In These Times by Jenny Uglow

Author:Jenny Uglow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781466828223
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Rowlandson, Perry’s Dock at Blackwall, 1806

The war prompted many inventions. The artillery had already adopted Colonel Shrapnel’s ‘spherical case-shot’ with its fuse exploding an inner shell, scattering shot as it hit, and Woolwich Arsenal was testing rockets developed by the son of the Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory, which proved to have considerable range but an alarming lack of accuracy. Meanwhile the Admiralty was considering the ‘catamarans’ designed by the American Robert Fulton, twenty-foot-long wooden shells, lined with lead and packed with explosive, worked by a clockwork timer. These were tested off Boulogne in October and November 1804 but then rejected as too risky – and ‘unsporting’. The board also turned to Richard Trevithick, who was at Coalbrookdale trying to get his steam engine to drive a boat. He told Davies Giddy that men from the Admiralty had called on him ‘to know if these engins wd not be good things to go into Bolong to destroy the flotels &c. in the harbour by fire ships … If you think you could get the Government to get it putt in to execution, I wod readily go with the engines and risque the enterprize.’18

Trevithick did go to the Admiralty to talk this through, but the response was slow. After waiting impatiently, he grew tired, and went back to Shropshire to get on with his other experiments. The business of defence could get on without him.

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