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A pencil detonator or time pencil is a time fuze designed to be connected to a detonator or short length of safety fuse. They are about the same size and shape as a pencil , hence the name. They were introduced during World War II and developed at Aston House , Hertfordshire , UK .
A time bomb's timing mechanism may be professionally manufactured either separately or as part of the device, or it may be improvised from an ordinary household timer such as a wind-up alarm clock, wrist watch, digital kitchen timer, or notebook computer. The timer can be programmed to count up or count down (usually the latter; as the bomb ...
Time fuzes detonate after a set period of time by using one or more combinations of mechanical, electronic, pyrotechnic or even chemical timers. Depending on the technology used, the device may self-destruct [21] (or render itself safe without detonation [22]) some seconds, minutes, hours, days, or even months after being deployed.
It has since been set backward 8 times and forward 18 times. The farthest time from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991, and the nearest is 89 seconds, set in January 2025. [6] The Clock was moved to 150 seconds (2 minutes, 30 seconds) in 2017, then forward to 2 minutes to midnight in 2018, and left unchanged in 2019. [7]
The timing of the detonators could also be affected by the desert heat; after a raid in December 1941 one party reported the 30-minute time pencils had detonated in just 18 minutes due to the warmth of the night. [5] In the hands of the SAS the Lewes bomb was an effective weapon against parked aircraft; following an attack in December 1941, an ...
The detonation time was set for 04:00 Mountain War Time (MWT), on May 7, but there was a 37-minute delay to allow the observation plane, [53] a Boeing B-29 Superfortress from the 216th Army Air Forces Base Unit flown by Major Clyde "Stan" Shields, [54] to get into position. [53] Men stack crates of high explosives for the 100-ton test
At 21:15, a third bomb, concealed inside two plastic bags, was found in the doorway of a Barclays Bank on Hagley Road, approximately two miles from the site of the first two explosions. This device consisted of 13.5 pounds (6.1 kg) [23] of Frangex connected to a timer, and was set to detonate at 23:00.
We begin bombing in five minutes" is the last sentence of a controversial, off-the-record joke made by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1984, during the Cold War. While preparing for a scheduled radio address from his vacation home in California, Reagan joked with those present about outlawing and bombing Russia.