkers.

Here are some pictures of IEDs which he re-created as part of his confession.

 

This was the device used in the Steuenberg attack – but Orchard adapted it to operate by tripwire, leaving the clock element unused.

 

Orchard’s confession is available online –if you’d like details of where to find it let me know – but because it has detailed description of how he constructed the devices I won’t post it publicly.

Victim Operated IED

Bombs in bodies – cross post on IMSL Insights

I’ve posted a piece about recent bombs in bodies of dead terrorist victims on Insights.

1850-1860

Weapon Technical Intelligence in 1855

I’ve found a very interesting print of a Russian Infernal Machine (i.e. an “IED”) from 1855 from the Crimea, with an interesting back story, demonstrating once again that technical exploitation of IEDs as part of “Weapons Technical Intelligence” in nothing new.

The print is shown below.  It was drawn by a British Naval artist, Oswald Walter Brierly who was attached to the British Naval fleet at Crimea as an artist in residence.

In May 1855 British forces, assisted by Turkish and French contingents, conducted a large scale raid to seize the Russian held port of Kertch.  They destroyed several magazines, seized weapons and found this IED in the Dockyard.  The Dockyard was clearly being used to manufacture a number of devices, ammunition and other munitions.  The device was recovered and examined carefully along with other material.

From a military perspective the raid turned into something of an embarrassment – although it achieved its aims, the behaviour of the Turkish and British troops was appalling as they committed rape, pillaged the town and destroyed everything they saw.   From a technical perspective the device is interesting as it shows, I believe, an evolution from the designs of Immanuel Nobel and Professor Jacobi found in the Baltic and seized earlier by the British

a. The Jacobi Fuze (designed, I believe, by Immanuel Nobel, father of Alfred Nobel

b. Improvised Sea mines from the Baltic – 1854

c. American WTI in the Crimean War 

From a separate source I have the following description of the device shown in the image above, which consisted of six of the charges shown, operating in a chain:

It consisted of six vessels of wood, shaped like two cones placed base to base, each 21/2 feet long by 11/2 feet in diameter at the base, and of several similar vessels of a conical form, and of equal dimensions, loaded to float with the apex downward, the base being provided with a cover to fall on a prepared fuse and ignite the charge upon contact with any floating object.  These vessels were attached to each other by wires, and hen placed in the water would look like a line of buoy; but the wires were carried to the poles of a galvanic battery within the Russian magazine on shore.

The diagram above shows an electrical initiator in the upper part of the device and describes a “gutta percha” seal system to protect it from water ingress.

I think this then is an evolution of the devices seen before – using a “Jacobi fuze” as a contact initiator in the same manner as the devices described in the links above, but having a secondary, electrical initiation system as an alternate. Thus, they are one step more sophisticated in combing the two.

17th Century

A Booby Trap IED from 1630

I’m digging away at some interesting 17th century IED and explosive “textbooks” and I think I’ve found another document used by Irish Rebel Emmet in 1803. You will recall from earlier posts that he appears to have used an English manual from the 1690s for his rockets (see the post here), and now I think I’ve found an earlier French document, published in 1630, which he used for his IED designs – no kidding. More on that to come, but for now this extract of an interesting “victim-operated” booby trap IED from that 1630 manual. The image is shown below. The text accompanying it (not included here) explains it further. It’s a basket, to be left somewhere where the enemy might find it. Laid on top are such attractive objects as “eggs and fruits”. Hidden in the base is an explosive shell, surrounded by musket balls. The shell’s burning fuse is initiated by a wheel-lock gun mechanism, and that in turn has a cord from its trigger tied to an attractive object at the top of the basket.  Some things don’t change.

The manual that this is taken from has a lot of other interesting IEDs in, some of which I think I can show Emmet was building in Dublin in 1803, so 170 years after it’s publication.  We worry today about the proliferation of IED designs and tactical concepts on the internet – the truth is that this book shows that the problem goes back a long way and the proliferation of such knowledge is pretty ancient.  As an aside, if any reader of this has blog post has an understanding of archaic 17th century French technical language, I could do with some help analysing this book!

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