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Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2009) 63, 35–56

doi:10.1098/rsnr.2008.0039

Published online 5 January 2009

on August 31, 2018http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/Downloaded from

WILLIAM CONGREVE’S RATIONAL ROCKETS

by

SIMON WERRETT*

Department of History, University of Washington, 315 Smith Hall,

Box 353560, Seattle, WA 98195-3560, USA

This article examines the early development of military rockets devised by the English

inventor and Royal Society Fellow William Congreve in the first decade of the nineteenth

century. Congreve’s efforts to imitate Indian war rockets used against the British in Mysore

are set within a number of local and global contexts that saw increasing attempts by

Europeans to imitate eastern pyrotechnics while applying economic and scientific principles

to reform pyrotechnic production. Congreve viewed his rockets as ‘rational’, operated via an

experimental system that dispensed with the need for any skilled labour, save Congreve’s

own inventive capacities. But when rockets were put to the test, naval officers, artisans and

other inventors all disputed this claim, and this article shows how their various skills proved

indispensable in making the rocket work. Congreve responded by erasing both distant Indian

and local British contributions to the rocket system. The career of Congreve rockets thus

demonstrates how local processes of disciplinary reform around 1800, entailing rational

management based on scientific and economic principles, were intimately connected with

orientalizing tendencies in Britain, which sought to portray distant cultures of the East as

backward and static, justifying imperial domination.

Keywords: Sir William Congreve; Congreve rockets; fireworks;

science in the British military, ca. 1770–1810

INTRODUCTION

When Francis Scott Key wrote of the ‘rocket’s red glare’ in ‘The star-spangled banner’

(1814), he referred to the war rockets of Sir William Congreve. ‘Congreve rockets’, invented

in about 1805 for use against the French fleet threatening an invasion of Britain, were used

extensively in British engagements around the world until the end of the Crimean War.

Despite being recognized as a ‘man of science’ in his own time, Congreve, elected a Fellow

of the Royal Society in 1811 for his work on rocketry, remains less known today than many of

his contemporaries, probably because his military career and royal patronage ill fit the focus

on science and industrialization that historians typically bring to late Georgian and Regency

history. Examining Congreve’s career thus reveals dimensions of early nineteenth-century

scientific culture such as patronage and military science which have tended to be neglected.

35 This journal is q 2009 The Royal Society

[email protected]

http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/

S. Werrett36


Congreve’s rockets, meanwhile, have typically appeared in historical literature only as

antecedents to twentieth-century rockets and missiles; little concern has been shown for

the context or conditions in which they were produced, save that they were imitations of

Mysore war rockets recovered by British troops during the Anglo-Indian wars of the late

eighteenth century.1

This article identifies several important local and global contexts for the development of

Congreve rockets, and uses the career of the rocket to link distinct historical discourses on

science, economy and empire around 1800. Historians have identified key transformations in

relations of natural philosophical and artisanal labour and skill at this time, a period of

industrialization, when factory models, disciplinary technique and scientific knowledge

became increasingly entangled. British dockyards and naval reform are often taken as

seminal locations for the rise of disciplinary reason.2 Here, the institutions of artillery provide

the focus, while disciplinary reforms are shown to have been encouraged by military and

courtly contexts as much as industrial ones. Elsewhere, historians of colonialism have

identified the decades around 1800 with the rise of new European attitudes to non-European

arts and sciences. Michael Adas has demonstrated the ways in which Europeans’ assumptions

of technical superiority shaped their judgements over Africans, Indians and Chinese as being

technically and often morally inferior to themselves, which claims were then used to justify

European imperialist policies. More broadly, following the work of Edward Said, this period

has been identified with growing ‘Orientalism’, as Europeans developed historical and

literary images of Arab, Chinese and Indian cultures as static, sensual and unreflexive,

similarly serving as a pretext and a condition for imperialism.3

In this article it is argued that Congreve’s rocket experiments, as a process of exerting

rational control over artillery through imitations of Indian weapons, entailed both disciplinary

and orientalizing projects, and furthermore that these activities need to be seen as part of a

single process in which both local (British) and distant (Indian) labour and skills essential to

the rocket’s success were made invisible by Congreve in an effort to prove the value of his

rational ‘system’. Besides revealing the diverse skills that made rockets into viable weapons,

the article offers a more synthetic framework for examining rationalizing programmes circa

1800, taking both metropolitan and colonial contexts into account.

The case of Congreve rockets highlights the Indian skills behind European invention, and

also the contingencies of imperial enterprise. As Kapil Raj and Maya Jasanoff have urged,

British imperialism was more contingent and collaborative in this period than traditional

accounts suggest, facing recurrent obstacles and relying on existing local skills and traditions

to build new institutions of fiscal, governmental, technical and scientific control in colonial

settings.4 Geographical divisions between Europe and the East were challenged and remade

in such settings. India played host to British and French enmities, while Indian knowledge

underwrote Europeans’ efforts to map the subcontinent. Daniel Headrick identifies the

problems of transferring European technological projects such as railways and telegraphy to

India in the nineteenth century. Whereas the physical transfer of machinery might be

relatively unproblematic, the cultural transfer of skills for using new techniques was often

restricted or failed.5 In reverse, the transfer of Indian rockets to Europe led to similar troubles,

as Congreve and others sought to replicate distant techniques in novel weapons.

The article is divided into five sections. Under the heading of ‘Contexts’, Congreve’s

activities are identified with a long tradition of British efforts to reconstruct fireworks as

useful and profitable commodities. The timing of Congreve’s imitation of Indian rockets was

not accidental. Congreve rockets emerged at the same time as European attitudes to eastern


37William Congreve’s rational rockets


pyrotechny switched from reverence to disdain in the late eighteenth century, and as

Europeans sought justification for commercial and imperial campaigns into India and China.

Congreve’s were among various attempts by Europeans to imitate and improve on eastern

pyrotechnics at this time.

The immediate context for Congreve’s rocket experiments, described in the second

section, was a series of reforms undertaken at Woolwich Arsenal in London in the second half

of the eighteenth century, led by Congreve’s father. Reformers sought to reduce labour costs

and bring gunpowder and ordnance production and management under the exclusive control

of the Royal Artillery, both projects that Congreve claimed the rocket would also fulfil.

Examining these reforms shows that artillery officers’ attitudes to local artisans closely

resembled emerging attitudes to distant eastern pyrotechnists, whose traditions were

disdained as unprogressive, and whose practices should be imitated, subjected to rational

management and orchestrated into a single system under centralized control. Congreve’s

rocket programme followed exactly this logic, designed as a ‘system’ under the inventor’s

control, which would discipline or remove the need for local trained labour and supposedly

owed nothing to Indians’ skills.

After a short section under the heading ‘Rockets’ considers William Congreve’s

background and engagement with Indian war rockets, the fourth section, ‘Trials’, explores

early experiments with Congreve rockets to consider how the ‘system’ worked in practice.

During a series of trials on the English Channel in 1805–06, naval officers and sailors charged

with firing Congreve rockets at the French fleet stationed off Boulogne repeatedly challenged

Congreve that rockets worked only if they were fired by skilled naval men. Congreve’s claims

to success for his system then hinged on his own skills as a journalist and writer, as a final

examination of publishing in Congreve’s career after the trials shows. In a series of books and

pamphlets Congreve rehearsed the claims of Woolwich reformers and orientalist authors that

the contributions of local skills (in this case naval) and distant arts (Indian rocketry) were

negligible in the success of his rational system of rocketry. Congreve’s election to the

Fellowship of the Royal Society and royal patronage finally helped secure such claims.

Congreve rockets were thus products of, and contributions to, a wider context of

transformations in Britain’s artillery, empire and economy, whose career has consequences

for current ideas concerning science, industrialization and orientalism around 1800, discussed

in the conclusion.

CONTEXTS: RATIONAL PYROTECHNICS, EMPIRE AND ORIENTALISM

Congreve rockets developed during an important era in the history of pyrotechnics, which

saw diverse attempts to make traditional fireworks more ‘philosophical’.6 From the

Renaissance to the mid eighteenth century, courts across Europe staged grand displays of

‘artificial fireworks’ as potent demonstrations of princely power. Typically set off around

elaborate allegorical decorations, court displays included spinning wheels, fiery candles, star-

filled bombs, and rockets, the latter used originally in warfare but primarily in festive

fireworks from about 1600. Performed to music, fireworks typically ended in a great

‘girandola’ or burst of several thousand rockets at once. In the eighteenth century, critics,

particularly in Britain, increasingly attacked court fireworks as expensive and wasteful, while

others offered alternative uses for fireworks. In Britain, natural philosophers proposed more

profitable uses for pyrotechnics. The Newtonian lecturers William Whiston and Humphry

Ditton thus suggested using rockets as signals to solve the longitude in 1714, and the


S. Werrett38


mathematician Benjamin Robins measured the ascent of rockets in 1748 to use them in

surveying and navigation.7 Congreve rockets followed this ‘philosophical’ tradition, seeking

to make fireworks more useful and economic through experimental inquiry.

Simultaneously, Europeans entangled imperial projects with pyrotechnics in various ways

in the eighteenth century. Imperial victories were celebrated with fireworks both in the

European capitals and at the edge of empire.8 The artillerist John Muller urged the British

army to train artillerymen overseas in pyrotechny, ‘for how often does it happen, when a

detachment is sent to the East or West-Indies, where having powder, shells, and shot, it is

necessary . after having gained a victory, to make fireworks for rejoicing.’9 Fireworks could

also challenge empire. In October 1759, Voltaire staged a satirical firework in disdain of his

own nation, celebrating the English conquest of Quebec by General Wolfe with martial

music, ‘savage trophies’ and the illuminated motto ‘Spite to the French’.10

Alternatively, imperial ventures returned novel forms of pyrotechnics to Europe. An

important precedent for Congreve rockets was the ‘Bengal Fire’ or ‘Blue Light’ made with

sulphur and antimony by Indian troops and used to illuminate enemies at night. French and

British troops dismissed these flares on first encountering them in India, but by the late 1750s

‘Bengal lights’ were advertised in Europe, first as festive pyrotechnics, then as military.

After Whiston and Robins’s experiments, rockets and then Bengal lights were used as

signals in surveying. Simultaneously with Congreve’s rocket experiments came proposals to

use Bengal lights as coastal signals warning against French invasion, and to support British

armies in India.11

Indian rockets were thus not the first eastern pyrotechnics to appear in Europe, and

fireworks were of course a Chinese invention, appearing in Europe in the fourteenth century.

The interest in imitating eastern pyrotechnics was more recent. In the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, Europeans often considered Chinese and Indian fireworks superior to

their own, but attitudes had changed by the early nineteenth century. Opinions fitted broader

orientalist attitudes, claiming that eastern culture was stagnant in comparison with European

progress. The change reflected transformations in European empires and economies. Efforts

by the British and French to control territory and trade in the East coincided with metropolitan

attempts to imitate and substitute imports of eastern luxury goods, until Europeans identified

their own goods and production processes as being superior to those of Chinese, Japanese and

Indians, whose work was represented as ‘rude’: static, caught in the past, and lacking the

inventiveness and scientific literacy of Europeans.12 The ‘superiority’ of European arts then

provided a pretext for expanding European trade and dominion. Pyrotechnists participated in

the denigration of eastern arts. In the early nineteenth century, having claimed that Chinese

fireworks were superior to those of Europe, the French artificer Claude-Fortune Ruggieri

changed his mind, proposing that Chinese rockets ‘turned out to be no different from what the

Chinese have made for the last three or four centuries. That convinced me that we in Europe

are much superior to the Chinese.’13 Similar attitudes marked the efforts of Lord Macartney’s

embassy to Peking in 1793, intended to secure trade with the Chinese by a display of

supposedly superior British craftsmanship. Macartney’s retinue included various scientific

instruments and machines intended to demonstrate British mastery in the arts and sciences to

the Chinese emperor, including ‘philosophical fireworks’ devised by the mechanic James

Dinwiddie.14 Success proved elusive. The emperor was unimpressed with British ingenuity

and refused to trade. Subsequently, Macartney’s secretary, George Staunton, printed

descriptions of a complex Chinese firework witnessed on the embassy, the ‘Chinese Drum’, a

container from which different fireworks fell in orderly succession. Europeans set out to




imitate the drum, but in 1805, chemist William Nicholson was still perplexed as to how the

effect was achieved. Only in 1830 did Congreve’s collaborator, the Scots chemist John

MacCulloch, offer an explanation.15

REFORMS: ECONOMIES OF LABOUR AT WOOLWICH ARSENAL

Congreve rockets emerged within these contexts of rationalizing pyrotechnics, imperial

spectacle and the interest in imitating eastern fireworks. Congreve’s distinction was to

develop rationalizing principles to produce military fireworks. Congreve championed a mode

of reason characteristic of ‘industrial enlightenment’, which found its roots in Adam Smith’s

division of labour and attempts by philosophes such as Denis Diderot to render crafts

transparent and subordinate to enlightened management.16 Customary practices and

embodied craft skills associated with private manufacturers were thus to be subjected to

rational analysis, improved through experiments and then reorganized into an economizing

system under the centralized control of the state’s enlightened officials. Systems should be

transparent, demanding no tacit skills and capable of producing maximum utility for

minimum costs. Such principles, together with Congreve’s rockets, emerged in the context of

attempts to reform Woolwich Arsenal along rational and economic lines. Congreve presented

British versions of Indian rocketry as solutions to Woolwich reform projects, already closely

connected to the culture of ‘philosophical fireworks’.

Woolwich Arsenal, known as the ‘Warren’ in the eighteenth century, was situated in east

London on the Thames, and had been home to the Royal Artillery since the 1690s.17

Supplying ordnance to imperial armies around the globe and fireworks for the English court,

the site consisted of a cannon foundry, ordnance stores, the Royal Military Academy for

training young officers, and the Royal Laboratory, which produced fireworks. Here, during

the second half of the eighteenth century and in the context of a difficult war in the American

colonies, artillery officers set out to overhaul practices in gunnery, to improve the

manoeuvrability of ordnance over difficult terrain, and to economize labour and costs in the

process. The principal reformers were Thomas Desaguliers and William Congreve, 1st

Baronet, father of the rocket improver. Their activities also led to increasing integration

between the Royal Artillery and the Royal Society.18

Desaguliers, who served as chief firemaster of the Royal Laboratory from 1748, was the

son of Jean Theophilis Desaguliers, Newtonian curator of experiments at the Royal

Society.19 Thomas sought to put artillery on an experimental footing, and in about 1772–73

he established a Military Society at Woolwich with Congreve senior and others for

experiments on improving ordnance.20 Subsequent reforms sought to reduce costs and

bring artillery production and deployment under stricter control. Both Desaguliers and

Congreve senior designed new lightweight carriages and guns to make ordnance more

manoeuvrable over difficult terrain, and introduced training in handling the new guns.

Lighter carriages were more economical, requiring fewer horses and men to pull them.

Congreve centralized control over artillery deployment, replacing hired labour and horses

used to haul ordnance with a new regiment of Royal Horse Artillery.21 Congreve also

oversaw an extensive programme of reforms in gunpowder production across England,

which reduced the Artillery’s reliance on private powder suppliers in favour of centrally

controlled Crown powder-works.22 For these efforts, Desaguliers became the first artillerist

to be elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, just before his death in March 1780.23

Congreve also collaborated closely with the men of science, studying chemistry with


S. Werrett40


the Scots physician George Fordyce in London, experimenting on charcoal with the

Cambridge chemist Richard Watson, and asking for advice from the Royal Society on his

gunpowder reforms.24

As the later decades of the eighteenth century witnessed changing attitudes to Chinese and

Indian fireworks, so they also saw a growing disdain among British officers for local labour.

‘Orientalism’ applied at home, as reformers represented artisans working in artillery in

similar terms to the Chinese (indeed, Desaguliers and Congreve’s light cannon were among

the gifts sent to the emperor of China with Macartney).25 Watson cast artisans as static and

complacent, and so in need of control and guidance from learned men like himself:

artists themselves are generally illiterate, timid, and bigoted to particular modes ofcarrying on their respective operations. Being unacquainted with the learned, or modern,languages, they seldom know any thing of new discoveries, or of the methods of workingpracticed in other countries. From this apprehension . they acquire a certain opiniatrete[sic], which effectually hinders them from making improvements, by departing from theancient traditionary precepts of their art.26

Similarly, Congreve urged centralized surveillance of private gunpowder manufacturers

because they were ‘too indolent to go into the dirty work of their Mills and have generally left

the Superintendence thereof to artful but ignorant Foremen.’27 As in imperial ventures to the

Far East, representing artisans as incapable of governing themselves warranted rational

management by the learned. Congreve ordered mills ‘to do the most work with the fewest

men and in the least time’.28 Those who failed to meet standards were sacked.29

ROCKETS: WILLIAM CONGREVE AND INDIAN ROCKETRY

The goals, methods and attitudes of Desaguliers and Congreve senior in Woolwich were

continued in the younger William Congreve’s efforts to produce military rockets: indeed, in the

younger Congreve’s case, orientalizing views of the East and efforts to bring local labour under

control became closely integrated. The younger Congreve’s career began after studies of

mathematics and chemistry at Richard Watson’s Cambridge college Trinity, and at the Royal

Military Academy in Woolwich. After studying law at Middle Temple, Congreve set about

editing a Tory newspaper, The Royal Standard, while writing A Second Century of Inventions, an

unpublished compendium of mechanical inventions and speculative history whose accounts

of the arts echoed his father’s centralizing tendencies and disdain for craft traditions.30 Congreve

lamented how the arts continued to rely on ‘the effect or accident of the gradual operations

of artificers’ and proposed mathematical training of artisans in a ‘grand national institution’ as the

only solution.31 In a long historical section, Congreve claimed that the division of labour

had shaped a natural hierarchy in which rational elites, especially military reformers, were best

placed to govern society and the arts to bring progress and prosperity.32 ‘Equality in a State is not

only inconsistent with the Arts but with the Happiness of Man.’33 This was Congreve’s

programme, and such rational principles were next applied to Mysore rockets. After a lawsuit

scuppered The Royal Standard, Congreve senior appointed the hapless graduate to a salaried

position in the Royal Laboratory, in which he had unrivalled access to men and materials.34 Here

the younger Congreve turned his attention to schemes for defending Britain from a looming

invasion by the French fleet stationed at Boulogne, and fixed on the Indian rocket as a solution.

The Indian war rocket that inspired his efforts was a product of military reform in the

armies of Mysore, India, during a period of prolonged war. From 1767 to 1799 the armies of

Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan fought the British, who sought to extend their dominion


Figure 1. A Mysore rocketeer of Haidar Ali, carrying a war rocket, late-eighteenth-century watercolour. (Copyright qV&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London; http://www.vam.ac.uk; reproduced with permission.)(Online version in colour.)



over southern India after gaining control of the east at the battles of Plassey and Buxar. Three

Anglo-Mysore wars culminated in Tipu’s death and British victory at the siege of

Seringapatam in 1799, signalling the beginning of British dominance of the Indian

subcontinent. To combat the British, who from 1780 to 1786 were led by Macartney before

his Chinese embassy, Haidar Ali undertook major reconstructions of the Mysorian army.35

Reforms resembled those in Woolwich, with French artillerists employed to cast ordnance.

An efficient system of cart and bullock transport was established. Tipu added a potent Islamic

ideology to these forces, centring on the symbolic motif of the tiger (Haidar), linking him to

Haidar, sacred cousin of the prophet Mohammad.36 Tipu also established shipbuilding

arsenals, canals, irrigation works and workshops boring tiger-muzzled cannon.37

The use of military rockets, or baana, had flourished in India since the reign of the Mughal

emperor Akbar in the second half of the sixteenth century. Under Haidar and Tipu, production

expanded in Mysore, probably in the fort of Tirthahalli, in the northern part of their

kingdom.38 Rockets consisted of bamboo sticks or wootz steel blades attached to iron cases,

about eight inches long and weighing from six to twelve pounds, charged with one to two

pounds of gunpowder.39 Rocket making was skilled work, undertaken by specialized artisan

castes, whose expertise reflected long Indian traditions of working the high-quality iron ores

and saltpetre deposits found in India.40 By the end of Tipu’s reign, some 5000 Mysorean

troops fired off huge volleys of rockets against the enemy, although, as in Britain, rockets

served other functions besides the military (figure 1).41 Like Macartney, Tipu deployed his

best technologies as diplomatic gifts, sending rockets to the Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid I,

on an embassy to Constantinople in 1783 (unlike the Chinese emperor, the sultan was

impressed and sent a tiger throne to Tipu in return).42 Rockets were also used as a measuring

http://www.vam.ac.uk


S. Werrett42


unit in India, and in Mysore they were subject to the princely practice of ‘name-changing’,

whereby the prince signalled his power by creating new names for things.43 To Mir Miraan,

the commanding officers of his armies, Tipu ‘presented dresses of gold embroidery . and

jewelled gorgets. About this time the sultan changed the names of the different arms, as for

instance . a ban, or rocket, Shuhab.’44

British and French troops returning to Europe from India regularly assessed Indian

rockets, some identifying them as trivial, others as formidable.45 Commentators linked

rockets with orientalizing condemnations of Muslim culture. East India Company servant

Quintin Craufurd, whose Sketches . of the Hindoos (1790) featured Indian rockets on the

title page, proposed that Muslim domination of southern India created ‘an enslaved, ignorant,

and bigotted race of men, whose history . creeps through one continued gloom of cherished

barbarism.’46 Tyranny exerted a ‘baneful influence’ on scientific inquiry. If Indians had

discovered gunpowder before the Europeans, which Craufurd doubted, they failed to invent

the ordnance to exploit it, relying instead on the ‘less ingenious invention of the rocket’. Even

with ordnance available, Indians rejected change: ‘being accustomed to [the rocket], they

may still continue to use it.’47

These reports led to attempts at replication, perhaps assisted by the presence of Indian

rockets in Europe. Indian skyrockets were already on show as oriental exotica in London

as early as the 1750s, and after the siege of Seringapatam several Mysore rockets were

brought to London and displayed as trophies in Woolwich’s Royal Military Repository.48

Some time before his death in February 1780, an ageing Thomas Desaguliers experimented

with war rockets, although no details are known.49 In the 1790s, the French pyrotechnist

Claude-Fortune Ruggieri also tried replicating Indian war rockets, collaborating with a

French officer returned from Mysore. His efforts stalled during the revolutionary wars, but

Ruggieri later claimed French priority in the invention, ‘which we do not owe to the

Chinese, much less to the English.’50 If these replications were attempts to copy specimens

of Indian rockets returned from Mysore, they probably failed because Indian rockets were

highly refined, using gunpowder mixtures designed to burn effectively in Mysore’s humid

environment, and containing ingredients of a high quality, particular to India.

Congreve never identified the source of his interest in rockets, erasing any debt to local or

distant inventors. Congreve was also quick to dismiss Indian rockets, which he represented as

another unchanging eastern art, negligible compared with his own rockets devised through

experimental science. The capacity of his rockets, ‘the results of much thought and

experiment’, were thus ‘infinitely beyond any thing ever before conceived . or known in

India, where they have been used . time out of mind. But what are the Indian rockets

compared to our own?’51 Congreve may have witnessed Indian rockets in the Woolwich

Military Repository, and probably did so. In any case, Congreve’s rocket experiments

followed directly from his father’s and Desaguliers’s reforms at Woolwich. As the reformers

had sought to reduce reliance on hired labour in gunpowder production and artillery haulage,

Congreve identified the rocket as a way to eliminate labour from artillery altogether,

explaining in 1807 that

The rocket carcass is not only fired without re-action upon the point from which it is

discharged, but is also unencumbered with the necessity of heavy ordnance to project it, as

is the case with every other carcass. These are the points which first induced me to

speculate upon it. . It is ammunition without ordnance, it is the soul of artillery without

the body.52


Figure 2. Congreve 32-pounder incendiary rocket (top); explosive rockets with side-mounted sticks (bottom). Theseare larger than Congreve’s earliest rockets, which weighed from six to eight pounds. (Copyright q National Air andSpace Museum, Smithsonian Institution (SI 2008-2099); reproduced with permission.)



Because rockets had no recoil, there was no need for ordnance or carriages on which to

mount them, nor for the skilled labour needed to do so.

Installed at Woolwich, Congreve began developing the new war rocket following

Desaguliers and his father’s experimental methods, seeking to extend the range of common

skyrockets while subjecting local pyrotechnic artisanry to further rationalization.53 Congreve

depended on traditional pyrotechnic skills and privileged connections to make these trials.

Skyrockets bought from the London firework makers proved of limited range, but after his

father’s superior ordered Royal Laboratory fireworkers to make larger rockets for trial,

Congreve extended their range to 2000 yards. This, he reckoned, was sufficient to attack the

French port of Boulogne. Congreve also applied rational principles to the use of rockets,

making them suitable for an attack on Boulogne. The result was a new form of philosophical

firework, the ‘rocket system’, consisting of scaled-up rockets modified to carry incendiary

explosives in the nose cone. Some 30 feet long including the stick, the rockets weighed from

six to eight pounds (figure 2).54 Congreve argued that the rocket would work only if all

aspects of its deployment were subject to the rational system of the inventor. Thus, war

rockets were to be fired at sea from frames on small flat-bottomed rafts or ‘launches’, also

devised by Congreve. Congreve claimed this as a ‘universally effective system’ based on the

‘best principles’.55 Because the rocket eliminated any need for heavy gun carriages, it

was ‘a measure of economy both as to men and money’.56 Rational instructions should

make the system work, with no need for embodied skills; ‘it may be made and adapted by

any workman’.57

Assessment of the rocket system demanded trials at sea and collaboration with the

Royal Navy, whose officers would take the rockets out to the English Channel to fire

them at the French ships stationed off Boulogne. In the process of making these trials,


S. Werrett44


however, naval officers disputed Congreve’s ‘system’. Although Congreve was sure that

inventors’ principles would secure the rockets’ success, naval officers argued that skilful

boat-handling and artful judgement were more important. In the event, nautical skills proved

critical to the rockets’ success, but just as Indian skills in rocketry were erased in Congreve’s

accounts, so too were the contributions of the navy men, as Congreve sought to credit

his system.

TRIALS: DISPUTING SKILLS IN THE ROCKET SYSTEM

Following these trials reveals the labour implicit in making rockets work. Even before the

first trials Congreve faced opposition. The navy was also being subjected to reforms at this

time, by men such as George Fordyce’s son-in-law, Samuel Bentham, whose introduction of

block-making machinery by Henry Maudslay at Portsmouth docks was designed to work

‘independently of the need for skill or manual dexterity in the workman’.58 Naval officers had

little time for Bentham’s or Congreve’s ideas. George Elphinstone, Viscount Keith,

commander of the North Sea fleet and a veteran of sea campaigns, wrote to the Navy

comptroller, Charles Middleton, Lord Barham, ‘Mr. Congreve, who is ingenious, is wholly

wrapt up in rockets, from which I expect little success, for Mr. Congreve has no idea of

applying them professionally.’59 Keith agreed with many other navy officers that personal

judgement and experience, not newfangled rational principles, were the keys to military

success. They disliked any systematization of naval practices or production: ‘all formality .only tends to keep the main point out of question and to give knaves and fools an opportunity

to justify themselves on the credit of jargon and nonsense.’60

To make his rational system work, Congreve relied on powerful patronage. Congreve was

a client of the Prince of Wales, later George IV, and often presented projects to the prince at

Carlton House on Pall Mall or at that archetypical orientalist site of the early nineteenth

century, the Marine or Royal Pavilion in Brighton. Originally built as a Palladian villa in

1787, from 1803 revisions of the pavilion transformed it into a mock Mughal temple, with

chinoiserie interiors inspired by accounts of the Macartney embassy.61 Like Congreve’s

rockets, the pavilion imitated the East with science and engineering. Indian turrets thus rested

on an innovative cast-iron structure, while the recipe for chromatic yellow and red paint used

in the chinoiserie interiors was worked out with chemistry. At the pavilion, Congreve showed

the prince plans for imitating Indian rockets and used the prince’s patronage to ‘ride over’

opposition. After George ordered William Pitt to pay ‘immediate attention to the rockets

adoption’ the Prime Minister turned to Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, his Minister of

War, to organize sea trials.62

In autumn 1805, Congreve and Castlereagh sent the rockets out to sea. Castlereagh ordered

10 specially designed launches to be constructed in Woolwich dockyards, to be fitted out with

standing ladder frames for firing rockets. Each frame would carry 50 eight-pounder rockets

fixed to launch at 558 elevation, which Congreve determined would give them sufficient range

to strike the French ships. Towed to within 2000 yards of Boulogne by gun-brigs, the

launches would be led by a naval officer to a station determined by a survey of the harbour.

From here, according to Congreve’s plans, using leaders fed through gunlocks as fuses

the ten boats . would discharge 500 [rockets] in one flight, which would, by one singleand momentary operation, convey as much carcass matter as could be thrown in four hoursby ten 8-inch mortars; so that the boats need scarcely be five minutes exposed to any fire[before retreating].63




The key phrase in Congreve’s plan was ‘one single and momentary operation’, the firing of

the rockets instantaneously, recalling the tradition of firing a great girandola volley of rockets

in festive royal fireworks. This for Congreve was another critical element in the economy of

his system, because the possibility of firing rockets without ordnance saved time and labour;

‘the principle difference is in the labour, which may be very much reduced when the thing is

properly systematized.’64 Whereas firing shot from mortars on a ship required gunners’ skills

and time to charge and reload, rockets could be fired in one great discharge, without

ordnance, and so by unskilled mariners, maximizing the quantity of ammunition fired in a

fixed time, and minimizing opportunities for the enemy to return fire.

However, when rockets moved out from the laboratory into the field, in this case the

choppy waters of the English Channel, they failed dramatically. An enthusiastic naval officer,

Sir William Sydney Smith, oversaw the first trial. In the event, 12 double canoe launches were

fitted with rocket-firing frames, each carrying 48 paper-case six-pounder and eight-pounder

rockets, a total of nearly 600. The launches sailed from Dover to anchor three miles outside

Boulogne, and on the night of 20 November they made the attack. There were many

conflicting reports of what happened. Opponents pointed to a lack of range and irregularities

in the rockets. Keith reported ‘Congreve rockets could not reach by miles.. The rockets

were fired without effect, some of them burst in our own boats, and none went in the intended

direction.’65 Even Congreve conceded that the attack was a failure, but blamed high winds

and rough seas.66

Critics thus cast Congreve’s plans as over-optimistic and impracticable despite the fact

that they were ‘carried on upon the best principle’.67 Keith claimed that the failure was due to

a lack of ‘professional’ skill needed to handle the boats and rockets in more order. Smith

agreed, supposing ‘there is no use in firing rockets at random in the air at [the French] line.’68

The ‘girandola’ technique of festive rocketry could not be extended to military application.

After the trials, Keith was pleased to report that Smith had ‘confessed the impracticability of

the plan succeeding.’69 Smith informed Barham apologetically, ‘My own opinion . of

Mr. Congreve’s rockets . is that they are a valuable addition to the force of swift-rowing

boats, as the smallest can throw a six-pounder carcass . without being encumbered with the

weight of ordnance.’70 But he pointed to the need for naval skill in managing the weapons:

‘this must be carefully kept and skillfully managed, or there is danger in the application.’71

The conflict of artful skill and rational principles was now to become a major point of

contention between Congreve and the naval officers. After the November escapade, the Navy

Board replaced Sydney Smith with Captain Edward Campbell Rich Owen of the HMS Clyde

(figure 3). At 34 years old, Owen was a veteran of the Navy. At sea since the age of four, he

had served on and commanded numerous ships in the West Indies, North America and around

the British coast. On the Immortalite, Owen had achieved great success in destroying or

capturing French vessels off the coast of Dunkirk and Boulogne.72

Further trials now began at sea, where Owen, in his element, began to erode Congreve’s

authoritative position as it had developed under Smith. Like his father, Congreve believed his

position to be that of an overseer, in complete control of the enterprise he was reforming. This

was why Congreve referred to a ‘system’, over which he presided. ‘I am convinced’, he

argued on another occasion, ‘that the most rapid way to perfection is by experiment entirely

under the control of the inventor.’73 Owen disagreed, and wrote to Keith to complain that ‘he

[Congreve] will consider himself the Commanding . officer as to the mode of employing

the vessels in this attempt.’74 Owen reckoned that such ‘interference’ must undermine the

confidence of sailors who only respected officers for their experience ‘in service’:


Figure 3. Portrait of Admiral Edward Campbell Rich Owen by H. W. Pickersgill, 1849.(Copyright q National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; reproduced with permission.)

S. Werrett46


I know Mr. Congreve has formed plans of attack which can never be realized.. An

attentive observation last year, when a similar plan was preparing, convinced me it could

not be executed in that manner and the failure which followed was wholly the consequence

of the wrong system on which we set out. I . most decidedly approve the rocket as an

auxilliary weapon . but if we wish to use them with effect the means and mode must

always be within ourselves.75

Owen was claiming that for the rocket to work it must depend not on the rational

principles of the inventor but on the practical skills of the sailor. Owen called Congreve’s

‘the wrong system’, and now devised his own method for firing rockets. Congreve had

demanded a single instantaneous discharge of rockets to reduce the time of an engagement

and so its cost. But Owen and Keith argued that the technique was fundamentally




impracticable, and they identified the solution on the basis of their own competences.

Success thus depended on ‘the number of vessels and boats employed’, not the system.76

Spread out in a line, several small vessels would fire rockets in twos over a period, making

it possible to keep the rocket boats steady by skilful handling, because ‘On the water the

machine is never a second in the same position.’77 Rational principles gave way, as Owen

put it, to ‘the greatest order and regularity’ of sailing combined with good discipline and

‘seaman’s courage’.78

Congreve chose the more predictable location of Woolwich Arsenal as the place to meet

these criticisms, conducting new experiments with larger 32-pound rockets ranging up to

3000 yards in the spring of 1806, before stage-managing a spectacular demonstration to Lord

Howick, the new First Lord of the Admiralty.79 Howick was impressed, advising Lord Keith,

‘As the inventor of the weapon, [Congreve] is best instructed in the use of it, and . his

knowledge and judgement seems almost of indispensable necessity to assist Captain

Owen.’80 Owen responded by saying that success by no means depended on the judgement of

the inventor. Congreve’s further presence at the trials was even unnecessary, ‘for as we act in

separate divisions each commander of these ought to be perfect in their work.’81

For Owen, local skills mattered in assessing competence. Woolwich’s stage-managed

shows were no match for seamen’s experience of the Channel seas. He later praised the value

of the ‘local knowledge & long service’ of his men for conducting the rocket trials; ‘to

whatever our want of success in the great object of destroying the flotilla is to be ascribed it

was certainly neither owing to want of judgment, nor of skill in those officers.’82 Keith also

supported Owen’s proposals and lambasted Congreve, replying to Owen, ‘I hope that

[Congreve] has satisfied you that he will never think of . setting his opinion in opposition to

your well attested experience and nautical skill.’83 Keith supposed that Owen should soon be

‘master of the whole plan’.84

The next time that rockets left Woolwich for an attack on Boulogne, on 8 October 1806,

they were under Owen’s command. As night drew in on the Channel, 24 cutters under Owen’s

supervision, fitted with rocket frames, formed the line and fired Congreve’s rockets at

Boulogne. Significantly, the bombardment lasted half an hour, dispensing with Congreve’s

‘instantaneous volley’.85 Once again, reports of the attack varied. The French dismissed it,

one journal proposing that of ‘a hundred incendiary rockets . most . were without

effect.’86 Congreve himself, however, now believed the attack a success, and wrote to

Grenville, First Lord of the Admiralty, to claim that this success proved the viability of his

system. But in so doing Congreve redefined what counted as ‘system’. Discarding the

previously essential idea of instantaneous firing, Congreve instead claimed Owen’s methods

as his own:

The number of rockets thrown was about 400 in less than half an hour & in fact nothing

could succeed the regularity and rapidity of the attack . it is indeed . in this power of

throwing great quantities of combustible matter in a short time, that one principal

advantage of the system exists.87

The ‘short time’ here was critical, because it incorporated precisely the tacit skills that

rational rocketry was supposed to eliminate. But Congreve made no mention of this, and

never referred to the necessity of nautical skills in subsequent public pronouncements on

rocketry. Just as Indian skills were absent from Congreve’s accounts, so were those of the

navy men. Artful boat-handling and judgement disappeared as Owen’s practical success was

turned into a triumph of Congreve’s rational principles.


S. Werrett48


PUBLISHING: ERASING INDIANS, INVENTORS AND ARTISANS

Congreve had succeeded in persuading the government of the technical feasibility of rocket

warfare, seeking, like earlier Woolwich reformers, to erase expensive skills in artillery.

Making rockets work, however, had necessitated hiding, rather than eliminating, skill in

artillery, as Congreve passed over both Indian rocketry and nautical skills in accounts of the

rocket’s success. Congreve’s publications on rocketry provided an important venue for these

arguments. In numerous books and pamphlets on rocketry, appearing from 1805 until his

death in 1828, Congreve sought to overcome two remaining obstacles to the acceptance of the

rocket: moral objections to its use in war, and priority claims from rival inventors. The

acceptance of rocketry thus came to rely on another set of embodied skills: Congreve’s own

experience as a journalist on the Royal Standard, whose publisher, James Whiting,

collaborated with Congreve in his publishing efforts to promote the rocket’s credit. However,

publications further elided both local and eastern skills in rocketry, as Congreve’s critics were

quick to point out.

Patronage remained central to Congreve’s schemes. Congreve’s first pamphlet on

rockets was written in February 1806 and dedicated to the Prince of Wales.88 Here

Congreve made no mention of Indian rocketry or sailors’ skills, and instead focused on

playing up the threat of a Napoleonic invasion, while attempting to justify the use of rocket

bombardments as a mode of warfare. Many officers objected to rocketry on principle, as an

offensive weapon liable to inflict severe civilian casualties. Rockets seemed to make

traditional martial honour and heroism redundant.89 Already in 1805, Horatio Nelson had

written to Castlereagh:

The rockets, if the account of them is true, must annoy their fleet very much; but I depend

more upon hunger for driving them out, and upon the gallant officers and men under my

command for their destruction, than any other invention.90

Congreve responded by emphasizing the honour of rocketry in comparison with traditional

artillery. Rockets were no different from other shells, except in their form of impulsion, and

‘both means are equally open and manly, both equally conducted by a fair and honourable

approach to the enemy’, though only rockets could ‘annihilate’ the Napoleonic fleet.91

Congreve’s claims evidently worked, because after the sea trials the government

officially approved the use of Congreve rockets in military engagements. After a

bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, Congreve collected testimonies of the damage

inflicted and proposed that this was enough ‘to establish the credit of the rocket as a

carcass’.92 The government agreed, and ordered regular rocket attacks, in Baltimore in

1812, at Leipzig in 1813, then on the Barbary Coast and in India.93 Although Congreve

never patented the rocket, numerous people identified him as claiming priority in the

invention, and in the course of these engagements several challenged that priority.

Congreve’s own skills were in danger of being erased from rocketry’s history, and he

responded in A Concise Account of the Origins and Progress of the Rocket System in 1807.

These early critics’ particular claims are unrecorded, but they evidently emphasized Indian

contributions to rocketry, prompting Congreve to make the only pronouncements he ever

made on Indian rockets. Congreve thus accepted that rockets were invented by some ‘heroes

of Chinese antiquity’, while their application in war belonged to ‘the remote ages of the

mogul empire’. However, because no one in England was capable of making them, he

claimed priority in the invention:




The only merit I claim, as the author of the rocket system in this country, is that I haveobtained from the power of the rocket, by a just combination of its parts . ranges, and thepower of carrying weights infinitely beyond any thing ever before conceived . or knownin India, where they have been used . time out of mind. But what are the Indian rocketscompared to our own?94

Congreve’s orientalist response was that his rational rockets were effectively a different

invention from those of Indians, and no one else claimed the invention in Britain. ‘What I

have done, therefore, towards the perfection of this weapon, is as much my own as if the

original invention of rockets in general were mine.’95 In contrast with other inventors of this

period, Congreve did not patent his rocket. A patent would probably have been rejected, and

furthermore Congreve could rely on his patron to provide protection and rewards outside the

patent system. The Prince Regent thus gave Congreve a pension of £1200 a year in 1814 and

the gift of an honorary rank in the Hanoverian Artillery three years later (figure 4).96 In print,

however, Congreve claimed that his not seeking a patent was a sign of his disinterestedness

and his desire to serve the nation in a time of war, ‘unlike the generality of projectors’ and

self-seeking rivals.

One such rival claimant to the invention of rocketry, the Scots chemist Joseph Hume, lost

no time in pointing out how Congreve’s rockets really relied on hidden skills, while his credit

relied on hidden patronage. In 1808, Hume used the Gentleman’s Magazine and The Times to

claim he had submitted plans and drawings for ‘pyrotechnic arrows’ or incendiary war

rockets to the Board of Ordnance in 1803. Hume saw the Board reject his proposals, despite

keeping his plans, only to find Congreve experimenting on rockets in subsequent years. This

prompted the suspicion that the Arsenal had ‘taken undue advantage of me . and have been

nibbling at my inventions.’97 Hume identified exactly the artillerymen’s unwillingness to rely

on outside labour as the cause of his troubles and of Congreve’s success, claiming that

Congreve succeeded only through ‘technical aid and patronage’, which an outsider could not

obtain: ‘I must have been considered as an intruder, a layman, and . quite extra-parochial.’98

Hume also pointed to Indian skills in the development of war rockets, strenuously asserting

Indian rights to the invention in the pages of William Nicholson’s Journal of Natural

Philosophy to counter Congreve’s priority: ‘in the use of rockets as “implements of warfare”

[the Indians] have a prior claim to any man in this country.’99 When Hume then claimed

priority over Congreve, he sought to do so in a manner that revealed the skills implicit in

rocketry, by identifying himself as an improver rather than an inventor of rockets: ‘There is a

most obvious distinction between an inventor and an improver; for improvement depends

upon others, as well as the genius and abilities of him who undertakes the management of the

article to be improved.’100

CONCLUSION

Congreve’s response, in the pages of The Times, reasserted his claims to priority as an

inventor, but Congreve made no further efforts to counter Hume. In 1811 Congreve’s

reputation was further secured by election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, with

several other honours following from his royal patrons.101 As had been the case throughout

his career, royal and institutional patronage, together with a range of Indian, artisanal, naval

and publishing skills, contributed to making the rocket into a viable weapon, and to attaching

Congreve’s name to its invention. This article has unpacked some of these skills and the ways

in which Congreve worked to erase his debts to them during the early stages of the rocket’s


Figure 4. Sir William Congreve, 2nd Bart., by James Lonsdale; oil on canvas, 1812. National Portrait Gallery,London, reg. 982f. The painting shows Congreve in the uniform of a Major General of the Hanoverian ArtilleryRegiment, an honorary rank given to Congreve by the Prince Regent for his invention of rockets. (Copyright qNational Portrait Gallery, London; reproduced with permission.)

S. Werrett50


career. In the process, we have seen how rationalizing programmes, intended to discipline

and economize artillery, simultaneously entailed the exercise of control over both local

and distant skills, justified by assimilating techniques and downplaying or making

invisible the value of those techniques in securing the feasibility and credit of the ‘rocket

system’. Congreve thus minimized the contributions of both Indian rocketeers and British

naval officers—contributions that Congreve’s critics were quick to make visible again. This

was the case in Europe at least, and further research might reveal whether Indian masters

criticized Congreve’s claims to rocketry in the nineteenth century.

To see these processes of orientalizing and discipline in action, this essay has looked away

from the traditional historical focus on Britain’s factories and dockyards to the Arsenal,

whose culture of reform was as pervasive in the late eighteenth century as at any other




location. From the 1770s, Woolwich became a key site for philosophical experiments, labour

rationalization and economies, whose full significance remains to be assessed. Certainly

Desaguliers and Congreve’s rationalizing measures pre-date the naval reforms of figures

such as Samuel Bentham, which began in the 1790s, and may have had an impact on

Britain’s successes in India during the 1790s, and hence on the transformation of the British

Empire subsequently.

Finally, economic and labour reforms in late-eighteenth-century Britain have often been

identified with liberal, private or manufacturing concerns, and have been contrasted with the

conservatism of the Crown and state. Yet in Congreve’s case, royal patronage, family

connections and pyrotechnic tradition proved critical to the success of his rationalizing

schemes. The Prince Regent was a significant supporter of such schemes, also patronizing the

first gas-lighting projects of the German entrepreneur Frederick Winsor, another technology

with roots in ‘philosophical fireworks’.102 Congreve spent much of his later career promoting

gas lighting, and he regularly relied on royal and aristocratic patronage to do so.103 The court

therefore continued to serve as a significant site of philosophical activity well into the

nineteenth century.

NOTES

1 A broad study of the evolving technology of rocketry in the nineteenth century is provided by

Frank H. Winter, The first golden age of rocketry: Congreve and Hale rockets of the nineteenth

century (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1990). Winter also considered ‘The

rocket in India from “ancient times” to the 19th century’, J. Br. Interplanet. Soc. 32, 467–471

(1979). The only substantial study of Congreve’s career remains unpublished. The typescript of

John G. Smith’s biography ‘The two Sir William Congreves’ (1993) is kept in the James Clavell

Library, Royal Artillery Museum, Woolwich.

2 William J. Ashworth, ‘System of terror: Samuel Bentham, accountability and dockyard reform

during the Napoleonic wars’, Social Hist. 23, 63–79 (1998); Simon Schaffer, ‘Fish and ships:

models in the age of reason’, in Models: the third dimension of science (ed. Soraya de

Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood), pp. 71–105 (Stanford University Press, 2004); Greg Dening,

Mr. Bligh’s bad language: passion, power, and theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge University

Press, 1992); Peter Linebaugh, The London hanged: crime and civil society in the eighteenth

century (Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 371–401.

3 Michael Adas, Machines as the measure of men: science, technology, and ideologies of Western

dominance (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1989); Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon,

New York, 1978).

4 Kapil Raj, Relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in South

Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007); Maya Jasanoff, Edge of

empire: lives, culture, and conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (Vintage Books, New York, 2006).

5 Daniel R. Headrick, The tentacles of progress: technology transfer in the age of imperialism,

1850–1940 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1988).

6 Simon Werrett, ‘From the Grand Whim to the gasworks: philosophical fireworks in Georgian

England’, in The mindful hand: inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early

industrialisation (ed. Peter Dear, Lissa Roberts and Simon Schaffer), pp. 325–348 (Edita,

Amsterdam, and University of Chicago Press, 2007); Simon Werrett, Philosophical fireworks:

science, art, and pyrotechnics in European history (University of Chicago Press, in the press).

7 William Whiston and Humphry Ditton, A New Method for Discovering the Longitude both at Sea

and Land, humbly proposed to the Consideration of the Publick, 2nd edn (London, 1715);

Benjamin Robins, ‘Observations on the Height to Which Rockets Ascend’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc.

46, 131–133 (1749).


S. Werrett52


8 See, for example, the account of the ‘Meshianza’ celebrations for General Howe on the Delaware

river in 1778. John McGregor, British America (London, 1832), vol. 1, pp. 63–69.

9 John Muller, A treatise of artillery . With large additions, alterations, and corrections,

according to the second London edition (Philadelphia, 1779), p. 159.

10 Public Advertiser, 27 November 1759, quoted in Robert E. Pike, ‘Voltaire: le patriot insulaire’,

Mod. Lang. Notes 57, 354–355 (1942), at p. 354.

11 Richard Owen Cambridge, An Account of the War in India, between the English and French, on

the Coast of Coromandel, from the Year 1750 to the Year 1760 (London, 1761), p. 106; Robert

Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, from the Year

MDCCXLV (London, 1763), p. 273; Major-General William Roy, ‘An Account of the Mode

Proposed to be Followed in Determining the Relative Situation of the Royal Observatories of

Greenwich and Paris’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. 77, 188–469 (1787), p. 216; Robert M. Shearman,

Copy of a plan for a day and night telegraph, and proposal for general communications of

intelligence throughout India, in particular (London, 1807), p. 21; for festive use, Journal de

Paris no. 193 (12 July), p. 772 (1778).

12 Maxine Berg, Luxury and pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain (Oxford University Press,

2005), pp. 46–110; Adas, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 166–198.

13 Claude-Fortune Ruggieri, Principles of Pyrotechnics (tr. Stuart Carlton) (Paris, 1821; MP

Associates, Buena Vista, CA, 1994), pp. 46–47; on changing attitudes to Chinese pyrotechnics,

see Simon Werrett, ‘“The finest fireworks in the world”: Chinese pyrotechnics in early modern

Europe’, in Variantology 3: on deep time relations of arts, sciences and technologies in China

and elsewhere (ed. Siegfried Zielinski and Eckhard Fuerlus), pp. 17–34 (Walther Koenig,

Cologne, 2008).

14 Simon Schaffer, ‘Instruments as cargo in the China trade’, Hist. Sci. 44, 217–246 (2006).

15 William Jardine Proudfoot, Biographical Memoir of James Dinwiddie . embracing some

account of his travels in China (Liverpool, 1868), pp. 50 and 54; George Staunton, ‘Quotation

from Sir George Staunton’s Embassy, containing a Description of Fireworks unknown in

Europe . with a View to obtain Explanation of the Means by which they were produced’,

[William Nicholson’s] Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, 11, 273–274

(1805); John MacCulloch, ‘Pyrotechny’, in Edinburgh Encyclopedia (ed. David Brewster), vol.

17, pp. 217–277 (Edinburgh, 1830), at pp. 270–272.

16 On the development of ‘rational principles’ of management, see, for example, Cynthia J. Koepp,

‘The alphabetical order: work in Diderot’s Encyclopedie’, in Work in France: representations,

meaning, organization, and practice (ed. Stephen Laurence Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp), pp.

229–257 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1986); on ‘industrial enlightenment’, Joel

Mokyr, The gifts of Athena: historical origins of the knowledge economy (Princeton University

Press, 2002).

17 O. F. G. Hogg, The Royal Arsenal: its background, origin, and subsequent history (Oxford

University Press, London, 1963).

18 On Congreve senior, see Smith, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 1–113; Seymour H. Mauskopf, ‘Chemistry in

the Arsenal: state regulation and scientific methodology of gunpowder in eighteenth-century

England and France’, in The heirs of Archimedes: science and the art of war through the Age of

Enlightenment (ed. Brett D. Steele and Tamera Dorland), pp. 293–330 (MIT Press, Cambridge,

MA, 2005).

19 H. M. Stephens, ‘Desaguliers, Thomas (1721–1780)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

(ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Howard Harrison), vol. 15, pp. 893–894 (Oxford University

Press, 2004).

20 Major Francis Duncan, History of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, 3rd edn, vol. 1, pp. 269–270

(London, 1879); ‘Gunnery’, in Captain George Smith, An universal military dictionary, or a

copious explanation of the technical terms &c. Used in the equipment, machinery, movements,

and military, n.p. (London, 1779).




21 Smith, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 41 and 79–81; the archives of the James Clavell Library,

Royal Artillery Museum, Woolwich, contain numerous papers by Congreve senior on carriage

reforms. See, for example, ‘A Particular Account of the Alterations made in the Light 6

Pounder Carriages in the Year 1776’, Royal Artillery Historical Trust collection, RA/93;

and ‘Exercises and Manoeuvres for the Light Six Pounders or Two Heavy Three Pounders of

General Desaguliers Construction, by William Congreve, Capt. of Artillery’, MD/213/9,

reproduced in Major J. P. Kaestlin, ‘Firemaster: The Life and Trials of Sir William Congreve

(1772–1828)’, Royal Artillery Library, Woolwich, MD 213/14, no. 6, supplement of illustrations,

MD 939/15.

22 Congreve senior listed his reforms in ‘A State of Facts relative to the Grounds on which the late

and present Master General have had so much Reason to doubt the goodness and durability

of Gun Powder which was delivered into the Royal Magazine for the King’s Service’, dated

17 January 1788, James Clavell Library, Royal Artillery Museum, Woolwich, MD213/8;

and A Statement of Facts, relative to the Savings which have arisen from manufacturing

Gunpowder at the Royal Powder Mills; and of the improvements which have been made in

its strength & durability since the year 1783 (London, 1811); for discussion, see Mauskopf,

op. cit. (note 18).

23 For Desaguliers’s certificate, Royal Society, London, GB 117: EC/1779/26; Desaguliers had been

proposed for election in December 1779.

24 Maria Bentham, ‘Memoir on the Various Methods Adopted and Proposed for the Preservation of

Timber’, Mechanic’s Magazine, no. 1415 (21 September), pp. 224–228 (1850), at p. 224;

Mauskopf, op. cit. (note 18), p. 303; Congreve’s exchanges with the Royal Society are in Royal

Society, London, Miscellaneous Manuscripts, MM/4/30 to MM/4/36; some precedent lay in

Stephen Hales’s assistance in securing fireworks in the Green Park of 1749. Stephen Hales, ‘A

Proposal for Checking in Some Degree the Progress of Fires’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. 45, 277–279

(1748); Cromwell Mortimer, ‘An Addition to Dr. Hales’s Paper, p. 279.’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. 45,

302 (1748).

25 George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the

Emperor of China (London, 1797), vol. 1, pp. 495–496.

26 Richard Watson, Chemical Essays (London, 1781), vol. 1, pp. 41–42.

27 Congreve, ‘A State of Facts’, op. cit. (note 22), f. 7v.

28 William Congreve, 1st Bart., to the Board of Ordnance, 14 July 1801, attached to a letter from

Congreve to Joseph Planta, Secretary, Royal Society, 29 June 1801, Royal Society, MM/4/34.

29 On sacking, see Smith, op. cit. (note 1), p. 76.

30 William Congreve, ‘Dedicated by permission to His Royal Highness Prince William Frederic

[sic] of Gloucester—A Second Century of Inventions and A speculative Enquiry into the origin

and Progress of the practical & theoretical Knowledge of Man from the Creation to the Present

Times’, c. 1800, British Library, Add MSS 38844.

31 Ibid., f. 11v.

32 Ibid., ff. 309r–313r.

33 Ibid., f. 258r.

34 Smith, op. cit. (note 1), p. 133.

35 Praxy Fernandes, The Tigers of Mysore: a biography of Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan (reprint,

Viking Books, New Delhi, 1991).

36 Kate Brittlebank, ‘Sakti and Barakat: the power of Tipu’s tiger. An examination of the tiger

emblem of Tipu Sultan of Mysore’, Mod. Asian Stud. 29, 257–269 (1995).

37 Irfan Habib, ‘Introduction: an essay on Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan’, in Confronting colonialism:

resistance and modernisation under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan (ed. Ifran Habib), pp. xvii–xlvii

(Anthem Press, London, 2002); Pradeep Barua, ‘Military developments in India, 1750–1850’,

J. Military Hist. 58, 599–616 (1994), at pp. 600–604.


S. Werrett54


38 Edward Moor, A narrative of the operations of Captain Little’s detachment, and of the Mahratta

army, commanded by Purseram Bhow: during the late confederacy in India, against the Nawab

Tippoo Sultan Bahadur (London, 1794), at p. 169.

39 Winter, The first golden age of rocketry (op. cit. (note 1)), pp. 6–7; the range was between 900 and

1500 m.

40 Asitesh Bhattacharya, ‘Gunpowder and its applications in ancient India’, in Gunpowder,

explosives and the state: a technological history (ed. Brenda J. Buchanan), pp. 42–50 (Ashgate,

Aldershot, 2006); Haridas Mitra, The fire works and fire festivals in ancient India (Abhedananda

Academy of Culture, Calcutta, 1963), pp. 28–33.

41 Winter, The first golden age of rocketry (op. cit. (note 1)), p. 7.

42 Mir Husain Ali Khan Kirmani, History of the reign of Tipu Sultan, being a continuation of the

Neshani Hyduri (tr. Colonel W. Miles) (1864; Susil Gupta, Calcutta, 1958), at p. 68.

43 On rockets as measures, see Jonathan Scott, A Translation of the Memoirs of Eradut Khan, a

Nobleman of Hindostan (London, 1786), pp. 35, 36 and 71.

44 Shuhab is Arabic for shooting star. Kirmani, op. cit. (note 42), p. 160.

45 See, for example, Moor, op. cit. (note 38), p. 509.

46 Quintin Craufurd, Sketches Chiefly Relating to the History, Religion, Learning, and Manners of

the Hindoos (London, 1790), at p. 10.

47 Ibid., pp. 295–296, at p. 296.

48 A Catalogue of the Rarities To be seen at Adams’s at the Royal Swan, in Kingsland Road,

Leading from Shoreditch Church, 3rd edn (London, 1756), at p. 7; The Britannic Magazine; or

entertaining repository of heroic achievements (London, 1798–1807), vol. 9, pp. 287–288,

describes the repository contents; on rockets brought back from Seringapatam to London,

see East India Company, Copies and Extracts of advices to and from India (London, 1800),

pp. 262–263.

49 On Desaguliers’s efforts, see William Congreve, A Concise Account of the Origins and Progress

of the Rocket System (London, 1807), pp. 1 and 42; William Congreve, A Treatise on the General

Principles, Powers, and Facility of Application of the Congreve Rocket System, as Compared

with Artillery (London, 1827), p. 15.

50 Claude-Fortune Ruggieri, ‘Pyrotechnie’, L’Annotateur Boulonnais, Journal d’annonces

judiciaires, du commerce, des arts et de la litterature, 42 (19 August), 14 (1824); see also

Claude-Fortune Ruggieri, Pyrotechnie militaire, ou traite complet des feux de guerre et des

bouches a feu (Paris, 1812), pp. 278–283.

51 Congreve, A Concise Account. (op. cit. (note 49)), p. 141.

52 Ibid., p. 7.

53 See the brief accounts of Congreve’s experiments appended to Congreve, A Concise Account

(op. cit. (note 49)); William Congreve, Memoir on the possibility, the means, and the

importance, of the destruction of the Boulogne flotilla, in the present crisis: With the outline

of a general system for the attack of all the enemy’s naval depots and arsenals (London,

1806), p. 12.

54 Congreve, Memoir on the possibility. (op. cit. (note 53)), pp. 11–12.

55 Ibid., dedication.

56 Ibid., p. 7.

57 Ibid., p. 24.

58 Maria Bentham, The Life of Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Bentham (London, 1862), p. 98;

Samuel Bentham, Services Rendered in the Civil Department of the Navy in Investigating and

Bringing to Official Notice Abuses and Imperfections: and in Effecting Improvement in Relation

to the System of Management (London, 1813), pp. 132–133.

59 Keith to Barham, 12 October 1805, in Charles Middleton, Lord Barham, Letters and papers of

Charles, Lord Barham, Admiral of the Red Squadron, 1758–1813 (ed. Sir John Knox Laughton)

(Navy Records Society, London, 1907–1911), vol. 3, pp. 153–178, at p. 157.




60 Admiral Edward Vernon, quoted in Brian Tunstall, Naval warfare in the age of sail: the evolution

of fighting tactics 1680–1815 (Conway Maritime Press, London, 1990), p. 80.

61 On Brighton pavilion, see John Dinkel and John Morley, The Royal Pavilion, Brighton (Brighton

Borough Council, Brighton, 1990); Congreve, A Treatise on the General Principles. (op. cit.

(note 49)), p. 6; Smith, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 146 and 202.

62 Quoted in Smith, op. cit. (note 1), p. 137; Winter, The first golden age of rocketry (op. cit.

(note 1)), pp. 16–17.

63 Congreve, Memoir on the possibility. (op. cit. (note 53)), p. 13; Winter, The first golden age of

rocketry (op. cit. (note 1)), p. 17.

64 Congreve to Colonel Neville, enclosed in a letter from Congreve to Castlereagh, 12 December

1805, in Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, Correspondence, Despatches, and other Papers,

of Viscount Castlereagh, Second Marquess of Londonderry. Second Series. Military

and Miscellaneous (ed. Charles William Vane, Marquess of Londonderry) (London, 1851),

vol. 5, p. 146.

65 Keith to Barham, 25 November 1805, in Middleton, op. cit. (note 59), vol. 3, p. 175; ‘Operations

off Boulogne’, The Times, no. 6587 (25 November), p. 3 (1805); William Congreve to Lord

Grenville, 12 October 1806, in Christopher Lloyd and Craig Hardin Jnr, ‘Congreve’s Rockets,

1805–1806’, Naval Miscell. 4, 424–468 (1952), at p. 457; William Congreve to Board of

Ordnance, 27 November 1810, WO 44/642, Public Record Office, Kew, London.

66 For Congreve’s assessment, see the appendix to Congreve, Memoir on the possibility. (op. cit.

(note 53)), pp. 28–30.

67 Congreve, Memoir on the possibility. (op. cit. (note 53)), p. 8.

68 Sir Sidney Smith to Castlereagh, n.d. (ca. 3 October 1805) in Stewart, op. cit. (note 64), vol. 5,

pp. 113–114, at p. 114.

69 Keith to Barham, 12 October 1805, in Middleton, op. cit. (note 59), vol. 3, p. 157.

70 Sir Sidney Smith to Castlereagh, 22 November 1805, in Stewart, op. cit. (note 64), vol. 5,

pp. 130–131, at p. 131.

71 Keith to Barham, 25 November 1805, in Middleton, op. cit. (note 59), vol. 3, p. 175.

72 J. K. Laughton, ‘Owen, Sir Edward Campbell Rich (1771–1849)’ (rev. Andrew Lambert), Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 42, p. 195.

73 William Congreve, An Elementary Treatise on the Mounting of Naval Ordnance (London, 1811),

p. xiv.

74 Owen to Keith, 20 July 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), pp. 441–442.

75 Ibid.

76 Markham to Keith, 25 September 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), pp. 446–447, at

p. 446.

77 Keith to Grenville, 12 October 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), p. 454.

78 See Owen’s general orders, 19 August 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), pp. 444–446,

at p. 444.

79 For details of the new rockets and demonstration, see Congreve, A Concise Account. (op. cit.

(note 49)), p. 7.

80 Howick to Keith, 19 August 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), pp. 443–444.

81 Owen to Keith, 20 August 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), p. 443, n. 1.

82 Owen to Grenville, 30 November 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), pp. 460–461.

83 Keith to Owen, 22 July 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), pp. 442–443.

84 Ibid., p. 443.

85 Congreve to Grenville, 12 October 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), pp. 455–457.

86 Le Moniteur Universel, 15 October 1806, quoted in Winter, The first golden age of rocketry

(op. cit. (note 1)), p. 20.

87 Congreve to Grenville, 12 October 1806, in Lloyd and Hardin, op. cit. (note 65), p. 457.

My italics.


S. Werrett56


88 Congreve, Memoir on the possibility. (op. cit. (note 53)).

89 The role of honour in enlightened warfare is analysed in Armstrong Starkey, War in the Age of

Enlightenment, 1700–1789 (Praeger, Westport, CT, 2003), pp. 69–104.

90 Nelson to Castlereagh, 3 October 1805, Stewart, op. cit. (note 64), vol. 5, p. 111; see also Barham

to Castlereagh, 4 October 1805, ibid., vol. 5, p. 115.

91 Congreve, Memoir on the possibility. (op. cit. (note 53)), p. 20.

92 Congreve, A Concise Account. (op. cit. (note 49)), p. 5; on Copenhagen, see Winter, The first

golden age of rocketry (op. cit. (note 1)), pp. 20–23; Frank H. Winter, ‘The Copenhagen rocket

bombardment of 1807: some new views of early rocket history’, J. Br. Interplanet. Soc. 47,

171–179 (1994).

93 On later uses, see Ralph Robinson, ‘The use of rockets by the British in the war of 1812’,

Maryland Hist. Mag. 40, 1–6 (1945); Major G. Tylden, ‘The use of rockets in the British Army in

the nineteenth century’, J. Soc. Army Hist. Res. 26, 168–170 (1948).

94 Congreve, A Concise Account. (op. cit. (note 49)), p. 141.

95 Ibid., p. 142.

96 For a request for remuneration, see William Congreve to Grenville, 25 March 1807, British

Library Add 59282, ff. 170–171; Grenville to William Congreve, British Library Add 59282,

f. 172; on the prince’s rewards, see Smith, op. cit. (note 1), p. 178.

97 The Times, no. 7827 (14 November), 3 (1809); Gentleman’s Mag. 78 (February), 129 (1808).

98 The Times, no. 7827 (14 November), 3 (1809).

99 Joseph Hume, ‘Remarks on Military Rockets’, A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and

the Arts 29, 63–67 ( January 1811), at p. 64.

100 Ibid., p. 65.

101 Congreve went on to become Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory in 1814, and inherited his

father’s baronetcy in the same year. He was appointed senior equerry to the Prince of Wales in

1817.

102 See Werrett, ‘From the Grand Whim.’, op. cit. (note 6).

103 Congreve and other Royal Society Fellows formed a commission to investigate gas explosions in

London in 1813, after which Congreve founded his own gas company, the Imperial Continental

Gas Association, in 1824. Smith, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 195–207.


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