Standing Well Back
1580-1590

The mystery of Ralph Rabbards and strange historical munitions

While researching some historical stuff for another post I came across a letter from an alchemist, chemist and inventor called Ralph Rabbards writing to Queen Elisabeth I some time in the latter half of the 1500s.   In the letter Rabbards offers the Queen a series of military inventions, many of them associated with explosives.  Some of these may be bluff on the part of Rabbards, but some will raise your eyebrows, I guarantee. Stick with the archaic language and plough through it, it’s worth it.  These are some extracts from the letter listing the inventions he is offering. My comments in bold

Speciall Observations concerninge the preparations for fireworks

An excellente kinde of salt-peter of great force

Saltepeter  might be so refined that the powder made thereof mighte be of double the force, so that one pounde maye serve as manye shotte, and as stronge as two pounde of that is comonly used, and lesse chardge in cariage and many other wayes apter and better for service

 (Improved gunpowder)

 A strange kinde of flyinge fire many wayes serviceable

A flyinge fire which shall , without ordynance, and farre of, wonderfully annoye any battayle, towne, or campe, and disperse even as if it did rayne fire; and the devydinge fires, being coted and made flyinge, may touch many places, and leave them all burninge; very terrible both to men and horse.

 (Napalm?)

Balls of mettle serving to many purposes

Balls of mettle to throwe into shippes, to enter in campes in the nightes, likewise in streights or breaches, especially in battayles; and to have said balls of all heightes diamiters and quantities, of a righte composition to devide in as many partes, and of such thickness as it should; and to delyver a thousand at once amongst the enemyes with small charge of ordynance, or other instrumentes, and to powre as much fire as your Majestie will upon any place.

(Carrier shells? Cluster munitions?)

A shotte to fire in passinge

A shotte for greate ordnance to pierce deeper then any other shotte, and sett on fire whatsoever it strike throughe or sticketh in.  A moste noble ingen, specialy for sea service.

(Armour piercing incendiary rounds)

A firy chariott to be forc’d by engine of great service

A firy chariot without horses to runne upon the battaile and and disorder it, that no man shal be able to abide or come nighe the same, and wil be directed even as men will to tourne, to staye, or come directly backe upon any presente danger, or elles to followe and chase the enemye in theor flighte.

(An Armed ROV?)

A rare invention

A musket of calyver, with dyvers strange and forcible shotte, which no armor will holde out, at three quarters of a mile or more; and will also become a most forcible weapon in the hande, as good as a pollox, and with a teice, become a perfitt shotte again.

(An anti- armour sniper rifle with a hand to hand capability?)

There’s a manuscript with diagrams by Rabbards of his military inventions in a collection at Yale University – I can’t wait to find a way to see that.

19th Century

Siemens Tangents – Command Wire IEDs of 1848

Following the post below about micro IEDs in Siemens equipment I’m going to go off on a wild tangent here. Hold on.

I’m reminded by the mention of Siemens about much earlier IEDs associated with the Siemens founder, Werner von Siemens in the 1840s.  For context, in the US Samuel Colt developed a number of sea mines, and in Russia, Alfred Nobel’s father Emmanuel Nobel worked for the Russians developing a contact fuze for sea mines used in the Crimean war against British naval vessels in the Baltic.  (A similar contact fuze, named the Jacobi fuze, but actually designed by Nobel was also used in improvised land mines in the Crimea).

Werner von Siemens was a German electrical engineer and inventor who developed electrically initiated command detonated water borne IEDs which protected the waters off Kiel and prevented Danish naval bombardment of the city during the Schleswig-Holstein war in 1848.   I’m amused that Siemens was placed under “honorary arrest” for being a second in a duel, and used his time in gaol to conduct chemistry experiments.

Siemens’s sister lived in Kiel where her husband was a chemistry professor. They lived close to the harbour in Kiel and were potentially vulnerable to Danish attack.   As Siemens says in his autobiography:

This led me to the then entirely novel idea of defending the harbour by submarine mines fired by electricity. My wires insulated with gutta-percha offered a means of exploding such mines at the right moment in safety from the shore. I communicated this plan to my brother-in-law, who took it up warmly and immediately submitted it to the provisional government for the defence of the country. The latter approved of it and despatched a special emissary to the Prussian Government, with the request to grant me permission to execute the plan. My authorized employment or even mere leave of absence for this warlike purpose was however opposed on the ground that peace still reigned between Prussia and Denmark. But it was intimated to me that I should receive the desired permission if circumstances changed, as was expected. 

I employed this waiting time in making preparations. Large and particularly strong canvas – bags rendered watertight by caoutchouc (rubber) were got ready, each capable of holding about five hundred- weight of powder. Further, wires insulated in all haste and exploding contrivances were prepared, and the necessary galvanic batteries procured for firing. When the departmental chief in the war-office. General von Reyher, in whose ante-room I daily waited for the decision, at last made the communication, that he had just been appointed minister and war having been resolved against Denmark, that he granted me the desired furlough as the first act of hostilities against Denmark, my preparations were almost completed, and on the same evening I left for Kiel. 

My brother-in-law in Kiel had meanwhile made all the preparations in order to proceed quickly with the laying of the mines, as the appearance of the Danish fleet was daily expected. A ship-load of powder had already arrived from Rendsburg, and a number of large casks stood ready well calked and pitched, in order to be provisionally used instead of the still unfinished caoutchouc-bags. These casks were as quickly as possible filled with powder, provided with fuses, and anchored in the rather narrow channel in front of the bathing establishment in such a way that they were buoyed twenty feet under the surface of the water. The firing-wires were carried to two covered points on the shore, and the course of the current so disposed that a mine must explode if at both points simultaneously contact was made.  At both places of observation upright rods were set up and the instruction given, that contact must be made, if a hostile ship took up a position in the direct line of the rods, and remain made until the ship had again completely removed from the right line. If contact of both right lines were at any moment simultaneously made the ship would be exactly over the mines. By experiments with small mines and boats it was ascertained that this exploding arrangement acted with perfect certainty. 

Later in the war the casks were replaced with “caoutchouc” india rubber bags and Siemens used the casks as command initiated land based IEDs to protect the fortifications around Kiel. One of these detonated prematurely, as follows:

The rest of the men I had collected in the fortress-yard to distribute them and exhort them to bravery, when suddenly before the fort-gate rose a vast fire -sheaf. I felt a violent compression succeeded by a violent expansion of the chest: the first sensation was accompanied by the clatter of broken window-panes, and the second by the elevation of the tiles of all the roofs to the height of a foot and their subsequent fall with a dreadful din. Of course it could only be the mine, whose explosion had produced the mischief. I thought at once of my poor brother Fritz. I ran to the gate to look after him, but before I reached it he met me uninjured.

He had prepared the mine, set up the battery on the terre-plein, connected the one igniting wire with the one pole of the battery and fastened the other to the branch of a tree to have it ready to hand, and was about to announce this when the explosion occurred, and the atmospheric pressure hurled him down from the rampart into the interior of the fort. The rather violent wind had shaken the second firing-wire from the tree, causing it to fall just on the other pole of the battery and so producing the explosion.

Incidentally the same technique for sighting of targets was subsequently used in the US Civil war.

As an aside the scientific genes ran strong in the Siemens family. Werner’s younger brother was a remarkable engineer who emigrated to England, adopted British citizenship and became knighted as Sir William Siemens for his contributions to science. Another brother, Carl, an entrepreneur,  worked in Russia developing the Russian telegraph system.  He was ennobled for this by Tsar Nichlas II.

So a number of industrial dynasties, (Colt, Nobel and Siemens) all had beginnings based on the development of IEDs….

 

 

Update on Wednesday, September 26, 2012 at 1:50PM by Roger Davies

Just to clarify in terms of the relative dates of inventions:

Samuel Colt demonstrated  a working electrically initiated water borne mine in 1841.

Werner Siemens’s Kiel devices seem to have been independently invented in 1848.

Immanuel Nobel seems to have taken Siemens’s idea and created contact fuzing in 1853.

…or thereabouts….

Colt’s IED’s were not brought into service in the US because it was objected to by then Congressman John Quincy Adams who scuttled the project as “not fair and honest warfare” and called the Colt mine an “unchristian contraption”  But such mines were later used extensively in the Civil war.

Update on Friday, September 28, 2012 at 6:15PM by Roger Davies

Ok, there’s another man in the mix for earliest electrically initiated sea mines. Engineer in Chief Schilder of the Russian Navy in the 1830s.

 

 

Update on Friday, November 2, 2012 at 10:52PM by Roger Davies

And another  even earlier Baron von Schilling was making electrically initiated command sea mines and land mines for the Russians in 1812.

2010-2020

The media and terrorist bomb making

There’s an interesting NPR article here about how the media report bomb making details.  The general thrust is that the genie is already out of the bottle and if a terrorist wants to make a bomb he doesn’t require education or prompting from press reporting to be able to make the final step.  As readers of this blog will know I don’t hold the press in high regard anyway for reporting useful facts in this domain!  (Note the comment from the CNN expert who clearly doesn’t know the difference between a fuel component in an explosive and an “accelerant” component in an incendiary.)   In general I would hope the point that making the public more aware of precursors is working – several recent cases have been reported to the police to start with by retailers of fertiliser or Hydrogen Peroxide who were suspicious of people buying the material from them.

Despite that I’m still a little amazed that in incidents such as the Glasgow airport incident and the Times Square effort that well educated terrorists mounted an attack with large devices that were never going to “detonate” in a million years. Wishful thinking gets you a long way but not far enough. It indicates strongly that these were lone wolf attacks without the training and  resources of an effective terrorist organisation behind them… which is good.  There is another argument though… from a terrorist’s perspective both attacks “succeeded” in terms of raising awareness of their cause…..Discusss…

1910-1920

A Train Of Thought

A bomb on a railway line in Russia yesterday, 27th November, causes me to bounce, in a mind map sort of way along a series of thoughts. Let me try and replicate this below with, excusing the pun, a progression of thoughts in a train. I’ll put a link or two at each “carriage” so you can dig detail if you wish. I’m limiting my thoughts to bombs under train tracks and not bombs on trains.

The explosion yesterday appears to have derailed the train, killing at least 26 people. Interestingly there was a second explosion some hours later a short distance away – details are not yet clear.

Devices placed on railway lines, detonated as the train passes aren’t new in Russia. One occurred in 2007. Two Chechen terrorists were charged with the crime.

Earlier in Russia’s history trains were attacked by IEDs by other terrorists. Tsar Alexander II was the target of an IED attack in 1879 when the Narodnaya Volya terrorist group attempted to attack his train by placing explosives under the railway Livadia to Moscow, but they missed the tsar’s train. The Narodnicks attacked the Tsar seven times, finally killing him in 1881.

One of history’s best train bombers, arguably, was Lawrence of Arabia, famous for attacks on the Turkish controlled railways in Arabia during the ”Arab revolt”. This excerpt from a letter to fellow officers from Lawrence.

In a letter to fellow officers describing one of his daring raids on a Turkish train, Lawrence vividly captures the excitement he felt fighting in the desert. The train, he wrote, “had two locomotives and we gutted one with an electric mine. This rather jumbled up the trucks , which were full of Turks shooting at us. We had a Lewis and flung bullets through the sides. So they hopped out and took cover behind the embankment and shot at us between the wheels at 50 yards.Then we tried a Stokes gun, and two beautiful shots dropped right in the middle of them. They could not stand that (12 died on the spot) and bolted away to the East across a 100-yard belt of open sand into some scrub. Unfortunately for them, the Lewis covered the open stretch.”

In other conflicts too, IED shave been used against trains. The diagram below is of an IED recently researched by a colleague in South Africa dating from the Boer war and was a Boer IED used to attack trains. The device uses the trigger of a rifle which is pressed when a train travels over it.

EXTRACT FROM PAGES 25 & 26 – TO THE BITTER END BY EMANOEL LEE

This incident highlights the Boers’ success in wrecking trains, which plagued Roberts and Kitchener throughout the war.  No train was safe.  At first they were derailed by setting off dynamite as the train passed.  The attackers had to lie next to the line to light the fuse.  This was highly dangerous, and the Boers subsequently developed a safer method of stopping trains without injuring passengers or damaging the supplies they needed.  Old Martini-Henry rifles (for which there was no ammunition) were prepared by sawing off the butt behind the breech and removing the barrel a few inches in front of it.  The trigger-guard was the removed and the breech opened.  They inserted a cartridge without a bullet in the breech and placed a dynamite cartridge in the shortened barrel.  Stones were then removed under the rail to make a hole, which was packed with dynamite.  The mutilated breech of the rifle was then placed upside-down on top of the dynamite with the trigger just touching the rail.  When a train passed, its weight made the rail sag and set off the trigger.’

 

Jumping back to modern times, and to demonstrate the potential vulnerability of rail systems, the terrorists responsible for the Madrid train bombings were believed to have planted a device under the tracks of a Madrid express train to carry out a subsequent attack but they all died when their safe house was discovered before this follow on attack could be launched.  The 12kg device was found on April 2 2004 on the Madrid to Seville express line. Other islamist/Al Qaeda plots focused on train tracks are numerous.

In France a few years ago there was a bizarre extortion plot threatening trains that soaked up thousands of hours of track searching by the police.

Elsewhere, a wide variety of groups around the world have attacked train tracks and the trains that run on them. Northern Ireland, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc etc,  Here’s a couple of reports  from India both in the last two weeks which demonstrate how commonplace such attacks are:

I think this ‘train of thought’ technique works quite well – please feel free to add your own carriages of related material – remember this thread is explosions of tracks to attack trains not bomb on trains.

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