Fusée Congreve

The Congreve rocket was a type of rocket artillery designed by British inventor Sir William Congreve in 1808. The design was based upon the rockets deployed by the Kingdom of Mysore against the East India Company during the Second, Third, and Fourth Anglo-Mysore Wars. Lieutenant general Thomas Desaguliers, colonel commandant of the Royal Artillery at Woolwich, was impressed by reports of their effectiveness, and undertook several unsuccessful experiments to produce his own rocket weapons. Several captured Mysorean rockets were sent to England following the annexation of the Mysorean kingdom into British India following the death of Tipu Sultan in the siege of Seringapatam. The project was continued chiefly with William Congreve, who set up a research and development programme at the Woolwich Arsenal's laboratory. After development work was complete the rockets were manufactured in quantity further north, near Waltham Abbey, Essex. He was told that "the British at Seringapatam had suffered more from the rockets than from the shells or any other weapon used by the enemy." "In at least one instance", an eyewitness told Congreve, "a single rocket had killed three men and badly wounded others." The rockets were used by the British, the Russians and Paraguay during the nineteenth century. Mysorean rockets The sultan of Mysore, Tipu Sultan and his father Hyder Ali developed the military tactic of using massed wave attacks supported by rocket artillery against enemy positions. In 1792, Tipu Sultan wrote a military manual called Fathul Mujahidin, in which two hundred artillerymen specialising in rocket artillery were prescribed to each Mysorean brigade (known as cushoons). Mysore had between sixteen and twenty-four cushoons of infantry. The areas of towns where rockets and fireworks were manufactured were known as "taramandal pet" ("galaxy market"). The rocket men were trained to launch their rockets at an angle calculated from the diameter of the cylinder and the distance of the target.