Barranquilla
Barranquilla is the capital district of Departamento del Atlántico located near the Caribbean Sea and it is the largest city and port in the northern Caribbean Coast region of Colombia, with a population of 1,232,766 as of 2018, which makes it Colombia's fourth most populous city after Bogotá, Medellín and Cali. Barranquilla lies strategically next to the delta of the Magdalena River, 7.5 kilometres from its mouth at the Caribbean Sea, serving as port for river and maritime transportation within Colombia. It is the main industrial, shopping and cultural center of the Caribbean Region of Colombia; the city is the core of the Metropolitan Area of Barranquilla, which includes the municipalities of Soledad, Galapa and Puerto Colombia. Barranquilla was established as a town on April 7, 1813, although it dated from at least 1629, it grew into an important port, serving as a haven for immigrants from Europe during and following World War I and World War II, when waves of additional immigrants from the Middle East and Asia arrived.
Barranquilla became Colombia's principal port, with its level of industrialization and modernity earned the city the nickname Colombia's Golden Gate. In the 1940s, Barranquilla was the second largest city in Colombia and one of the most modern cities in the Caribbean and in South America, while local administrations, due to widespread corruption in their ranks, brought about a decline in the standard of living; as government investment increased in other Colombian cities, Barranquilla's national position was eclipsed. The city is home to one of the most important folk and cultural festivals of Colombia, the Carnival of Barranquilla, declared a National Cultural Heritage by the Congress of Colombia in 2001 and recognized by UNESCO in 2003. Ernesto Cortissoz International Airport, built in Barranquilla in 1919, was the first airport in South America; the city is served by international flights. Barranquilla's name refers to the canyons that existed in the area adjacent to the Magdalena, where the city arose.
During the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the name "barranca" was common in coastal communities. This name was derived from an alteration of Aragon. During Spanish colonization, the area was known as Camacho or Kamash Indian site and San Nicolás de la Barranquilla began to develop the area with the estates of Barrancas de Camacho, Barrancas de San Nicolás, Barranquilla de Camacho and Barranquilla de San Nicolás from which the city name is derived. In 1921, President Marco Fidel Suárez called the city the Pórtico Dorado de la República in recognition of its economic importance as a port since the late 19th century. In 1946, opening the 5th Central American and Caribbean Games, President Mariano Ospina Pérez reaffirmed the nickname of the city as the "Golden Gate". Barranquilla is known as La Arenosa, so named by the president of New Granada, Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, during his stay in Barranquilla in 1849. Curramba, la Bella was used to refer to Barranquilla by journalist Juan Eugenio Cañavera in Bogotá in the mid-twentieth century.
The "la Bella" part was assigned by fellow journalist Roger Araújo as a counterweight to the word Curramba, seen as derogatory, derived from adjective "currambero". The thinker Agustín Nieto Caballero called Barranquilla "Ciudad de los Brazos Abiertos" and Enrique Ancízar, president of the Colombian Society of Agriculture, called it "Faro de América". FlagIn 1811, the patriots who won the Independence of the Cartagenas adopted the current flag, it consists of three rectangles, red being the outermost yellow, green in the center. Red symbolizes the blood of patriots. In the centre, there is an eight-pointed silver star which symbolizes the eight provinces of the confederacy; the flag was carried by Simon Bolívar during the campaign of Lower Magdalena in 1812. In 1814, the Congress of Tunja adopted it as the emblem of the United Provinces of New Granada. In 1910, the Council approved the flag for Barranquilla. Coat of armsThe seal of the city was mentioned in the decree that granted Barranquilla the status of a city by Manuel Rodríguez Torices, the President of the Sovereign State of Cartagena de Indias, as a reward for the determined and courageous patriots who participated in the defense of the independence of Cartagena de Indias against Santa Marta in 1813.
AnthemThe music and lyrics of Himno de Barranquilla were chosen in competition by the Sociedad de Mejoras Públicas and adopted as the anthem of the city by the Municipal Council in a meeting on October 19, 1942. The lyrics were written by the poet the music is of Panama, by Simón Urbina. Other symbolsThe flowers Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, Tabebuia rosea, the animals Volatinia jacarina and iguana are used as other symbols of the city. Unlike other cities in Colombia such as Cartagena or Bogotá D. C. Barranquilla was not founded during the Spanish colonial period and it was not founded on a pre-Columbian site; the first mention of the current territory of Barranquilla dates back to 1533 and was written by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés. He describes the route of Pedro de Heredia, founder of Cartagena, just weeks before he founded that city, says that this was a point of landing of canoes for the Indians of Santa Marta within the interior. They
El Nuevo Siglo
El Nuevo Siglo is a regional daily newspaper based in Bogotá, Colombia. It was founded in 1925 with the name El Siglo by Laureano Gómez Castro and José de la Vega, but its staunch opposition to the military rule of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla led it to be closed by the Government in 1953, only reopened at the end of the dictatorship in 1957; the newspaper had a drastic change of presentation in 1990, when it went from a broadsheet format to tabloid, changed its name to the current one
Colombian Communist Party
The Colombian Communist Party or PCC is a legal communist party in Colombia. It was founded in 1930 as the Communist Party of Colombia, at which point it was the Colombian section of the Comintern, changed its name in 1991; the party is led by Jaime Caycedo and publishes a weekly newspaper called Voz. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia was founded as the armed wing of the PCC in 1964, but the two organisations separated in 1993. In July 2017, they announced new plans to form a political coalition. In the mid-1960s the U. S. State Department estimated the party membership to be 13,000. Three members of the PCC were known to have undergone training with the East German Ministry of State Security; the PCC was a founding member of the Social and Political Front party coalition, which merged into the Alternative Democratic Pole alliance. The PCC was expelled from the PDA in August 2012 because of its affiliation to Patriotic March, another political alliance. During and following the La Violencia civil war that erupted in Colombia from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, the communists developed organic links to several liberal guerrilla and irregular rural forces, most of whom nominally depended on the official Colombian Liberal Party and demobilized by the end of that period.
Those groups with more direct relations with the PCC tended to not demobilize, keeping their weapons and organizational structures intact. In 1947, a short-lived Communist Labour Party was formed by former members of the PCC. In 1964, a section of these guerrillas would develop into the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, considered as the official armed wing of the Communist party; the PCC leadership operated in the cities during the 1960s and 1970s, but it supported the operations of the FARC holding solidarity and donation rallies for FARC members and units, as well as providing other forms of aid. The PCC justified the operations of the guerrillas as the armed component of the fight against capitalism and imperialism in Colombia, while at the same time it continued to participate in legal electoral activities independently. Both activities were considered to have their own place within the so-called "combination of all forms of struggle", a concept employed by PCC and FARC; the PCC and FARC-EP grew apart politically, in particular during the 1980s.
Both organizations had their share of internal debates, for example as to which entity would have greater influence and control over the Unión Patriótica during its formation, on the issue of continuing to participate in elections as the UP suffered violent suppression. Other disagreements would include that the PCC may have tended to follow the changes that developed within the official Soviet line during the Cold War, which the FARC-EP did not consider as binding. After the Berlin Wall fell, confusion among the two sides increased; the principle of the "combination of all forms of struggle" was brought into question at the time by some members of the PCC and UP leadership. The PCC broke with the FARC in 1993; as a result, a separate Clandestine Colombian Communist Party was formed in 2000, though some sort of separate FARC-based internal party structure had been in de facto existence during most of the 1990s. Both organizations have remained distinct in their activities, though individual members of both parties may have continued to maintain working relationships on occasion.
In July 2017, the PCC and FARC announced plans to create a new political alliance ahead of the Colombian parliamentary election, 2018. Both organisations indicated their support for the creation of a "new party or political movement". During most of its history the PCC has been the subject of repression and persecution both by private individuals and retired government agents and others; the PCC was weakened by paramilitary massacres and assassinations from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s. A leading PCC figure, Arturo Díaz García, was assassinated on December 21, 2005 in the corregimiento of Toche in the municipality of Ibagué, Tolima. Supporters of David Ravelo, a member of the PCC's central committee, serving an 18-year sentence for plotting to murder a municipal official, contend that he is a political prisoner, prosecuted illegitimately. Communism in Colombia PCC Party website
Tram
A tram is a rail vehicle which runs on tramway tracks along public urban streets. The lines or networks operated by tramcars are called tramways; the term electric street railways was used in the United States. In the United States, the term tram has sometimes been used for rubber-tyred trackless trains, which are unrelated to other kinds of trams. Tram vehicles are lighter and shorter than main line and rapid transit trains. Today, most trams use electrical power fed by a pantograph sliding on an overhead line. In some cases by a contact shoe on a third rail is used. If necessary, they may have dual power systems—electricity in city streets, diesel in more rural environments. Trams carry freight. Trams are now included in the wider term "light rail", which includes grade-separated systems; some trams, known as tram-trains, may have segments that run on mainline railway tracks, similar to interurban systems. The differences between these modes of rail transport are indistinct, a given system may combine multiple features.
One of the advantages over earlier forms of transit was the low rolling resistance of metal wheels on steel rails, allowing the trams to haul a greater load for a given effort. Problems included the fact that any given animal could only work so many hours on a given day, had to be housed, groomed and cared for day in and day out, produced prodigious amounts of manure, which the streetcar company was charged with disposing of. Electric trams replaced animal power in the late 19th and early 20th century. Improvements in other forms of road transport such as buses led to decline of trams in mid 20th century. Trams have seen resurgence in recent years; the English terms tram and tramway are derived from the Scots word tram, referring to a type of truck used in coal mines and the tracks on which they ran. The word tram derived from Middle Flemish trame; the identical word la trame with the meaning "crossbeam" is used in the French language. Etymologists believe that the word tram refers to the wooden beams the railway tracks were made of before the railroad pioneers switched to the much more wear-resistant tracks made of iron and steel.
The word Tram-car is attested from 1873. Although the terms tram and tramway have been adopted by many languages, they are not used universally in English; the term streetcar is first recorded in 1840, referred to horsecars. When electrification came, Americans began to speak of trolleycars or trolleys. A held belief holds the word to derive from the troller, a four-wheeled device, dragged along dual overhead wires by a cable that connected the troller to the top of the car and collected electrical power from the overhead wires. "Trolley" and variants refer to the verb troll, meaning "roll" and derived from Old French, cognate uses of the word were well established for handcarts and horse drayage, as well as for nautical uses. The alternative North American term'trolley' may speaking be considered incorrect, as the term can be applied to cable cars, or conduit cars that instead draw power from an underground supply. Conventional diesel tourist buses decorated to look like streetcars are sometimes called trolleys in the US.
Furthering confusion, the term tram has instead been applied to open-sided, low-speed segmented vehicles on rubber tires used to ferry tourists short distances, for example on the Universal Studios backlot tour and, in many countries, as tourist transport to major destinations. The term may apply to an aerial ropeway, e.g. the Roosevelt Island Tramway. Although the use of the term trolley for tram was not adopted in Europe, the term was associated with the trolleybus, a rubber-tyred vehicle running on hard pavement, which draws its power from pairs of overhead wires; these electric buses, which use twin trolley poles, are called trackless trolleys, or sometimes trolleys. The New South Wales, government has decided to use the term "light rail" for their trams; the history of trams, streetcars or trolley systems, began in early nineteenth century. It can be divided up into several discrete periods defined by the principal means of motive power used; the world's first passenger train or tram was the Swansea and Mumbles Railway, in Wales, UK.
The Mumbles Railway Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1804, horse-drawn service started in 1807. The service was restarted in 1860, again using horses, it was worked by steam from 1877, from 1929, by large electric tramcars, until closure in 1961. The Swansea and Mumbles Railway was something of a one-off however, no street tramway would appear in Britain until 1860 when one was built in Birkenhead by the American George Francis Train. Street railways developed in America before Europe due to the poor paving of the streets in American cities which made them unsuitable for horsebuses, which were common on the well-paved streets of European cities. Running the horsecars on rails allowed for a much smoother ride. There are records of a street railway running in Baltimore as early as 1828, however the first authenticated streetcar in America, was the New York and Harle
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was a Cuban communist revolutionary and politician who governed the Republic of Cuba as Prime Minister from 1959 to 1976 and as President from 1976 to 2008. A Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, Castro served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1961 until 2011. Under his administration, Cuba became a one-party communist state, while industry and business were nationalized and state socialist reforms were implemented throughout society. Born in Birán, Oriente as the son of a wealthy Spanish farmer, Castro adopted leftist anti-imperialist politics while studying law at the University of Havana. After participating in rebellions against right-wing governments in the Dominican Republic and Colombia, he planned the overthrow of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista, launching a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953. After a year's imprisonment, Castro traveled to Mexico where he formed a revolutionary group, the 26th of July Movement, with his brother Raúl Castro and Che Guevara.
Returning to Cuba, Castro took a key role in the Cuban Revolution by leading the Movement in a guerrilla war against Batista's forces from the Sierra Maestra. After Batista's overthrow in 1959, Castro assumed military and political power as Cuba's Prime Minister; the United States came to oppose Castro's government and unsuccessfully attempted to remove him by assassination, economic blockade and counter-revolution, including the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961. Countering these threats, Castro aligned with the Soviet Union and allowed the Soviets to place nuclear weapons in Cuba, sparking the Cuban Missile Crisis – a defining incident of the Cold War – in 1962. Adopting a Marxist–Leninist model of development, Castro converted Cuba into a one-party, socialist state under Communist Party rule, the first in the Western Hemisphere. Policies introducing central economic planning and expanding healthcare and education were accompanied by state control of the press and the suppression of internal dissent.
Abroad, Castro supported anti-imperialist revolutionary groups, backing the establishment of Marxist governments in Chile and Grenada, as well as sending troops to aid allies in the Yom Kippur and Angolan Civil War. These actions, coupled with Castro's leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement from 1979 to 1983 and Cuba's medical internationalism, increased Cuba's profile on the world stage. Following the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991, Castro led Cuba through the economic downturn of the "Special Period", embracing environmentalist and anti-globalization ideas. In the 2000s, Castro forged alliances in the Latin American "pink tide" – namely with Hugo Chávez's Venezuela – and signed Cuba up to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas. In 2006, Castro transferred his responsibilities to Vice President Raúl Castro, elected to the presidency by the National Assembly in 2008; the longest-serving non-royal head of state in the 20th and 21st centuries, Castro polarized world opinion. His supporters view him as a champion of socialism and anti-imperialism whose revolutionary regime advanced economic and social justice while securing Cuba's independence from American imperialism.
Critics view him as a dictator whose administration oversaw human-rights abuses, the exodus of a large number of Cubans and the impoverishment of the country's economy. Castro was decorated with various international awards and influenced different individuals and groups across the world. Castro was born out of wedlock at his father's farm on 13 August 1926, his father, Ángel Castro y Argiz, a veteran of the Spanish–American War, was a migrant to Cuba from Galicia, Northwest Spain. He had become financially successful by growing sugar cane at Las Manacas farm in Birán, Oriente Province. After the collapse of his first marriage he took his household servant, Lina Ruz González – of Canarian origin – as his mistress and second wife. At age six, Castro was sent to live with his teacher in Santiago de Cuba, before being baptized into the Roman Catholic Church at the age of eight. Being baptized enabled Castro to attend the La Salle boarding school in Santiago, where he misbehaved. In 1945, Castro transferred to the more prestigious Jesuit-run El Colegio de Belén in Havana.
Although Castro took an interest in history and debating at Belén, he did not excel academically, instead devoting much of his time to playing sports. In 1945, Castro began studying law at the University of Havana. Admitting he was "politically illiterate", Castro became embroiled in student activism and the violent gangsterismo culture within the university. Passionate about anti-imperialism and opposing U. S. intervention in the Caribbean, he unsuccessfully campaigned for the presidency of the Federation of University Students on a platform of "honesty and justice". Castro became critical of the corruption and violence of President Ramón Grau's government, delivering a public speech on the subject in November 1946 that received coverage on the front page of several newspapers. In 1947, Castro joined the Party of the Cuban People, founded by veteran politician Eduardo Chibás. A charismatic figure, Chibás advocated social justice, honest government and political freedom, while his party exposed corruption and demanded reform.
Though Chibás came third in the 1948 general election, Castro remained committed to working on his behalf. Student violence escalated after Grau employed gang leaders as police officers, Castro soon received a death threat urging him to leave the university. However, he refused to do so an
Molotov cocktail
A Molotov cocktail known as a petrol bomb, bottle bomb, poor man's grenade, Molotovin koktaili, fire bomb or just Molotov, sometimes shortened as Molly, is a generic name used for a variety of bottle-based improvised incendiary weapons. Due to the relative ease of production, Molotov cocktails have been used by street criminals, rioters, criminal gangs, urban guerrillas, hard-line militants, irregular soldiers, or regular soldiers short on equivalent military-issue weapons, they are intended to ignite rather than obliterate targets. The name "Molotov cocktail" was coined by the Finns during the Winter War, called in Finnish: polttopullo or Molotovin koktaili; the name was an insulting reference to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the architects of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed in late August 1939. The pact with Nazi Germany was mocked by the Finns, as was much of the propaganda Molotov produced to accompany the pact, including his declaration on Soviet state radio that bombing missions over Finland were airborne humanitarian food deliveries for their starving neighbours.
The Finns sarcastically dubbed the Soviet cluster bombs "Molotov bread baskets" in reference to Molotov's propaganda broadcasts. When the hand-held bottle firebomb was developed to attack Soviet tanks, the Finns called it the "Molotov cocktail", as "a drink to go with the food". A Molotov cocktail is a breakable glass bottle containing a flammable substance such as petrol, alcohol or a napalm-like mixture, with some motor oil added, a source of ignition such as a burning cloth wick held in place by the bottle's stopper; the wick is soaked in alcohol or kerosene, rather than petrol. In action, the wick is the bottle hurled at a target such as a vehicle or fortification; when the bottle smashes on impact, the ensuing cloud of fuel droplets and vapour is ignited by the attached wick, causing an immediate fireball followed by spreading flames as the remainder of the fuel is consumed. Other flammable liquids such as diesel fuel, turpentine, jet fuel, isopropyl alcohol have been used in place of, or combined with petrol.
Thickening agents such as solvents, foam polystyrene, baking soda, petroleum jelly, strips of tyre tubing, nitrocellulose, XPS foam, motor oil, rubber cement and dish soap have been added to help the burning liquid adhere to the target and create clouds of thick, choking smoke. In addition, toxic substances are known to be added to the mixture, in order to create a suffocating or poisonous gas on the resulting explosion turning the Molotov cocktail into a makeshift chemical weapon; these include bleach, various strong acids, among others. Improvised incendiary devices of this type were used for the first time in the Spanish Civil War between July 1936 and April 1939, before they became known as "Molotov cocktails." In 1936, General Francisco Franco ordered Spanish Nationalist forces to use the weapon against Soviet T-26 tanks supporting the Spanish Republicans in a failed assault on the Nationalist stronghold of Seseña, near Toledo, 40 km south of Madrid. After that, both sides used petrol-soaked blankets with some success.
Tom Wintringham, a veteran of the International Brigades publicised his recommended method of using them: We made use of "petrol bombs" as follows: take a 2lb glass jam jar. Fill with petrol. Take a heavy curtain, half a blanket, or some other heavy material. Wrap this over the mouth of the jar, tie it round the neck with string, leave the ends of the material hanging free; when you want to use it have somebody standing by with a light. Put a corner of the material down in front of you, turn the bottle over so that petrol soaks out round the mouth of the bottle and drips on to this corner of the material. Turn the bottle right way up again, hold it in your right hand, most of the blanket bunched beneath the bottle, with your left hand take the blanket near the corner, wetted with petrol. Wait for your tank; when near enough, your pal lights the petrol soaked corner of the blanket. Throw the bottle and blanket as soon as this corner is flaring. See that it drops in front of the tank; the blanket should wind itself round an axle.
The bottle will smash, but the petrol should soak the blanket well enough to make a healthy fire which will burn the rubber wheels on which the tank track runs, set fire to the carburetor or frizzle the crew. Do not play with these things, they are dangerous. The Battle of Khalkhin Gol, a border conflict of 1939 ostensibly between Mongolia and Manchukuo, saw heavy fighting between Japanese and Soviet forces. Short of anti-tank equipment, Japanese infantry attacked Soviet tanks with gasoline-filled bottles. Japanese infantrymen claimed that several hundred Soviet tanks had been destroyed this way, though Soviet loss records do not support this assessment. On 30 November 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland, starting what came to be known as the Winter War; the Finns perfected the design and tactical use of the petrol bomb. The fuel for the Molotov cocktail was refined to a sticky mixture of gasoline, kerosene and potassium chlorate. Further refinements included the attachment of wind-proof matches or a phial of chemicals that would ignite on breakage, thereby removing the need to pre-ignite the bottle, leaving the bottle about one-third empty was found to make breaking more likely.
A British War Office report dated June 1940 noted that: The Finns' policy was to allow the Russian tanks to
Gunpowder
Gunpowder known as black powder to distinguish it from modern smokeless powder, is the earliest known chemical explosive. It consists of a mixture of sulfur and potassium nitrate; the sulfur and charcoal act as fuels. Because of its incendiary properties and the amount of heat and gas volume that it generates, gunpowder has been used as a propellant in firearms, artillery and fireworks, as a blasting powder in quarrying and road building. Gunpowder was invented in 9th-century China and spread throughout most parts of Eurasia by the end of the 13th century. Developed by the Taoists for medicinal purposes, gunpowder was first used for warfare about 1000 AD. Gunpowder is classified as a low explosive because of its slow decomposition rate and low brisance. Low explosives deflagrate at subsonic speeds, whereas high explosives detonate, producing a supersonic wave. Ignition of gunpowder packed behind a projectile generates enough pressure to force the shot from the muzzle at high speed, but not enough force to rupture the gun barrel.
Gunpowder thus makes a good propellant, but is less suitable for shattering rock or fortifications with its low-yield explosive power. However, by transferring enough energy a bombardier may wear down an opponent's fortified defenses. Gunpowder was used to fill fused artillery shells until the second half of the 19th century, when the first high explosives were put into use. Gunpowder is no longer used in modern weapons, nor is it used for industrial purposes, due to its inefficient cost compared to newer alternatives such as dynamite and ammonium nitrate/fuel oil. Today gunpowder firearms are limited to hunting, target shooting, bulletless historical reenactments. Based on a 9th-century Taoist text, the invention of gunpowder by Chinese alchemists was an accidental byproduct from experiments seeking to create the elixir of life; this experimental medicine origin of gunpowder is reflected in its Chinese name huoyao, which means "fire medicine". The first military applications of gunpowder were developed around 1000 AD.
The earliest chemical formula for gunpowder appeared in the 11th century Song dynasty text, Wujing Zongyao, however gunpowder had been used for fire arrows since at least the 10th century. In the following centuries various gunpowder weapons such as bombs, fire lances, the gun appeared in China. Saltpeter was known to the Chinese by the mid-1st century AD and was produced in the provinces of Sichuan and Shandong. There is strong evidence of the use of sulfur in various medicinal combinations. A Chinese alchemical text dated 492 noted saltpeter burnt with a purple flame, providing a practical and reliable means of distinguishing it from other inorganic salts, thus enabling alchemists to evaluate and compare purification techniques; the first reference to the incendiary properties of such mixtures is the passage of the Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe, a Taoist text tentatively dated to the mid-9th century: "Some have heated together sulfur and saltpeter with honey. The Chinese word for "gunpowder" is Chinese: 火药/火藥.
In the following centuries a variety of gunpowder weapons such as rockets and land mines appeared before the first metal barrel firearms were invented. Explosive weapons such as bombs have been discovered in a shipwreck off the shore of Japan dated from 1281, during the Mongol invasions of Japan; the Chinese Wujing Zongyao, written by Zeng Gongliang between 1040 and 1044, provides encyclopedia references to a variety of mixtures that included petrochemicals—as well as garlic and honey. A slow match for flame throwing mechanisms using the siphon principle and for fireworks and rockets is mentioned; the mixture formulas in this book do not contain enough saltpeter to create an explosive however. The Essentials was however written by a Song dynasty court bureaucrat, there is little evidence that it had any immediate impact on warfare. However, by 1083 the Song court was producing hundreds of thousands of fire arrows for their garrisons. Bombs and the first proto-guns, known as "fire lances", became prominent during the 12th century and were used by the Song during the Jin-Song Wars.
Fire lances were first recorded to have been used at the Siege of De'an in 1132 by Song forces against the Jin. In the early 13th century the Jin utilized iron-casing bombs. Projectiles were added to fire lances, re-usable fire lance barrels were developed, first out of hardened paper, metal. By 1257 some fire lances were firing wads of bullets. In the late 13th century metal fire lances became'eruptors', proto-cannons firing co-viative projectiles, by 1287 at the latest, had become true guns, the hand cannon; the earliest Western accounts of gunpowder appear in texts written by English philosopher Roger Bacon in the 13th century. Several sources men
