The Disappearance of William Cantelo
Generally, there are few missing person cases that would capture the mind of historians as most are in the realm of true crime or not historically notable. There are a few cases though that captivate historians: the Princes in the Tower (we will probably do an article on this topic in the future), Amelia Earhart, The Roanoke Colonists in America, and Ambrose Bierce to name the top cases. There is one instance however that particularly catches the eye here at Seeking History and that is the disappearance of William Cantelo and his potential “reappearance” as noted automatic weapons inventor, Hiram Maxim.
Around this time, military innovation was a focal point for those interested in mechanical engineering. Several inventors were rapidly advancing the firearms world with quick firing “machine” guns. These automatic weapons first saw use in the American civil war and started an arms race amongst the European powers to also have guns of their own that could give them an edge in the next European war. Enter in now our two inventors, William Cantelo and Hiram Maxim.
William Cantelo was born on the Isle of Wight in 1830 and by 1870 owned an engineering firm, employing around 40 people in Southampton, England. He had numerous ties to his community and a wife and 3 children. He also owned an inn called the Old Tower Inn that connected to an old defensive tower constructed by the Normans. In the early 1880s, Cantelo, using his engineering background (along with his two sons, themselves engineers), joined the race to produce a homegrown automatic weapon for Britain, testing his weapon in the tunnels beneath his inn, working to perfect a recoil driven automatic mechanism. Although the family was closely guarded about what they were developing, they couldn’t hide the noise of a gun firing in quick succession from their neighbors and accounts of Cantelo developing a new “rifle” were repeated by locals. Sometime later (dates are unclear in this story) but still in the early 1880s, Cantelo declared his weapon perfected. The next part of Cantelo’s story is difficult to piece together, there are conflicting sources on what exactly led to his disappearance. One states that when he declared his weapon completed, he wanted to take a holiday or vacation to celebrate his success, leaving his family to never be seen or heard from again. Another account states that Cantelo, upon completion of his gun, left to market it to the world and find a buyer but both are consistent that he was to be gone for three months. There are other additions to the mystery with reports that a large sum of money was withdrawn from his bank account, but records can’t say when or where this happened. The disappearance of Cantelo was out of character enough that his family hired a private investigator to find him and traced to him America, but from there, the trail died. Here we will temporarily leave Cantelo and go to our next inventor, Hiram Maxim.
Hiram Maxim, an American born in Maine in 1840, was an inventor also trying to develop a recoil operated automatic weapon. Hiram, while born in the USA, moved to England in his 40s and became a naturalized British subject, possibly to escape a reputation of being problematic in his dealings with other inventors. Maxim was a prolific inventor, securing patents for steam pumps, curling irons, and claimed to have invented the lightbulb, amongst other items. His interests even extended into powered flight and medical inhalers, although he had a reputation for “stealing” ideas and plagiarism. This reputation is documented in letters stating that inventors were shy to debut new products to him due to fear of intellectual theft. Maxim created an arms company with Edward Vickers and developed his “Maxim” gun around the same time that Cantelo was developing his. Maxim completed his recoil operated automatic gun in 1884 whilst living in London and started to market his weapon to British imperial expeditions, such as the relief expedition of 1886 headed by Henry Morton Stanley, where it was used several times during a retreat. The weapon was adopted widely during the colonial wars of the late 19th century and variants of the design saw heavy use in the First World War and has remained in production. It has even been used in the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022-present.
Ok, so there two inventors living relatively close to one another in Britain, and both working to develop a machine gun at the same time. Interesting, but not necessarily remarkable. What is remarkable though is the claim that Maxim and Cantelo could be the same man, so we are going to break down the case for this and the case against this claim. Let us start with the case for Cantelo and Maxim being the same person.
First off, the biggest point in the “pro” camp, is their appearance. Maxim and Cantelo not only invented similar weapons at the same time, in the same place, but also looked remarkably similar, with similar hair and identical large beards. So similar was their appearance that after Cantelo’s disappearance, his sons being on the look out for any mention of him in the papers, saw a picture of Hiram Maxim and were convinced it was their father, further encouraged by the weapon invented by Maxim sounding eerily similar to the one they worked on with their father. They were so convinced that they tried to confront Maxim while in the UK but were unsuccessful, tracing him to a train station but not able to speak with him prior to the train’s departure. The newspaper they saw his picture in even captioned the image as Cantelo and not Maxim. Maxim also arrived in England around the same time that Cantelo disappeared. Could Cantelo have changed his identity, at a time when it was more possible to disappear than today, to escape some financial or personal difficulties, then remerged in England shortly after as the American born inventor?
Now the case against: Maxim obviously existed in the United States 40 years before Cantelo’s disappearance. There is documented evidence of this and numerous mentions of him in papers and through personal letters. If Cantelo went to America (per the private investigator’s trail) then shortly returned to England as Maxim, the real Maxim either had to be dead or silenced in a way to never re-emerge. However, Maxim was aware of someone posing as him back in America, while he was in England, even notating this in his autobiography, claiming a double was impersonating him back in the States. Beards that Cantelo and Maxim both wore were very common at the time and the men were of a similar age, which could lead to a visual confusion even by those who knew Cantelo best. Additionally, Maxim is documented as visiting Southampton, where Cantelo was last seen. Someone trying to hide with a new identity probably wouldn’t take the risk by visiting the town he lived in, potentially being spotted by people he knew. Lastly, inventing a weapon that would essentially change the way humans fought each other would draw huge amounts of attention to its inventor, which is not something that someone trying to hide would be interested in.
The more likely scenarios of what happened to Cantelo is that he met a grisly fate while marketing his new weapon, committed suicide, or purposely vanished to dodge personal or financial problems. The case of William Cantelo’s disappearance has unfortunately gone cold in the 140 or so years since his disappearance and continues to fascinate historians and true crime enthusiasts today.
Siege Artillery
As long as humans have existed, we have loved to see things go boom and the bigger the boom, the happier we are. Humans love destruction, it’s part of our makeup. With the adoption of gunpowder-based weapons, that destruction amplified. Humans learned how to make bigger and bigger weapons that defied the rules of warfare and caused destruction previously unimagined. Humans have also always looked at cities or territory that someone else has and thought to themselves, “I want that.” When you have leader that loves the big boom and conquest, you get the creation of siege cannons. To satiate the thirst for death, conquest, and destruction, leaders commissioned the construction of cannons that could either destroy city walls with giant cannon balls or artillery weapons that could fire shells tens of miles to hit populated centers, satisfying that ever present need for chaos. This article will focus on notable examples of the largest siege cannons ever produced in history and their use (or lack thereof).
The first cannon we will discuss is the earliest giant example in our little collection, the Basilic. This cannon was used by the Ottoman Turks to shell the walls of Constantinople during their conquest of the city in 1453. The walls of Constantinople were 40 feet tall and around 16 feet thick, so the Ottomans rightly thought they needed some massive cannons and guns to blow through it. The irony of this weapon is that the builder of it, Orban, was a Christian and first offered the cannon to the Byzantines, who had to pass on the offer due to the immense costs of the cannon. Basilic was made of bronze and weighed 40,000 pounds, 27 feet long, and had a cannon mouth diameter of 30 inches. It could hurl cannon balls weighing around 1,200 pounds up to a mile. Gun carriages were non-existent in this time so once the cannon was in place, it could not be moved. It sat upon a mount made of mud and wood to absorb the recoil and had to be taken apart to be loaded. The cannon took so long to load that it could only fire seven times a day, so the real work of destruction was done by the Sultan’s other guns, but the weapon caused terror amongst the defenders. By the end of the 53-day siege, the gun started to develop cracks in the bronze due to the casting technique for such a large gun being primitive (metallurgy was in it’s infancy for siege guns). These cracks eventually led to the cannon destroying itself before the end of the siege.
Our second cannon in this list, is a bombard that could hurl stone cannon balls 2,000 feet every 2-3 minutes, the Pumhart von Steyr (PVS). The PVS was the largest wrought iron by caliber and was developed by the Austrians in the 15th century. The PVS’s ammunition of stone balls were around 31 inches or 800mm and weighed 1,500 pounds. The bombard, while the service history is limited, was used by the Habsburg Empire as a siege bombard in an era when bigger cannons were being employed on a regular basis. If you look at pictures of the bombard, it looks more like a modern mortar with a short barrel and fixed elevated firing angle.
Let’s jump forward in time to the First World War where innovations in weaponry and artillery made killing the enemy easier than ever before. The Imperial German war machine had a particular fascination with large artillery pieces, but one stands out, Big Bertha. Now, Big Bertha was not one cannon, or even a cannon at that, technically. There were 12 Big Berthas, and they were actually howitzers. What’s the difference you might ask? Well, a howitzer has a lower firing velocity but a higher firing angle than a cannon or gun. It can also be used for direct fire on a target or indirect, such as lobbing shells higher up, similar to a mortar, to rain down on a target. The Big Berthas could fire shells weighing at over 1,700 pounds to distances of around 6 miles. These shells could be fitted with a delayed fuse (to explode later instead of on impact) and bury themselves 40 feet or 12 meters into earth and concrete for maximum destruction to fortified emplacements and targets. One Big Bertha shell obliterated an entire French fort during the early phase of war. The Big Berthas were usually utilized in pairs and crewed by 240 men due to the 47-ton weight. Unfortunately for the Big Berthas, although they found success early in the war against the French and Russians, they were unable to be effective against French forts that were made of reinforced concrete and utilized mid to late war construction.
Our last overcompensatingly large artillery are the Schwerer Gustav and Dora guns. These twin cannons were first developed in the 1930s by the Germans to use against the French Maginot Line in the next war (that they were conveniently planning). These particular guns, Gustav and Dora, both did not survive the war and was used very sparingly by the Nazis. Gustav and Dora weighed over 1,300 pounds, could only be moved on a railway, and could fire 800mm 7-ton shells (about half the weight of a passenger train carriage) to ranges of just under 30 miles. To this day, they are both the heaviest gun and the largest caliber gun to ever be used in combat. Although the guns were developed to destroy heavily fortified French forts along the Maginot Line, the blitzkrieg through Belgium meant the guns were not able to be used for their intended purpose, instead they were used against the soviets at Sevastopol. Its shells were so heavy that they were able to destroy a munitions depot 30 meters underground. Other than the Battle of Sevastopol, they weren’t really used, as the logistics to get the gun in place took months and generally arrived too late or had to be moved to avoid capture. Before the end of the war, the Nazis destroyed both guns to prevent them falling into the hands of the dreaded Americans and Soviets.
To wrap up this piece on comically large cannons/guns, let us part with this final thought. What type of man generally wants to make a gun that is bigger than what anyone else has? Is it the same kind of man that wants to have the loudest exhaust on his car, or the largest lift on his already too big pick up truck, or maybe it’s the loudest angriest man in the room? Do you see what I am getting at here? Of course you do.
The Parachute
Have you ever wondered how human beings came up with the parachute? Did it involve a few very brave but very dumb people jumping off high places holding a bedsheet trying to fly or float? Would you believe me if I told you, that yes, that’s basically it? Well, it is. But that is not the whole story, and I wouldn’t be writing about it if it was. With that being said, let’s get into the fun filled (mostly) death defying history of jumping off of high things and out of perfectly good airplanes.
Let’s start with the first documented idiot (or genius) who jumped off a high thing and lived: Abbas ibn Firnas or Armen Firman. You will notice I gave two names there (you are so smart), because those two names could be the same person OR could be two different people. Historians can’t sort that bit out but we will tell the story as if they are one person for the sake of simplicity. Around 875CE in Cordoba, Armen Firman was said to have fixed a sheet or cloak around himself supported with wooden struts and jumped from a tower. He didn’t fly as he wanted, but the sheet slowed himself down enough that the was surprisingly unhurt. We don’t have much detail more than that, but it’s the first documented example, and it’s a fun one to picture in your head and an easy start to the article.
So, let’s move to a true parachute like device. The first what you, dear readers, would call a parachute was designed and sketched in Renaissance Italy. The sketch shows a man floating from the sky with a conical shaped parachute-like device allowing him to descend. Although its just a sketch, based on the size of the parachute compared to the man, historians believe he would have gone splat. Then comes in the well-known inventor and polymath, Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched a parachute design of his own. Leo’s chute was much larger and better ratioed to the man, and has since been successfully tested in the 2000s. There is no conclusive evidence that shows Leo ever tested his parachute unfortunately. Now comes a Frenchmen named Louis-Sébastien Lenormand. Lenormand jumped off a high building in 1783 and survived to tell the tale. His parachute was a little different, basically two umbrellas put together; he even coined the word ‘parachute’ that we use today. Generally, human beings are pretty predictable, when someone does something, someone else comes along and has to do it better. Because aviation technology started to rapidly develop in the 18th century, balloons became a thing, specifically, hot air balloons that people would ride in. So, in 1797, some guy named André-Jacques Garnerin had to outdo Lenormand, and cut away his hot air balloon from the basket over Paris at 3,200 feet, surviving using a parachute to slow his descent.
So, side note, I know we have been talking about successful parachute designs or jumps, but let’s talk about one of, if not, the most famous parachute fails. In 1912, tailor Franz Reichelt leapt from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to his death while attempting to successfully test a personal parachute that could be worn as clothes. Why is this failed attempt so famous? Well, first, his last words were “See you soon.” I mean, when those are your last words while testing a parachute, people are going to use it as a punchline. Second, his attempt and subsequent death was filmed and you can still find the footage online today. It's pretty grainy and is in black in white, it was filmed in 1912, but it’s an example of immortalizing the unfortunate side of innovation on film before the internet.
Ok, now we are getting to the good stuff, let’s talk about the event that made the parachute a ubiquitous part of aviation, a little thing called the First World War. WW1 led to massive innovations in aviation technology, with planes going from flying for a mere 10 or so seconds in 1904 to bombing raids of front-line forces in multi-engine aircraft by the end of the war in 1918. When the war began in 1914, planes had little use other than as observation devices but military thinkers quickly saw the use of planes as an offensive tool. Air forces started outfitting planes with guns, bombs, cameras, and eventually, parachutes. The Central Powers, specifically the Imperial German Air Force, were quick to see the advantage of their pilots not dying unnecessarily when they could just jump out of a rapidly crashing plane instead. The Allies, though, were a bit slower to adopt. There is a historical rumor that the Allied Command were worried that if they outfitted their pilots with parachutes, they would jump out instead of fighting or flying the aircraft back, even when damaged. The reality is that the command staff didn’t understand pilot needs and were relying on an outdated view that all pilots just needed improvements to weapons and plane durability to survive.
Then comes the Second World War. WW2 saw even further innovations, no longer were flimsy biplanes the normal aircraft in sophisticated air forces (some smaller countries still fielded the biplane but they were reserved for specialty roles in most air forces). Now, these sleek mono-wing planes, flying hundreds of miles an hour, could obliterate each other with ease. Pilots had the ability to “bail out” or jump from a stricken plane and try to return to friendly lines to fight another day. Most pilots and crew of planes were outfitted with a parachute and highly encouraged to save themselves if necessary, contrasting heavily with the attitude of First World War command staff. The parachute also became an experimental form of military doctrine. All sides in the war deployed and utilized new “Paratroopers.” These airborne forces would jump out of airplanes using a parachute to land behind enemy front lines or in areas uncontested by the enemy so that they could quicky seize ground or outmaneuver a foe. There were airborne operations in all major theatres of the conflict, and countries like Greece, Tunisia, Italy, France, Holland, and Norway saw airborne soldiers dropped on their soil. WW2 created heroes out of Allied Airborne operations and Divisions like the 101st Airborne even have had an critically acclaimed series on HBO created about them 60 years after the war ended (go watch Band of Brothers, it’s pretty cool if you like that sort of thing).
After the war, the public thought parachutes were no longer reserved for idiotic (genius) people jumping off high things or out of perfectly good airplanes. They figured if the US Army could train farm boys from Nebraska to use them, then they couldn’t be that unsafe. Now, we have modern day skydiving and countless Hollywood movies showing that anyone could jump out of an plane using a parachute and (probably) live to tell the tale.
The Sundial
Sundials - you may have seen them in your weird aunt’s garden growing up, on some obscure British documentary regarding solar worship, or maybe you are a watch nerd like me and heard that sundials predated modern watches but are shit compared to what we have now. You may be wondering how accurate they are, who used them, and how did they have a religious use. Or maybe you aren’t. Regardless, you now find yourself reading a short article on the history of sundials and some notable examples of their uses. Lucky you! You must be fun at parties.
So let’s start with what is a sundial – a device with a circular or semicircular disc base, markers for hours or some way to signify time, and with a pointed angled pole in the center known as the gnomon (Greek for pole) that casts a shadow from the sun onto the markers etched or inscribed into the disc base. As the sun moves throughout the day, the shadow of the gnomon tells us what time it is using those markers.
Ok, so now that you know what a sundial is, let’s understand its uses. There are a number of uses but let’s start with the most obvious: a clock. Our ancient friends created the sundial to be a clock. Humans have been fascinated by the passage of time and as soon as we could count the hours, we have been frustrated with people for being late. The sundial was one of the first, most common clocks and was even used well up into the 19th century to check the accuracy of mechanical clocks. A second use of sundials is in the study of astronomy. Early astronomers, such as the Greek Aristarchus of Samos, created sundials that marked the passage of time and seasons, by studying the sun. A third use of the sundial was for a religious function, they were used to mark important seasonal festivals and for marking the specific times of day used for prayer. An example of this would be the use of sundials during the medieval period to mark when Muslims were supposed to pray. In fact, most sundials from the golden age of Islam indicate times on the sundial for when prayer was supposed to occur.
Some notable examples of famous sundials are the Egyptian shadow clocks that date to 1500 BCE. There was at one point a belief amongst historians that even the Egyptian obelisks could have been used as large sundials to measure the passage of time, but this idea has since been discounted mostly. The Greeks seem to have been particularly fascinated with sundials, two examples would be the Hemicycle by Aristarchus of Samos. This sundial not only measured time but also a concept (that goes way over my head) known as seasonal hours depending on the length of the shadow. Another is an octagonal building known as the Tower of the Winds in Athens. The building, completed around 100BCE, had eight “planar” sundials facing the cardinal directions of the compass. The Romans, as always, stole a famous example from a rival tribe, the Samnites. They put this sundial on display in the city of Rome in 290BCE and the first original Roman sundial for the city was not built until over 100 years later.
So, what killed off the sundial and relegated it to a garden ornament? Well, of course, the mechanical clock. Mechanical clocks started to come around in the 14th and 15th century and as they become more accurate with springs, pendulums, and gears, sundials started to disappear. They were stubborn as hell though, and lasted well into the 19th century to measure the accuracy of mechanical time keeping devices. So, next time that weird aunt with the sundial in the garden invites you over, make sure you regale her with the EXTREMELY exciting uses and past of the sundial.