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A bomb lance is a projectile weapon used in 
In 1874, a bomb lance was 21.5 inches long and pointed with three elastic feathers. It was fired from a three-foot long bomb gun made of iron, with a 23-inch barrel and a 1 1/8 inch bore. It weighed twenty-four pounds. Though it was first used as early as 1849, it wasn't widely utilized by open-boat whalemen until the late 1850s.Lindholm, O. V., Haes, T. A., & Tyrtoff, D. N. (2008). ''Beyond the frontiers of imperial Russia: From the memoirs of Otto W. Lindholm''. Javea, Spain: A. de Haes OWL Publishing. It had an accurate range of about sixty feet. It was used to kill
A bomb lance is a projectile weapon used in whaling
Whaling is the process of hunting of whales for their usable products such as meat and blubber, which can be turned into a type of oil that became increasingly important in the Industrial Revolution.
It was practiced as an organized industry ...
to injure and kill the object of the hunt. As the name implies, it does its work by explosively detonating once it has embedded itself into a whale. The conditions of whale hunting in the arctic led to the invention of the bomb lance. There, the presence of ice floes provide cover for whales to dive under, making it nearly impossible to execute a hand lance kill before the whale can escape. With bomb lances, a well directed shot assures a quick kill.
In 1874, a bomb lance was 21.5 inches long and pointed with three elastic feathers. It was fired from a three-foot long bomb gun made of iron, with a 23-inch barrel and a 1 1/8 inch bore. It weighed twenty-four pounds. Though it was first used as early as 1849, it wasn't widely utilized by open-boat whalemen until the late 1850s.Lindholm, O. V., Haes, T. A., & Tyrtoff, D. N. (2008). ''Beyond the frontiers of imperial Russia: From the memoirs of Otto W. Lindholm''. Javea, Spain: A. de Haes OWL Publishing. It had an accurate range of about sixty feet. It was used to kill whale
Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic placental marine mammals. As an informal and colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea, i.e. all cetaceans apart from dolphins and ...
s from a distance instead of using a hand-thrown lance. Men were occasionally injured when the guns burst. Between 1850 and 1870, several different types of shoulder guns were patented for firing bomb lances, including those made by Captain Ebenezer Pierce, Patrick Cunningham, Selmar Eggers, and Christopher Brand. Shoulder guns were used for firing bomb lances throughout whaling into the 20th century.
In 2007, Inupiat whalers using a modern bomb lance killed a 50-ton bowhead, kicking off a flurry of research into species longevity when it was revealed that the whale's body also contained fragments of an older bomb lance manufactured back in the 19th century, leading to the discovery that the whale was over 130 years old.
References
{{Whaling Explosive weapons