Mole, Lancelot de

Mole, Lancelot de
He was born in 13th March 1880 in Adelaide, Australia. De Mole’s father was an architect and surveyor and he himself followed a similar avenue as a draughtsman working on mining, surveying and engineering projects in Australia.

It was in 1911, while surveying in a particular rough terrain in Western Australia, that he first received the idea of the tank as a tracked, armored vehicle capable of traversing the most difficult ground.

He drew up detailed plans and submitted them to the war office in London the following year, but although they were rejected, not all the plans were returned to him.

When war broke out in 1914 he tried without success to interest the Australian authorities, even after he had constructed a model at their request.

A further blow came in 196, when the first tanks, built by British, appeared on the battlefields of France and looked remarkably similar in design to his own.

Believing that he could play a significant role in further tank development, but lacking the funds to travel to Britain, de Mole eventually succeeded, after an initial rejection by a medical board, in electing in the Australian Army, which got him to England at the beginning of 1918.

He immediately took his model to the British Inventions Committee, who were sufficiently impressed to pass it to the Tank Board, who promptly mislaid it for six weeks.

Meanwhile, in March 1918, Private de Mole was ordered to France and was unable to take matters further.

On his returned to England in early 1919 he made formal claim for a reward for his invention, but this was turned down on the grounds that not direct link could be established between his design and the first tanks that were built.

Even so, the Inventions Committee did authorize sum of money to cover his expenses, and in 1920 de Mole was a made a Commandeer of the Order of the British Empire.

Returning to Australia, de Mole worked as an engineer in the design branch of the Sydney Water Board.

He continued to invent, but none of his design, covered a wide range of times, were ever taken up. He died on 6th of May 1950 in Sydney.
Mole, Lancelot de

Gunpowder in Europe History

Gunpowder in Europe History
The first record of gunpowder in Europe dates from 1267, while the first record of guns from 1326.

By the end of the 1400s, thanks to advances in iron and copper mining, metallurgy and gunpowder manufacture, Europeans were making firearms in great quantity and great variety, from enormous cannons to handheld arquebuses.

If one of the essential characteristics of modernity is the substitution of chemical for muscle power, then firearms may be regarded as the first modern invention.

The spread of gunpowder was not welcome by everyone. The nobility, in particular, did not like weapons that rendered obsolete old notions of chivalry and if allowed, as one contemporary complained, “so many brave and valiant men” to be killed by “cowards and shirkers who would not dare to look in the face the men they bring down from a distance with their wretched bullets.”

Firearms were by no means a European monopoly – Mogul India, Ming China, Safavid Persia, Choson Korean, Ottoman Turkey and Tokugawa Japan also made effective use of them – but Europe early on became the worldwide leader in their production and development.

China and many other non-Western countries continued producing guns but by 1500 their weapons were markedly inferior to those being crafted in the workshops of Europe.

Even the siege guns used by the Ottoman to conquer Constantinople in 1453, including two titanic cannons firing stone projectiles weighing more than eight hundred pounds, were created not by a Turk but a Hungarian in Sultan Mehmed II’s employ.

The most immediate impact of firearms, once they became more reliable, was to end the military ascendancy of the horse archers of central Asia. Cavalrymen equipped with bows and arrows were no match for infantrymen armed with guns, and since the Mongolian nomads could not manufacture firearms of their own, their reign of terror came to an end.
Gunpowder in Europe History