Manby mortar

The Manby mortar or Manby apparatus was a maritime lifesaving device originated at the start of the 19th-Century, comprising a mortar capable of throwing a line to a floudering ship within reach of shore, such that heavier hawsers could then be pulled into place an used either to direct a rescue-boat to the ship, or, later, to mount a Breeches buoy.

Manby mortar, 1842 drawing
John Cantiloe Joy, Going to a Vessel requiring assistance and Thereby preventing Shipwreck (undated), Norfolk Museums Collections

The apparatus was invented by Captain George William Manby, inspired by his witnessing a ship run aground off Great Yarmouth in 1807.[1]

The first recorded rescue using the Manby apparatus was on 18 February 1808, with Manby himself in charge. The crew of seven were brought to safety from the Plymouth Brig Elizabeth, stranded off the shore at Great Yarmouth. It was estimated that by the time of Manby's death nearly 1000 persons had been rescued from stranded ships by means of his apparatus.[2]

It was used by the Waterguard and later by H M Coastguard for many years.

Earlier attempts

There had been earlier unsuccessful attempts at similar ideas, including by the French agronomist and inventor Jacques Joseph Ducarne de Blangy,[3] and a ship to shore idea by a Mr John Bell, in 1792 the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce gave him a bounty of fifty guineas, he was at that time a sergeant, afterwards a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. In 1807 the same society furnished some further particulars, with a plate of the apparatus. [4]

The Manby apparatus was also prefigured by proposals, unfulfilled, made by George Miller as early as 1793 to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce for the purchase of a mortar and line to rescue people from vessels wrecked on the Dunbar shoreline. Miller was instrumental in the purchase of a lifeboat for Dunbar, amongst the earliest (though not the first) in Britain.[5]

See also

References
  1. Gilly Pickup, What the British Invented: From the Great to the Downright Bonkers, Amberley Publishing Limited, 2015 ISBN 1445650282.
  2. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Manby, George William" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.
  3. "Founders Online: To Thomas Jefferson from Jacques Joseph Ducarne de Blangy, 3 J …".
  4. Philosophical Magazine Series 1, Volume 37, Issue 158, p455. 1811 url=http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14786441108563318
  5. Anderson, David (2002). "The Dunbar Lifeboat" (PDF). Transactions of the East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists Society. 25: 94.


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