Congreve rocket

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Image:Congreve rockets.gif The Congreve Rocket was a British weapon designed by William Congreve in 1804.

History

The British had become interested in the concept following the use of rockets against their troops by Tipu Sultan in India in the 1790s. Several inventors made attempts but the design of Congreve was accepted following a successful demonstration in 1805. They were first used against the French fleet at Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1806, fired from specially designed boats. They were used throughout the Napoleonic Wars although a specialist "Rocket Troop" was not formed until 1812, first seeing action at the Battle of Leipzig.

Design

The rocket was made up of an iron case of black powder for propulsion and either an explosive or incendiary "cylindro-conoidal" head. The warheads were attached to wooden guide poles and were launched in pairs from half troughs on simple metal A-frames. The original rocket design had the guide pole side-mounted on the warhead, this was improved in 1815 with a base plate with a threaded hole. They could be fired up to two miles (3 km)—the range being set by the degree of elevation of the launching frame—although at any range they were fairly inaccurate and had a tendency for premature explosion. They were as much a psychological weapon as a physical one, for they were rarely or never used except alongside other types of artillery. Congreve designed several different warhead sizes from 3 to 24 pounds (1 to 10 kg). The 24 pound (10 kg) type with a fifteen foot (5 m) guide pole was the most widely used variant.

The weapon remained in use until the 1850s, when it was superseded by the improved spinning design of William Hale. In the 1870s the rockets were adopted to carry rescue lines to vessels in distress superseding the mortar of Captain Manby and rockets that had been in use since the 1830s.

Congreve Rockets in popular culture

It was the use of Congreve rockets by the British in the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the U.S. in 1814 which gave the line referring to the "rockets' red glare" in The Star-Spangled Banner.

Congreve rockets are also a heavy artillery unit unique to the British in the game Age of Empires III.

The Congreve System was, fictionally, trialed by Richard Sharpe when a Rocket Troop under Lieutenant Gilliland in Sharpe's Enemy and appear briefly in Sharpe's Waterloo.