USE OF GUNPOWDER.
Though much of the old material was removed in this manner, and yet not diverted from its proper purpose, the ground was by no means clear. Wren, appointed under the Great Seal, architect of S. Paul’s, and one of the commissioners in the new commission for its rebuilding, had to take down by degrees what portions of the old building were still standing.
Warped and cracked as they were, the walls, eighty feet high and five thick, were yet strong enough to make the process of pulling down both difficult and tedious. Wren determined to avail himself of the knowledge he had acquired in the Royal Society’s recent experiments in raising weights by means of gunpowder. Houses, it is true, had been blown up in several places during the Fire in order to protect the Tower of London and Whitehall, but the use of gunpowder to raise a definite weight, and throw it a fixed distance and no farther, was a novel experiment. When the labourers reached at last the old central tower, the walls of which were two hundred feet high, they were afraid to go up to the top, as they had done elsewhere, and work with their pickaxes, while those below shovelled away the stones and mortar that they threw down into separate heaps.
This was the time for Wren’s experiment.
With great precautions, and the use of eighteen pounds of gunpowder only, he blew up the north-western angle of the tower, so contriving it that, while he raised more than three thousand tons weight, it was not scattered and no damage was done, though the shock made the neighbours imagine it to be an earthquake.
Encouraged by this success, Wren had another mine prepared, but unluckily was obliged to go out of town himself and to leave it in the charge of his next officer.
The man, thinking to improve upon his master, increased the quantity of powder, caused an explosion which shot stones far and wide, and though no lives were lost, terrified the City, all the more that an old superstition declared that the tower of S. Paul’s and the City of London would fall together.
Forbidden, owing to the panic thus caused, the use of this modern method, Wren betook himself to ancient times, and devised a gigantic battering ram, with a great spike at one end. Thirty men, fifteen on each side, worked the ram against one place in the wall, Wren watching and encouraging them when, disheartened by a day’s work without visible result, they were ready to give up in despair. On the second day the wall fell.
Wren made great use of this machine and ‘pleased himself that he had recovered so notable and ancient an engine.’