The Brescia explosion occurred in 1769 in Brescia (now part of Italy) when a large store of gunpowder exploded after a lightning strike, causing extensive destruction and many deaths. Claims that as many as 6,000 people died in the explosion (which may be an exaggeration), places the event high on lists of accidents and disasters by death toll.
On August 18, 1769, the city of Brescia in northern Italy was devastated when the Bastion of San Nazaro was struck by lightning. The resulting fire ignited about 90,000 kg (or about 200,000 lb) of gunpowder stored there by the Republic of Venice, causing a massive explosion. Huge stones were hurled in a radius of a kilometer around the explosion, landing on people, houses and church buildings including Santi Nazaro e Celso. Doors of houses and shops and city gates were thrown open and broken glass showered down. [1]
This explosion destroyed about one-sixth of the city. [2] [3] [4] [5] Reports of death tolls vary, with 3,000 deaths often reported in later English sources, though an official account from two years after the event references 400 dead and 800 wounded. [1] French writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier claimed in his popular 1770 novel L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais , which was translated into English as Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred that by 1772, 2,500 died in the explosion. [1] [6]
Scipione Garbelli's Le Rovine di Brescia was published in 1771 and documented the tragedy. [7]
Britain reacted to the tragedy by passing laws governing the private manufacture and storage of gunpowder. [2] In determining how to protect the British government stores, Benjamin Franklin advised the use of pointed "lightning rods" and prevailed in a debate over whether pointed rods or blunt rods should be used. [8]
The memory of the tragedy long remained with the people of the city. The fire and noise caused by the fall of a meteorite in nearby Alfianello in 1883 are said to have immediately caused recall of the long ago explosion. [1]
1769 (MDCCLXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Thursday of the Julian calendar, the 1769th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 769th year of the 2nd millennium, the 69th year of the 18th century, and the 10th and last year of the 1760s decade. As of the start of 1769, the Gregorian calendar was 11 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Mason Chamberlin (1727–1787) was an English portrait painter, who was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768. He was a student of Francis Hayman. He is perhaps best remembered for his portrait of Benjamin Franklin.
A mining accident is an accident that occurs during the process of mining minerals or metals. Thousands of miners die from mining accidents each year, especially from underground coal mining, although accidents also occur in hard rock mining. Coal mining is considered much more hazardous than hard rock mining due to flat-lying rock strata, generally incompetent rock, the presence of methane gas, and coal dust. Most of the deaths these days occur in developing countries, and rural parts of developed countries where safety measures are not practiced as fully. A mining disaster is an incident where there are five or more fatalities.
Georg Wilhelm Richmann was a Russian physicist of Baltic German origin who did pioneering work on electricity, atmospheric electricity, and calorimetry. He died by electrocution in St. Petersburg when struck by apparent ball lightning produced by an experiment attempting to ground the electrical discharge from a storm.
A lightning strike or lightning bolt is a lightning event in which the electric discharge takes place between the atmosphere and the ground. Most originate in a cumulonimbus cloud and terminate on the ground, called cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning. A less common type of strike, ground-to-cloud (GC) lightning, is upward-propagating lightning initiated from a tall grounded object and reaching into the clouds. About 25% of all lightning events worldwide are strikes between the atmosphere and earth-bound objects. Most are intracloud (IC) lightning and cloud-to-cloud (CC), where discharges only occur high in the atmosphere. Lightning strikes the average commercial aircraft at least once a year, but modern engineering and design means this is rarely a problem. The movement of aircraft through clouds can even cause lightning strikes.
There have been many extremely large explosions, accidental and intentional, caused by modern high explosives, boiling liquid expanding vapour explosions (BLEVEs), older explosives such as gunpowder, volatile petroleum-based fuels such as gasoline, and other chemical reactions. This list contains the largest known examples, sorted by date. An unambiguous ranking in order of severity is not possible; a 1994 study by historian Jay White of 130 large explosions suggested that they need to be ranked by an overall effect of power, quantity, radius, loss of life and property destruction, but concluded that such rankings are difficult to assess.
The Richmond, Indiana, explosion was a double explosion in the United States in 1968. It occurred at 1:47 PM EST on April 6, in downtown Richmond, Indiana. The explosions killed 41 people and injured more than 150. The primary explosion was due to natural gas leaking from one or more faulty transmission lines under the Marting Arms sporting goods store, located on the southeast corner of the intersection of 6th and Main streets. A secondary explosion was caused by gunpowder stored inside the building.
A lightning rod or lightning conductor is a metal rod mounted on a structure and intended to protect the structure from a lightning strike. If lightning hits the structure, it is most likely to strike the rod and be conducted to ground through a wire, rather than passing through the structure, where it could start a fire or even cause electrocution. Lightning rods are also called finials, air terminals, or strike termination devices.
Franklin bells are an early demonstration of electric charge designed to work with a Leyden jar or a lightning rod. Franklin bells are only a qualitative indicator of electric charge and were used for simple demonstrations rather than research. The bells are an adaptation to the first device that converted electrical energy into mechanical energy in the form of continuous mechanical motion: in this case, the moving of a bell clapper back and forth between two oppositely charged bells.
The bombing of Foggia took place on several occasions in 1943, by Allied aircraft. The bombing caused 20,298 civilian victims during nine air raids.
The church of Santi Nazaro e Celso is located on Corso Giacomo Matteotti, at the intersection with via Fratelli Bronzetti, in Brescia, Lombardy, Italy. The church contains the Averoldi Polyptych (1522), a masterwork of Titian.
Franklin's electrostatic machine is a high-voltage static electricity-generating device used by Benjamin Franklin in the mid-18th century for research into electrical phenomena. Its key components are a glass globe which turned on an axis via a crank, a cloth pad in contact with the spinning globe, a set of metal needles to conduct away the charge developed on the globe by its friction with the pad, and a Leyden jar – a high-voltage capacitor – to accumulate the charge. Franklin's experiments with the machine eventually led to new theories about electricity and inventing the lightning rod.
Brescia is a city and comune (municipality) in the region of Lombardy, in northern Italy. It is situated at the foot of the Alps, a few kilometers from the lakes Garda and Iseo. With a population of more than 200,000, it is the second largest city in Lombardy and the fourth largest in northwest Italy. The urban area of Brescia extends beyond the administrative city limits and has a population of 672,822, while over 1.5 million people live in its metropolitan area. The city is the administrative capital of the Province of Brescia, one of the largest in Italy, with over 1,200,000 inhabitants.
The thunder house is a scientific model invented by James Lind which gives a spectacular demonstration of the destructive effect of a lightning bolt striking a house with an imperfect lightning conductor.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Brescia in the Lombardy region of Italy.
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The Secondigliano tragedy, better known as the Secondigliano abyss, was a disaster in January 1996 involving gas leak explosion that occurred in Naples, in the Secondigliano district, where a total of 11 people lost their lives.