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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.
For the first time ever my old university is mentioned on Slashdot. I'm so happy!
The Guy Fawkes day was a frightning day for all of us British. Had it turned out differently, things would be different today. Why must we worry about the negative what ifs of history, instead of focusing on the future?
He has been the only person to go the parliament with honest intentions
CJC
*If* he was an expert,
*If* he had it packed in
_Then_ it would've had same effect as TNT
(and so blasted about a km big hole)
So this is a GOOD model.
yada yada.
Seriously, the assumptions they have made are just too far-fetched. It sounds like someone thought of this idea - hey what would've happened if.. -- and then did some calculations, and then put it in a sensational manner to get press.
As Dick Feynman would say, this is something like Cargo Cult Science - no true scientific backing for this
And let's not forget the South Bank ;-)
Experts at the Slashdot labratory have worked out for the first time the true extent of the possible damage to the University of Wales in Aberystwyth's web server due to the posting of a story about Guy Fawkes
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
err....it would have been a major twin-towers scale disaster, London was one of the biggest cities in the world at that stage, and westminster palace was almost at the centre.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
Not much to destroy? Only the newly fledged parliament and all the MPs. It would be like blowing up the Senate building with all the people in it. Sure there wasn't much else around but this may have completely changed the course of British history.
BBC has a nice website about it too. (much more informative)
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
True, but actually the effects of a large gunpowder explosion in the London of 1605 would likely be a lot more devastating than you, or the article, suggest.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
the 2,500kg of gunpowder Guy Fawkes was found with, would be equivalent to the same amount of TNT today
So TNT is no better then gunpowder? What is so special with this guys gunpowder?
Question authorities
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!
He said the physicists used the weight of explosive to work out how it would affect its surroundings.
"We know that the more explosive we have the more energy will be released when the charge is set off.
"From the pressure pulse generated by the explosion, we can tell if windows are going to be smashed or if whole buildings will be demolished," he said.
He explained that the further from the blast the lesser the effects until only a faint bang is audible.
Obviously they had their top minds working on this.
The government's moral compass is controlled by GPS.
In times of crises, they alter it to suit their needs.
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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erm... no. Gunpower is the saltpeter mixture, TNT is tri-nitro-toluene, which is completely different. More like nitroglycerene if i recall.....
"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.
It qould have destroyed the Houses of Parliament, including all the MPS, the Lords and the King who were there for the state opening of parliament; Westminster Abbey; and the main royal palaces of Whitehall and St James's (Buckingham wasn't built yet). So the effect on the government & ruling class would have been devastating.
On the other hand, the main commercial, shipping and population centre of London at the time was the City of London, which is a couple of miles from Parliament (technically in the City of Westminster), so the direct effect on London's population would have been small. The knock-on might have been huge, though. Just as 9/11 may have ended lower manhattan's dominance of the finance sector in NYC, it's possible that London's importance as a trading centre would have been seriously dented.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
*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.
> It would be like blowing up the Senate building with all the people in it.
Huh? Our Senators are cowards who stay at home and have 'voice votes' when its time to pay their owners. See DMCA vote or yesterday's 87 billion Iraq vote. Almost 90 senators stayed home for the Iraq vote.
Sorry to get OT, but voice votes are as close to a bomb as far as democracy is concerned.
If anyone's interested in other results of conventional explosions, take a look at the texas city explosion in 1947 when a ship carrying fertilizer (supposedly, there is some debate about whether there was more behind it) detonated, or the fauld explosion in the UK in 1944 where 3670 tonnes of stored bombs exploded underground
Or the Usenet group soc.history.what-if :T F-8 &oe=UTF-8&group=soc.history.what-if
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=U
What's wrong with that? I hate vasts! Out with the vasts!
(Apparently, you're history buffs, but not spelling buffs.)
Please help metamoderate.
"Devasted"- To make un-vast, ie to reduce in vastness. To smallify.(qv)Unbiggen.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
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.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
It's a school of whales, not a university, you insensitive clod!
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
Actually in 1605, Parliament was on the periphery of London. Back in those days, London was still concentrated around the original "City of London" -- a few miles downstream from Westminster. Almost the entire population lived and worked in or just outside "the City" (today it's the financial district of London). Linking the Houses of Parliament and the City was the Strand, which was lined by aristocrat's mansions, and (nearer to parliament) Whitehall, then the site of the main royal palace. So the devastation would have barely affected most of London's buildings or population.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
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.
Not even close. TNT is "tri-nitro toluene", is a pale yellow crystalline, aromatic hydrocarbon compound that melts at 81 C. It is way more stable than nitroglycerine (not related to gunpowder either). The specific combustion energy of TNT is 4.6 MJ/kg. I'm not sure what gunpowder formula Fawkes used, but I doubt that it could have been as effective as TNT.
Or 1,250 really, really fast CD-Rs.
Money for nothing, pix for free
that is a stupid question
What if RMS was sane?
that is a much more sensible question, but asked in a profoundly stupid way
I moved to London recently, but no one has been able to answer my question about Guy Fawkes with certainty: Are Londoner's celebrating because Fawkes tried to blow up parliament, or because he was caught before he could?
An explosion of this magnitude (over 2.5 kilotonnes of TNT) did explode in a city back in 1917. Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada was devestated by an explosion of a munitions ship on its way to Europe. The explosion killed almost 2000 people, injured over 9000 and rattled dishes about 300 km away. The explosion was so large, it was actually studied by Oppenheimer and his crew as a model of how to deliver the atomic bomb. From this, they determined that damaged is greatly enhanced when the bomb is exploded above ground. If you want to find out more, just go here.
Technically we are celebrating the failure of a plot to bring down the government (King+Parliament) by means of an explosive nature.
TNT, or tri-nitro-toluene, is a high explosive. It detonates, producing a violent shock wave.
High explosives are more violent in their effects than low explosives. That's why they are so popular with the military. They do a better job of breaking things.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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?
> Obviously they had their top minds working on this.
That's the first thing that came to my mind, too. I think he's also a founding member of the Royal Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things.
Back in WW2, the RAF had a huge ammo depot called the Fauld.
g e2_lge.j pg
l dc rater.htm
e r. htm
On November 27, 1944, there was an accident and it blew up.
This is the supposedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in recorded history.
3670 tons of bombs went up in an explosion that was seismically recordable in Casablanca
The crater was half a mile across.
78 people killed.
A photo:
http://www.historicairphotos.com/g_uk/ima
Some informative links with other photos:
http://www.carolyn.topmum.net/tutbury/fauld/fau
http://freespace.virgin.net/kehla.barnes/disast
"In one of the more peculiar of English habits, Guy Fawkes is celebrated with his own day of national remembrance for his role in a failed scheme to dispose of King James I and the House of Lords. You'd think they'd celebrate the foiler of the attempt rather than one of its enactors, but then "1st Earl of Salisbury Day" or "Lord Monteagle Day" just don't have the same ring."
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
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.
By todays definition, does this count as a "Weapon of mass destruction" then? As horrible as the damage would been, it seems that phrase is highly overused from the day when it just meant Nukes.
The energy of explosion of TNT is 3.9 MJ/kg while black powder has 2.8 MJ/kg. Black powder is low-explosive. It rather burns quickly than explodes so it is usually not used as an explosive. However, large amounts of black powder (especially well packed) can explode and the effects can be comparable to TNT (but never equal to).
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
My BS detector needle is hugging the high end again!!!!
FWIW, a high explosive is one where the detonation wave exceeds the speed of sound in the explosive so that it blows up, so to speak before it flies apart. High explosives do not need compression, but low-explosives do. This is why black powder goes off in a phut unless it is compressed so that it doesn't fly apart until all parts are reacting.
See my journal, I write things there
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?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Centre for Explosion Studies!! Now there is a cool major.
Bob: Hi, what's your major?
Jane: Theater. How about you?
Bob: Explosion Studies.
Jane: Wow, that is soooo cool. Wanna go out tonight?
Doesn't work that way with CS I can tell you. Seriously, was there ever a cooler thing to major in? I would have even dropped out of CS to be able to blow things up. They also get to study all the great explosions of all time.
I wonder what kind of job Explosive majors get? Cool stuff like special effects, building demolition, pyrotechniques, rodent control. I think I missed my true calling in life.
Your friend and well-wisher
m0smithslash
http://www.ferociousflirting.com
I also understand that Brits seem to have tossed out the whole Nov 5th thing for the more commercial American import of Halloween There's a typo there. What you meant was: I also understand that Brits seem to have tossed out the Halloween thing for the more commercial American import of US Halloween ... for indeed Hallowe'en (all hallow's[saints] eve) has been celebrated in Scotland and the north of England for generations.
Children would dress up and go round houses telling jokes, singing songs and reciting Spike Milligan in exchange for sweets, fruit and nuts. Valid enterprise through the dramatic arts.
Of course, imported television programmes put an end to that.
Now "kids" go down the "sidewalk" knocking on doors and saying "Trick or Treat", which is roughly equivalent to "nice car -- shame if anything should happen to it".
And of course we import those nasty sickly pumpkin things (what an export that must be for the ol US of A) instead of using the traditional housing for a halloween lantern: a turnip. And no, it's not called a swede -- it's a turnip.
Hal.
(Grumpy old twentysomething.)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
What if the French won the war?
I think you meant: What if the French won a war
I'm guessing to get a degree there you simply have to be alive at the end of the programme.
Anybody want a peanut?
Kind of does but it's more external association. If someone said that was a drawing of John Locke, for example, no one would notice.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
There's some extra verses to the traditional rhyme that you don't ordinarily hear (for non Brits, it usuall finishes at 'should ever be forgot').
:)
Remember, remember,
The Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot;
I see no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot,
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes,
'Twas his intent
To blow up the King and the Parliament;
Three score barrels of powder below
Poor old England to overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and lighted match
Holler Boys, holler boys make the bells ring,
Holler boys, holler boys, God save the King.
And what shall we do with him?
BURN HIM!
I attended the celebrations in Lewes, Sussex a few years ago where a crowd gathers in the town square late at night to recite the rhyme. IIRC the locals all seemed to know even more verses that went on about hanging, drawing and quartering him...
Would have gone again this year, but the Warchowski brothers interfered with my plans
Yea, like that dammned butterfly that flaps its wings in Brazil and fucks up the weather in Scotland...
Damn, that little bug is working overtime.
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!
My favorite limerick (prompted by the fact that the university that the professors are from is the University of Aberystwyth):
There was a young girl from Aberystwyth
Who took grain to the mill to get grist with.
The miller's son, Jack,
Laid her flat on her back
And united the organs they pissed with!
(Apologies to anyone from what I am sure is a very nice town, but I couldn't help passing this one on!)
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313