GLMITE - WW2 superexplosive or crackpot idea

During WW2 a bomb developer named Lester P. Barlow claimed to have discovered a new type of explosive utilizing liquid oxygen which would surpass every other explosive in use at the time.
He dubbed this explosive "GLMITE".

Personally I think that there is no way that a mixture of liquid oxygen with another substance can be much better than TNT but Barlow managed to convince some influential people to give him the clearance to conduct tests with GLMITE.

The biggest test with several hundred pounds of his explosive failed to kill any of the 200+ goats that were tethered at different distances from the explosion.

I uploaded several newspaper articles and other documents that I found on the internet regarding "Barlow's bomb" to Archive.org.
BarlowBombCompendium

This could be the end of this post but there are some important questions that I think need to be answered.

Why was Barlow so sure that GLMITE would have a more severe effect than other explosives i.e. what was the theoretical foundation and if it was just a scam then why did he try to conduct supervised tests?
Surely he must have known that if this was a scam that a test would reveal the truth and this would forever mark him as a fraud.

Some of the newspaper articles claim impressive results during the German bombing of Barcelona like bombs killing people located a quarter of a mile(400 meters) from the explosion.
Is there any evidence of those alleged effects or were those claims nothing more but rumors combined with the fear that Germany developed a wonder weapon with an enormous blast radius?



Attachment: GLMITE_BarlowBombExplosion.mp4 (981kB)
This file has been downloaded 132 times

Quote: Originally posted by Trashcanman

Some of the newspaper articles claim impressive results during the German bombing of Barcelona like bombs killing people located a quarter of a mile(400 meters) from the explosion. Is there any evidence of those alleged effects or were those claims nothing more but rumors combined with the fear that Germany developed a wonder weapon with an enormous blast radius?

Quote: Originally posted by Sir_Gawain

Interesting that the concept of mutually assured destruction was around before nuclear weapons. Anyway, I don’t think there’s any way for a simple fuel/oxidiser mixture to outperform molecularly bonded explosives.

Quote: Originally posted by EF2000

But if we assume that medium weight 250 kg bombs were used, reports of casualties at ~400 metres become more realistic. "Explosive weapon effects" report by GICHD says that "risk estimate distance" (RED) with 0.1% "expected percentage of incapacitation" for 500lb/250kg-class bomb is 425 metres (see Table 10 at p.84). REDs are calculated for soldiers lying prone, for standing unprepared civillians hit probability and distances are more. Also in urban areas, there's a lot of secondary fragments like shattered glass. Also should be noted that during one of air raids, a truck with explosives was hit, resulting in huge explosion and rumors about giant bombs, according to "The battle for Spain" by Antony Beevor, page 333. Thanks for reading an armchair analysis by a dummy.

Thanks for the analysis.
I think that your explanation is probably correct and that the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes truck explosion(according to an article on a site that I found the truck carried about 4 tons of explosives) and the cases of fragmentation injuries somehow merged into a story about a non-existent "superbomb".
The content of the first attached image allows the assumption that Barlow read that warped story and truly believed that a new type of bomb was used in Barcelona.

What still remains unanswered is the question of why he believed that a few hundred pounds of a liquid oxygen containing explosive(his "GLMITE") could potentially flatten every building and kill everyone within a 1000 feet(300 meters) radius.

PS: I think it is crazy that in 1938 an explosion with a yield of a few tons of TNT managed to start a false story about a superbomb and that just a few years later it had become normal to regularly drop real superbombs aka High Capacity/Blockbuster bombs with a similar and sometimes higher yield(like the 12000lbs HC bomb).

Quote: Originally posted by Sir_Gawain

Five times as fast as TNT? That’s 34,500 m/s!

Quote: Originally posted by Sir_Gawain

Yeah, it’s undoubtedly completely made up. Also, his claim that it detonates “flat” as opposed to spherical makes no sense.

Quote: Originally posted by Sir_Gawain

I wonder if it acting almost like a thermobaric bomb threw off some of the tests.

In my opinion there is a chance that at least one of Barlows first small tests with GLMITE could have benefited from a "thermobaric effect" without him realizing it.

The first tests of fuel air explosive and thermobaric weapons(that I am aware of) were conducted in 1944/45(if you don't include the Taifun-Gerät which was already tested in 1940) in Germany(annexed Austria) under supervision of Mario Zippermayr.
That means that no scientific publications on thermobaric weaponry could have existed in the US at the time when Barlow claimed in 1940 that GLMITE would be far more powerful than other explosives.
What was publicly known at the time was that coal dust(mainly consisting of carbon) could lead to severe explosions in the coal mining industry.

What if exactly that knowledge coupled with a lack of scientific data on coal dust explosions could have lead him to believe that coal/carbon had some mysterious property which made it very suitable for explosive purposes. This could have motivated Barlow to start experimenting with carbon as a main ingredient.

I can see how small experiments with a carbon-liquid oxygen mix could have lead to unexpected behaviour during the explosion and I think the key to this could be the liquid oxygen and its property of evaporating at room temperature.
The problem that the liquid oxygen was evaporating appears to have been a constant problem during the tests.

This can be seen in the attached video before detonation.
Attachment: EvaporatingLiquidOxygen.mp4 (198kB)
This file has been downloaded 126 times

An earlier test even had to be rescheduled because too much liquid oxygen had evaporated.




I made a simple image in Paint to better explain how the evaporated oxygen could have contributed to unexpected blast results.

[1]Liquid oxygen has evaporated and because oxygen is heavier than air it has accumulated near ground level and the bomb still contains liquid oxygen but not enough to oxidize all of the carbon.

[2]The bomb has been triggered and the unreacted carbon dispersed into the vicinity which is filled with more oxygen than would be normal because the evaporated oxygen has mixed with the air.

[3]The fireball grows to the dimensions of the carbon-(oxygenRich)air cloud and within it the overpressure of the explosion does not significantly decrease because the detonation reaction propagates throughout this cloud. Thereby the blast wave does not decay as fast with distance when compared to one caused by an ordinary high explosive.

In other words the evaporated oxygen increases the probability of the unreacted carbon forming an explosive mix in the air and this causes an unintentional volumetric explosion.



This is of course just a hypothesis but it could explain the result of a different test that is visible in the following picture.