Explosion in Bremen on the steamer “Mosel”
“A terrible crime was considered and arranged by American William King Alexander, living in Dresden. Thomas, as he called himself, wanted to enrich himself at the expense of insurance companies in which he insured for a large amount of his destructive car, which he sent to America. To get a bonus, he decided to blow up, through terrible nitroglycerin or dynamite, a whole steamer. To do this, he needed a mechanism that automatically, without his assistance, would produce an explosion at a certain time. To fulfill this task, he ordered a clockwork and sent this hellish car to the ship.
But fate ordered differently. The terrible nitroglycerin did not obey the mechanism and the terrible explosion occurred in the Bremen harbor, while the workers loaded goods on the steamboat. More than two hundred people lost their lives or health. Our drawing is the ship “Mosel” and the embankment after the explosion. The number of victims from that reached such a figure that the ship was surrounded by workers, passengers and persons escorting them. The culprit of this disaster, who did not expect a premature explosion, shot himself in the cabin of the steamer. This is what later managed to find out about this person.
Thomas addressed the clock mechanism to different craftsmen, but because by the complexity of his requirements, ordinary watchmakers refused to fulfill the car, Thomas turned to a talented, well -known special device of tower watches, a watchmaker Fux in Hamburg. Thomas offered him to make a clock mechanism for the machine for the fabric of silk matters invented by him. The main task set by Thomas to this skillful mechanics was the complete soundlessness of the mechanism and the possibility of the correct move in all positions. He told Fuchs that the mechanism would be attached to the machine invented by him to the wheel rotating on the horizontal axis. The mechanism was supposed to start ten days and, at the end of the term, the hammer’s blow was to report such a force to the machine that, as Thomas explained, the mechanism could cut a thousand silk threads at a time. The gifted watchmaker solved this difficult task very quickly and completed the order of SOT on March 9 by April 20, 1875 …
Why an explosion occurred earlier – it is unknown, but Fuchs suggests that when ordering, Thomas lost sight of that he arranged a mechanism that would withstand random blows. And since it was indicated on the box with the hellish machine that it contains fabrics, the workers, loading the ship, lowered the box without precautions, which is why, probably, there was an explosion of dynamite or nitroglycerin … ”
(“Illustrated newspaper”, February 1, 1876)
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