Carriage of the Giant Blakely

This is the carriage and chassis that carried one of the two 12.75-inch Blakely rifles: the mounting for a gun whose tube alone weighed twenty-five tons.

Alexander Theophilus Blakely was a captain in the Royal Artillery when he began working on the problem that killed gun crews — the breech bursting. A powder charge rammed down a cast-iron tube could let go with enough force to blow the breech apart and cut down the men who had just fired it. Blakely patented a method of shrinking a wrought-iron band around the breech to reinforce it, putting the outer metal into tension so it gripped the tube and helped contain the pressure.

Whether the guns burst because of the metal or because of how they were used was argued at the highest level of the Confederate ordnance establishment. Colonel Josiah Gorgas, Chief of Ordnance, wrote to General Samuel Cooper from Richmond on October 3, 1863:

The bursting of the heavy rifled guns is not sufficiently explained by the character of the metal, as General Beauregard supposes. The cast-iron of these guns was entirely satisfactory, and their premature destruction is due to the constant heavy charges with which they have been fired. But the same excuse cannot be made for the bursting of the 600-pounder imported Blakely gun. The destruction of this formidable gun was due to a want of forethought, unpardonable in an officer as experienced as General Ripley…

Gorgas was blaming Roswell Ripley, and he was writing before he had the full story. The surviving gun, he noted in the same dispatch, had just been fired successfully by Colonel Yates with charges of thirty to fifty-five pounds of powder behind a 470-pound shell, giving a range of a mile and a quarter at two degrees of elevation.

Blakely himself did not live long enough to see the argument settled. He died on May 4, 1868, at forty-one.