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Guy Fawkes' Explosion Would Have Devasted London
Anonymous Coward writes "Experts at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth have worked out for the first time the true extent of the damage Guy Fawkes would have caused if his daring deed had not been foiled on November 5, 1605. " Sorry - history geek/major in me coming out, but this is definitiely one of those major points in history when things Could Have Gone Differently.
Dr Geraint Thomas, head of the Centre for Explosion Studies, who led the research, said that the 2,500kg of gunpowder Guy Fawkes was found with, would be equivalent to the same amount of TNT today.
So, uh...what's the general difference between gunpowder and TNT? I mean, both are a pure form of salt peter and whatnot, basically a normal explosive.
Anyway, I'm also curious as to whether they took the differences in construction into effect, given that in 1605, artitecture was more solid (solid stone/marble) or very much weaker (wood).
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
BBC has a nice website about it too. (much more informative)
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Yeah? So? Where are the facts? It's hardly descriptive. This is really one of those `What-If?' things. They should have just used the What If Machine.
What if SCO wins?
What if Microsoft takes over Google?
What if Gore won the election?
What if Einstein wouldn't have been born?
What if Linus was killed in a car crash?
What if RMS was sane?
What if the French won the war?
What if Bender was really giant?
What if life was more like a video game?
Does it matter?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
I remember reading something somewhere a few years ago that offered proof that Guy Fawkes was framed. Anything to this?
I also understand that Brits seem to have tossed out the whole Nov 5th thing for the more commercial American import of Halloween, but haven't really picked up on the concept, with many kids showing up on pumpkinless doorsteps sans costume.
Seems to me that Guy Fawkes Night would be a much bigger blast!
At may 13th 2000, a fireworks storage facility (located in the middle of a residential area, of all places) in the city of Enschede in the east of the Netherlands went skyhigh. Some general info is here.
Whereas the London event would have been equivalent to 2.5 tons of TNT, the Enschede explosion was estimated as being equivalent to anywhere between 5 tons and 15 tons of TNT (between 2e10 and 6e10 Joules, and at maximum about 1/1000th of Hiroshima in terms of energy). In the event, about 100000 kg of fireworks detonated, set off by a detonation in one of the central containers. The energy in the explosion was estimated by analyzing images of the shockfront wave set off by the explosion.
The result was similar to what has been predicted for London: in Enschede, about 1200 houses were obliterated and 22 were killed.
Fortunately, the event led to changes in legislation and much stricter requirements for such dangerous storage facilities near residential areas.
On a personal note: I was about 6 km from Ground Zero when the event happened, and the sound from the explosion was very, very impressive even at that distance!
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"He [Dr. Thomas] added: "If Guy Fawkes was an expert in explosives and so knew what he was doing and had the gunpowder confined in barrels and well packed-in, it could have been almost as powerful as the equivalent TNT explosion so this is a fairly good model," he said."
The explosion model assumes Fawkes was an expert in explosives and would have packed the barrels really tight instead of just using the barrels as is...so by that logic there would have been more gunpowder there than historical attributed. I suppose it could have packed in there with nails and steel balls but then there's less gunpowder than the model (maybe)
Dampness could have been a factor also, generating heat, fire, and explosive pockets rather than an all out boom.
So, yeah, there could have been a big explosion but the polictical implications would have far outreached the physical damage or collateral damage.
*If* he was an expert,
There's a link at the end of the article where they point out that Fawkes was brought into the plot because...he was an expert in gunpowder.
*If* he had it packed in
This was not a spur of the moment event. There was more than enough time to ensure the gunpowder was correctly placed and packed.
Yes, but the Great Fire didn't turn England back into a Catholic country. The whole of Western history would have been different if old Guido (Guy) Fawkes had succeded. There was more to it than merely destroying property and the government.
Stick Men
The Halifax Explosion is one of the most impressive disasters in history. Often billed as the largest non-nuclear explosion prior to the atomic age, two ships, one loaded with war ammunition, collided right in the middle of Halifax Harbour in Nova Scotia. It exploded, killing over 1600 people. The anchor from one of the ships was found 5 kilometers away. The explosion shattered windows and rang churchbells in my hometown of Truro, over 100 km away.
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Quoting from the article
Bear in mind that even if only a few thousand people died in the initial explosion (there were hundreds of MPs in westminster, plus all the support staff) that there weren't firemen in the same sense as we have now. There would probably have been a fire sweeping london, like Great Fire of 1666:
"On Sunday morning, the 2nd September 1666, the destruction of medieval London began. Within 5 days the city which Shakespeare had known was destroyed by fire. An area of one and a half miles by half a mile lay in ashes; 373 acres inside the city walls and 63 acres outside, 87 churches destroyed (including St. Paul's Cathedral) and 13,200 houses." source
That fire started in a bakery. I think that Guy Fawkes could have done pretty well too.
I recognized that cogent description. My wife wrote it.
The rest of the article is here:
www.bonfirenight.net/gunpowder.php
She was interviewed about Bonfire Night by the Assoc. French Press:
http://tinyurl.com/tnu3 (Yahoo News)
(My wife is a bigger geek than I...Yay!)
What were you expecting?
Particularly the consequences of persecuting a minority within your population.
Some years ago I was given a book about the Gunpowder plot, which sets the context. After the death of Elizabeth I, there was hope among the English Catholics that life would get better. Instead, James I set up what was effectively an inquisition, and appoined Popplewell to turn the screws down even tighter. My family were tucked away in North Yorkshire, and got away with a series of fines, but many English Catholic families had members executed - the English Martyrs. That's why even in today's more ecumenical time I'm not ashamed to sing "Our fathers chained in prisons dark were still in heart and conscience free".
Yes, a splinter group decided to resort to violence, and yes that was totally unforgiveable, but there is a lesson which should not be ingored.
Dunstan Vavasour
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
what defines an explosive?
I believe that any compound or chemical which has speed of oxidation that exceeds the speed of sound within the medium itself constitutes an explosive due to the formation of a concussive shockwave. Ignoring nuclear nasties, this lets out CO2 bombs and such and confines itself to chemical reactions. However, the fact that the rate of deflagration (burning) of gunpowder confined in a moderately compressed form such as a wooden shipping barrel WILL give a heck of a concussive effect (personal experience with empty grain silos attest to this) would seem to shut down the theory that a simple deflagrant is anything to laugh at in its proper form. True, a higher rate-of-propagation gives a higher "brisance", or shockiness to the explosion, but sometimes you just want lots and lots of KE with little shock, such as in mining or loosening rock for a quarry. Then, you WANT a low explosive. You don't want powder, you want pieces. in other words, Fooey. Blooie!
Oi... I studied software engineering at Aberystwyth, who at the time were one of only three universities in the UK offering such a course. They may have terrible facilities for a lot of things, but their computer science departments and robotics labs are pretty damn impressive.
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
As to the response, well, we have a good parallel for that, don't we? Guy Fawkes launched a religiously motivated attack at heart of the the "infidel" symbol of power. So did Usama bin Laden, and given what happened there, in the context of the times another knee-jerk purge of English Catholisism would almost certainly have ensued.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
It has been surmised by some historians that James' aides, and not Guy Fawkes, planted the explosives only to have them found. The English people were pretty sceptical of a mostly-Catholic Scot ruling their country (remember that because of the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France, the Scottish nobility was about 90% French as every Scottish king married a French princess for many generations, and the French princesses were all Catholic), and James I of England needed to prove that he was (1) not Catholic but rather C of E; and (2) primarily James I of England and only secondarily James VI of Scotland.
So anyway, some surmise that his advisers knew nothing would prove his non-Catholicism better than some Catholic zealot trying to kill him. Of course that was the result, that the C of E English largely accepted James I until his death as loyal both in terms of religion and nationality. Of course things went a little differently for his son (and grandson too)...
As a European historian, I've always found Stuart England and its brief reprieve during the Commonwealth to be the most fascinating part of English history. Perhaps it's because they were just so untrustworthy and untrusted...
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
How it would have effected the Pilgrims sailing from Plymouth, given that Plymouth is a couple of hundred miles from London (I don't know how far exactly I'm a Northerner) is debatable. However if the Pilgrims hadn't sailed it would have meant that Amercicans would have had to make up some other myths about the founding of their country.
No but, yeah but, no but...
They aren't always that dramatic. Fate can turn on some pretty small things. I was in a contemplative mood recently, and I traced back my career path, and the two jobs I'm currently doing are directly attributable to small things that I did or experienced years back. Now, I'm not an important person in the scheme of the world, but I can recognize the small things that had a big impact on my life.
The knock-on might have been huge, though.
Yep: massacre of anyone sharing the same religion as Guy Fawkes, leading to two-sided clash of faiths that would rapidly have drawn in other countries and had an impact far beyond the initial location of the event.
Just like 9/11 in fact.
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
Um. There are two general categories of explosives; low-order and high-order. When someone says "high explosives," they are technically referring to the latter, or they are misusing the term. Different explosive compounds burn at different rates; the gases given off by the burn is what produces the force of the blast. The faster the rate of burn, the more destructive an explosive compound is, all other things being equal. Gunpowder, which is meant to propel projectiles, burns slowly and therefore is low-order explosive. If it burned too quickly, the projectile wouldn't have time to accelerate and get out of the way, and pressure would spike inside the cannon/barrel....BOOM! This is why nobody makes bullets that are propelled by dynamite or C4. TNT, on the other hand, is not intended for this use, but is rather intended to blow things up; it has a much faster burn rate, and is a high-order explosive.
So, with that said, how the hell can 2,500 kilograms of 17th-century gunpowder have the same destructive force as the same amount of 20th-century TNT?
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Last year I saw a documentary about this on the BBC. However, knowing the current standard of BBC journalism, it was probably a pile of fetid dingoes kidneys. They said that it was a plot by Catholics to overthrow the King who was too tolerant of protestantism. Catholics had to go into hiding, hencs the "priest holes" in many houses of the day. Politics and Religion are far too complex for me. I are an injunear after all.
Stick Men
Indeed, Mr. Robertson likely believes (as do many born-agains) that the Catholic Church isn't even Christian and is in league with the Freemasons and the Trilateral Commission to impose the New World Order...
For something on a somewhat related note, a good read is Ruled Brittania by Harry Turtledove.
It's about how Britain would have been IF the Spanish Armada would have been able to get past the British fleet and all those pesky fireboats. After the Spanish defeats the weaker British army, a puppet govt is set up by the children of Phillip I, and the English Inquisition is conducted by the once banished Catholic Bishop of Canterbury.
A really good read for those interested in what could have been.
It was certainly more destructive - no trace was found of at least one locomotive caught in the blast.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Fire.
Friend of mine's brother-in-law burns things for a living. Every day he gets to burn something or blow some shit up and get paid for it. Now and then they'll go out into the desert, build a house, and burn it down.
He's the happiest guy I think I've ever met.