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Galloglas
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Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2010 10:58 am |
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Here's something where member's own research and technical knowledge can help us towards a better understanding.
Many of us might have wondered how it was that Evelyn Wood could record in his autobiography having heard guns being fired during the evening of 22nd January whilst camped near Bemba's Kop; thought at the time to be at Isandlwana. Logically, this would appear to coincide with the action to seize Black's Koppie and the south saddle.
The light calibre of the 7 Pdr RML, there being only four guns, and the sheer distance suggest to us that 'rationally' this was fairly unlikely. Or was it?
I was last weekend re-reading Ludovic Kennedy's autobiography, "On my Way to the Club" (Collins 1989), which contains this interesting reference to his journalism, which I will reproduce here in full:
"I had two or three assignments from the Sunday Times. One was to describe an atomic bomb test explosion in the Nevada desert. I stayed the night before in Las Vegas, and in the morning was taken to an observation post nine thousand feet up in the mountains where there were pine trees and snow. The bomb bomb exploded forty miles away, a stab of red light low down in the desert, then the familiar mushroom cloud, beginning just above ground level: this led us to question whether the explosion had taken place underground, which the official in charge would neither confirm or deny. To me the oddest thing about the explosion was that there was no noise. The official explained this by saying that some sound waves travelled direct into the ozonosphere (sic) and by reflection hit the earth many miles away from their course. He said that after previous tests, windows in Las Vegas had been broken but those in Indian Springs which was much nearer the explosion had stayed intact. The same phenomenon, he said, had occurred at Queen Victoria's funeral when the minute-guns at Windsor were heard one hundred miles away."
Any other ideas?
G
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Neil Aspinshaw
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Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2010 11:27 am |
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Galloglas
Interesting. I read the same and questioned it, OK if it was in flat country, but as the Nqutu range would blank out any possibility of that its unlikely.
The biggest man made explosion prior to the A-Bomb was at RAF Fauld, near Uttoxeter, when the ammo dump in the gypsum mine went up in 1944, the explosion tore a crater a mile long and half a mile wide (still can be seen on google earth), the blast was heard in Coventry, 38 miles away. Wood though must have been in excess of that, for a 7pdr shell?.
I suppose if the shell was shrapnel, hence air burst the effect would be like a rocketin the distance on bonfire night so the sound would travel.
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Peter Ewart
Joined: 31 Aug 2005 |
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Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2010 8:45 am |
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The distance from the vicinity of Bemba's Kop to Isandlwana seems to be about 45 miles as the crow flies (someone check my figures - I've done a very hurried calculation from the map on Morris's endpaper and those near the end of Knight & Castle's Then & Now). From memory, I think David Rattray quoted 60 miles in his DotDM tapes.
It seems quite a distance for the sound of a few bangs from a 7 pdr to travel, except that at night, of course, it always seems more feasible (the scientific basis for which eludes me). The distance from the Somme theatre (taking, say, Albert as a central point for the bombardment of late June 1916) to London is around 130 miles or so as the crow flies, and approaching 100 miles to those parts of Sussex & Kent from where various unimpeachable accounts described hearing the sound from the Somme that week. (The northern extremity of the attack of 1 July, where the June barrage had been just as heavy - around Gommecourt, say - would lessen this distance by around a dozen miles). Still a very long way, but the difference between the sound from a 7 pdr and that 1916 barrage (biggest man-made noise in history, was it?) doesn't bear thinking about.
Is it possible that a sound from a 7 pdr can travel 45 miles, but a noise many thousands of times louder only travels a bit more than twice that distance? A bit of a puzzle, isn't it? (Or it is for this non-scientist, anyway!) Which makes us question the statement from Wood. No reason, I suppose, for him to make up that conversation, but then again it would certainly appear he made up plenty of the rest of his AZW memoirs.
Peter
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Sawubona
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Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2010 9:57 am |
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No physicist here, but some thoughts. Certainly many members of this site are familiar with the "Whispering Gallery" in St. Paul's in London, where a quiet whisper can be heard distinctly and understood clearly some 120 feet away-- And that's by no means the most dramatic example of such acoustic phenomena. Perhaps the hills of that area of Zululand extended the range of the sound rather than shortened it.
I should explore the available information further before leaping in with both feet as I'm about to, but I've repeatedly heard that the loudest "single", man-made noise before that of the first A-bomb occurred in Portsmouth, NH in 1905, when some 90,000 pounds of dynamite was used to "remove" a natural rock shipping hazard in the harbor named "Henderson Point". Maybe the key word is the "single"? Or "intentional"?
When Krakatoa went up, the explosion was heard distinctly in Perth over 1500 miles away and reported as far away as 3000 miles. Okay, the scale of that cataclysm is a bit larger than firing a 7 pd cannon (the Krakatoa explosion has been estimated to have been the equivalent of some 200 megatons of TNT), but the fact remains that sounds, both loud and not so loud, can travel a long, long way under the right conditions.
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