Hellfire Bomb

HELLFIRE BOMB. (See also: FIREBOMB, INCENDIARY DEVICES) The simple construction of a fire bomb, a glass container separating flammable liquid and a fuse, made it an easy device to improvise and adapt. There always existed a desire to produce a more devastating explosion. Widespread oil drilling in the U.S. through the late nineteenth century supplied vast amounts of crude oil. Refinement processes were developed which could distill increasingly explosive liquids. When re-purposed as weapons, these sated that desire, producing larger explosions, though generally at the expense of burn time. While the exact chemical formulations were never recorded, these were broadly referred to as hellfire bombs.