The 'Rockets' Red Glare' in America's Anthem Was an Indian Weapon

On 10 September 1780, near a village called Pollilur in what is now Tamil Nadu, a British East India Company column under Colonel William Baillie was hit by something its officers could not name.

They came in low and fast, hundreds at a time, trailing fire and smoke. Some skimmed along the hard dry ground like flung burning spears. Some came down out of the sky. They were wildly inaccurate — and it did not matter in the slightest, because there were so many of them.

Then Baillie’s ammunition wagons went up.

The tumbrils are thought to have been detonated by a stray rocket. What followed was, by some measures, the worst defeat the East India Company suffered on the subcontinent for the next seventy years. Baillie surrendered what was left of his force.

The Company had just been introduced to the Mysorean rocket.

The innovation was boring, and that’s why it worked

Rockets weren’t new. Gunpowder rockets had been fired in war in China and India for centuries. Everybody knew roughly how to make one: pack black powder into a tube, tie the tube to a stick, light it, get out of the way.

The problem was always the tube. Cardboard, paper, and bamboo casings can only take so much pressure before they split. So the powder had to burn slow and weak, and what you got was a firework with ambition.

Mysore’s armourers made the tube out of soft hammered iron.

That’s the whole idea. An iron combustion chamber holds far more pressure before it bursts, which means you can pack the powder harder and burn it hotter. More thrust. Far more range. A typical example was an iron tube around eight inches long and an inch or two across, strapped to a bamboo shaft about four feet long — a weapon a single soldier could carry a bundle of, and light in seconds.

How far they flew is genuinely disputed, and worth being careful about. The standard figure in Indian scholarship runs to as much as two kilometres. William Congreve — of whom much more shortly, and who had every professional motive to be unimpressed — wrote that Indian rockets’ range did not exceed 1,000 yards. Take somewhere around a kilometre as the floor. Even the floor was more than a British field gun crew wanted to think about.

Nobody fires one rocket

The second Mysorean insight was doctrinal, not metallurgical: a single rocket is a coin toss, but a thousand rockets are weather.

These things could not be aimed in any meaningful sense. Mysore’s answer was to stop trying. Fire them in massed barrages and the dispersion stops being a defect and starts being coverage — a rolling front of fire that horses would not walk into and infantry lines could not hold formation under.

The weapon was developed under Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore, and expanded by his son Tipu Sultan, who inherited both the kingdom and the wars in 1782. Tipu built the rocketmen into a standing corps — by some accounts several thousand strong, with dedicated rocket units attached to each infantry brigade. A whole branch of service, organised around a weapon Europe did not have.

They were used against the British again and again: through the 1780s, and then in the campaigns of the 1790s. NASA’s own history of rocketry, written for American schoolchildren, puts it plainly: “The success of Indian rocket barrages against the British in 1792 and again in 1799 caught the interest of an artillery expert, Colonel William Congreve.”

4 May 1799

The end came at Seringapatam — Srirangapatna — Tipu’s island capital.

The Fourth Mysore War was short. On 4 May 1799, a British-led assault went into the breach. Tipu Sultan was killed in the fighting, somewhere in the chaos of his own defences. Something like ten thousand of his people died with him.

Then the city was looted, and the arsenals with it. What followed in Britain was, in the National Army Museum’s phrase, “a kind of Tipu mania” — his sword, his turban, his tiger-striped everything became the most fashionable plunder in London.

(Tipu remains a fiercely contested figure in India today, argued over for reasons that have nothing to do with metallurgy. This is a story about a tube.)

Among the crates that went home were the rockets. Not as souvenirs. As samples.

What Woolwich did with them

They went to the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, and into the hands of Colonel William Congreve — Comptroller of the Royal Laboratories, and a man with the run of Britain’s weapons research.

The Royal Artillery Museum, whose business this is, states it without hedging: Congreve’s rockets “were inspired by those used by the Kingdom of Mysore against the East India Company during the Anglo-Mysore Wars (1780–1799).” Captured examples were sent to Britain, and Congreve developed his own designs from them. Britannica calls the Congreve rocket “an improvement over the rockets used by Hyder Ali, prince of Mysore.”

He worked fast. First successful tests in 1804. By 1806 he had 32-pounders flying 3,000 yards, and in October of that year eighteen boats off Boulogne put more than two hundred rockets into the town in half an hour and set it alight. By 1813 the British Army had a full range of them, up to monsters of 150 pounds.

Congreve did real engineering here. He scaled the thing up enormously, standardised its manufacture, worked out how to fire it from ships, and invented warheads Mysore never had. This is a derivation, not a photocopy.

But it is a derivation. And the name on it was his.

”Their magnitude was inconsiderable”

Here is the part you can read in his own hand.

In 1814 Congreve published The Details of the Rocket System, the technical manual for his weapon. Search it end to end and you will not find the word India. Not Mysore, not Seringapatam, not Hyder, not Tipu. No antecedents at all. The rocket simply exists, and it is British.

In 1827 he published a longer treatise, and this time he let it out — sideways:

“I knew that rockets were used for military purposes in India; but that their magnitude was inconsiderable, and their range not exceeding 1000 yards.”

Read that twice. It is an acknowledgement and a dismissal welded into a single sentence. Yes, they had them. They were small. I did the real work.

That’s how a technology changes nationality. Not with a theft — with a footnote.

Baltimore, 13 September 1814

Fifteen years after Seringapatam, the British ship Erebus sat in the Patapsco River off Baltimore and fired 32-pound Congreve rockets at Fort McHenry for twenty-five hours straight. The National Park Service counts more than 1,500 mortar bombs and rockets thrown at the fort in that barrage.

Watching from a ship about eight miles off was an American lawyer named Francis Scott Key.

You know what he wrote. And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

The red glare over Fort McHenry was the light of a weapon designed in South India.

The joke inside the anthem

Here is what makes it better: the rockets didn’t work.

They could not be aimed — the same flaw they’d always had, now flying under a British name. After twenty-five hours of bombardment, four Americans were dead and the fort was barely scratched. The garrison held. The British gave up and left.

One of the fort’s defenders left behind a line that ought to be more famous than it is. Firing back into the dark, the Americans needed some way to find their targets, and they found one:

“The only means We had of directing our Guns was by the blaze of their Rocketts.”

The Americans aimed by rocket-light. A weapon born in Mysore, captured by Britain, renamed for an English colonel, and finally used — by its intended victims — as a lamp.

Then Key wrote it into a poem, and the poem became a national anthem, and a nation that has never had anything to do with Mysore sings about its rockets before every ball game.

The weapon goes home

There’s one more sentence in that 1827 treatise, and it’s the one that lands hardest:

“I have also had the satisfaction of introducing this weapon into the service of the East India Company, and for that purpose, in 1817, I established a manufactory from which Rockets have from time to time been sent to India, with instructions for the formation of different corps for using them.”

The rocket went back to India.

Taken from Mysore, rebuilt at Woolwich, renamed Congreve — and then manufactured in England and shipped east, with instruction manuals, to the East India Company. The same Company whose column was shredded at Pollilur. Complete with British advice on how to organise rocket corps, which is the one thing Mysore had already worked out forty years earlier.

The circle closed, and the receipt was in English.

A well in Karnataka

In 2018, in Nagara village in Shivamogga district, Karnataka, a state archaeological team dug out an abandoned well.

The mud smelled of gunpowder. Underneath were more than a thousand corroded iron rockets, piled where somebody had dumped them, sometime around the fall of Tipu’s kingdom.

They had been sitting in the dark for two centuries — a thousand iron tubes, a few kilometres of range apiece, the direct technical ancestors of a line in another country’s national anthem, in a hole in the ground with no name on them.

That’s usually how it goes. The thing gets invented in one place and remembered in another. Wootz steel became “Damascus.” The Indian nose-reconstruction operation became modern plastic surgery under European names. And an iron tube from Mysore became the Congreve rocket, and then became American scripture.

The technology never cared whose name was on it. It just flew.