William Congreve's rational rockets

Abstract

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.