Erebus, the second rocket-firing ship, had started life as a Royal Navy 18 or 21 gun sloop and had been modified by the removal of her cannon and the installation of “firing racks” for rockets. While never fully effective, this project was important enough to the Royal Navy that the rockets fired upon the fort were fired from a ship specially equipped for the task. Originally designed for use against the wood sailing ships of the day, these rockets, which weighed 32 pounds and were 3.5 inches in diameter, had already been used as a terror weapon in the war to burn down private homes. The ones that were fired upon Fort McHenry were of the incendiary type, hoping to start a fire within the walls of the fort. He had both explosive and incendiary warheads available for the various-sized rockets. While his rockets did considerably better than the ones he had started with, they never reached a point of being truly reliable.Īnother of Congreve’s major innovations was the act of installing warheads onto his rockets. Tip of an early Congreve rocket – Author: Rama – CC BY-SA 3.0 frīut, no matter what he did, the young inventor couldn’t make a rocket that would fly straight and true. This success was from a combination of making larger rockets and packing the gunpowder tightly to create a more consistent burn rate. Through extensive testing, Congreve discovered that 55 degrees was the ideal angle at which to fire the rockets, allowing the greatest range.Ĭompared to the few hundred feet that the Chinese could get out of their rockets, Congreve was reaching distances of up to 3,000 yards, or more than 1.7 miles. They also had a longer tail pole, much like a scaled-up version of the sticks we find on pop bottle rockets today. They came in a variety of sizes, all the way up to one that was 18 inches in diameter! He had experimented with cardboard casings, like the Chinese used, but found them too unreliable and created a metal casing. To start with, they were larger and heavier with a metal casing. There were several things that made Congreve’s rockets different from the original Chinese ones. Congreve rockets from Congreve’s original work By the time the battle of Fort McHenry happened in 1814, he had spent a decade on the project. Starting with the Chinese design, young Congreve sought to make it better, hoping to turn what was nothing more than a terror weapon into something that could be used to sink ships. The ones fired at Fort McHenry were an improved design invented by William Congreve, the son of a British Lieutenant General of the Royal Artillery.
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