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!
Having felt the dragons breath many times I found this very interesting.
I may be able to help you with the translation. As a frenchman, I know old French can be a pain to understand. I think you can find my email in my post submission.
To be clear "the Basket of fruit and eggs" IED wasn't used in 1803, but I think other IEDs described in this 1630 book were. I'll post analysis of that in a coming weeks.
Just a thought but "Wheel locks" were not cheap or plentiful so this would have been an expensive" toy" to build ?
Leslie Payne
Leslie, yes very possible it was expensive – but:
a. By 1630 wheel-locks were largely being replaced by flintlocks (invented 20 years or so prior to 1630 – so there might be a few spare.
b. the book doesn't claim to be practical – essentially they are "designs" not necessarily practical ones.
The savage practical joke has changed little over time////