Creative History

  Monday, January 12, 1807.  About a quarter past four in the afternoon… A wooden cargo ship named the Delfs Welvaaren  (translated into English as “The Prosperity of Delft”) is docked near the city center in Leiden, Holland, at the mouth of the Rapenburg Canal.  Packed below decks into the hold of the Delf Welvaaren are 369 barrels, or approximately 37,000 lbs of highly combustible black powder. This volatile cargo, a mixture of sulfur, carbon and potassium nitrate, the oldest known explosive chemical composition on earth, is in Leiden awaiting transport to Holland’s main military armory in the southern Dutch city of Delft. It will never get there. On the morning of the 12th of January 1807, mere hours before disaster, the Delf Welvaaren’s Captain received word that his ship won’t be able to proceed to Delft immediately because the other ship’s in the convoy are still icebound in the North Atlantic due to inclement winter weather.   Adam van Sc...

  As King Louis Philippe I of France, led by his entourage of hundreds of troops and officials, rides down the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, past a throng of thousands of adoring citizens, a loud ear-splitting explosion rends the air. It is the sound of twenty-five rifled muskets being fired simultaneously.  In an instant, eighteen people are killed, dozens are wounded and King Louis Philippe is grazed on the forehead by a bullet.  All of Paris is thrown into an uproar. Mere seconds after the great explosion, before the smoke has even cleared along the Boulevard du Temple, a crazed man with blood streaming down his face and his hands burnt black by fire, leaps from the third story window of his tiny one room apartment at Number 50 Boulevard du Temple.  He attempts to flee by sprinting into the confused and shocked crowd that has gathered around the dead and dying as a result of his bizarre assasination attempt. Before Giuseppe Marco Fieschi can even reach the s...