Le Prieur rocket
Le Prieur rockets (French Fusées Le Prieur) were a type of incendiary air-to-air rockets used in World War I against observation balloons and airships. They were invented by the French Lieutenant Yves Le Prieur and were first used in the Battle of Verdun on 1916. Due to great inaccuracy their range was limited to about 115 metres (126 yards).
Development
The Le Prieur rocket was essentially a cardboard tube filled with 200 grammes of black powder with a wooden conical head attached (by doped paper or linen tape) and had a triangular knife blade inserted in a slot across its apex forming a spear point. A square sectioned wooden stick (usually pine) was taped to the rocket with about 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) extending back from the base of the rocket and fitted snugly into a launch tube attached to the aircraft inter-plane struts.
As top French military officers had expressed concerns about fire hazard for the attacking aircraft, Yves Le Prieur first experimented with his weapon by fitting one on a short section of a Voisin aircraft wing bolted on a Piccard Pictet (Pic-Pic) automobile (one of the few period cars with a genuine 120 km/h capability). As the tests went on with full success, the weapon was soon put into active service.
Yves le Prieur
Yves Paul Gaston Le Prieur (March 23, 1885 – 1 June 1963) was an officer of the French Navy and an inventor.
Adventures in the Far East
Le Prieur followed his father in joining the French navy. As an officer he served in Asia and used traditional deep sea diving equipment. He studied Japanese and became sufficiently proficient to be promoted to military attaché and translator at the French Embassy in Tokyo. While there he became the first Frenchman to earn a Black Belt in judo, and the first person to take off in a plane, a glider, from Japanese soil in 1909.
The glider, named Le Prieur No. 2 after an earlier No. 1 unmanned prototype, was 7.2 m long, 7.0 m wide, and weighed 35 kg. The frame was made of Japanese bamboo, which was covered with calico. Le Prieur had designed the glider in collaboration with Shirou Aibara, a Lieutenant of the Japanese Navy, and Aikitsu Tanakadate, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University. The first flight took place in December 1909 just to the East of the University of Tokyo at Shinobazu Pond with Le Prieur sitting on the glider's main wing. The first flight covered 200 m at an altitude of 10 m.
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