Explosions

Humans first harnessed the power of explosives around 2,000 years ago and have been working to create the perfect bomb ever since.

The Chinese discovered and refined gunpowder for use as celebratory “fireworks” but, within a few hundred years, they had begun to use gunpowder in the first crude explosive weapons of warfare, propelling rats from paper firecrackers to confuse and frighten the enemy.

The Italian explorer, Marco Polo, returned from his expeditions to the Far East 800 years ago with many treasures – among them, gunpowder. The scholars of Europe refined gunpowder, making it increasingly efficient and therefore deadly.

While more artistically minded, inventors created wonderful fireworks, which celebrated the cultural and artistic achievements of the European Renaissance. Military minds developed rockets, cannons and guns that wounded and maimed with ever-greater precision.

It is almost 400 years since the famous English Gunpowder Plot, when Guy Fawkes was caught red-handed with 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament in London.

Guy Fawkes and his Catholic conspirators had planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament on November 5th 1605 – the day of the annual State Opening of Parliament, when every MP would be in attendance at the ceremony, along with King James I.

The quest to create the ultimate explosive continued and the 20th century saw the advent of the ultimate in explosive power – the atomic bomb. Only ever used twice in combat, the effects of the atomic bomb are devastating. 140,000 people were killed when the Hiroshima bomb was detonated during the Second World War.

Huge test explosions were carried out by Russia in the sub-Arctic and the USA in the Pacific’s Bikini Atoll. The Partial Test Ban treaty banned nuclear bomb testing in the atmosphere, underwater or in space from 1963 onwards, but this remains a politically contentious subject.

Some of the planet’s ultimate explosions are:

British and Canadian forces detonating a series of huge mines under German front lines in Belgium during WWI. 10,000 German soldiers were killed.

The accidental explosion of the ammunition ship, Mont Blanc, at Port Halifax in Nova Scotia in 1917, killing almost 2,000 people.

Russia’s test explosion of a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb on the Arctic island of Novaya Zembla in 1961 – the equivalent of five million tons of TNT and the largest nuclear bomb ever exploded.