10 Gargantuan Things Made Solely For Killing People

In June 1917, during the First World War, the British army really, really wanted to kick the Germans out of Belgium. This involved booting them off a line of defences on a ridge near the village of Messines. The Brits wanted to do this so much they did something utterly insane, even by the standards of the First World War. They decided to blow the whole thing up.

The British army brought in a couple of geologists and a bunch of miners to dig tunnels under the German defences, a pretty hairy business in itself as the Germans knew they were down there and dug their own tunnels to stop them. The Brits planted nineteen enormous bombs, and at 3.10 AM on 7 June, they were detonated prior to a massive advance against the ridge.

Seventeen of the bombs went off, covering the ridge in craters that still exist today. An estimated 10,000 German troops were killed instantly. It was the biggest man-made explosion in history and Lille University's geography department mistook the tremors for an earthquake. Human beings would not make another explosion as immense until the Trinity atomic bomb tests in 1945.