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Bomb intended to sabotage steam engines

The coal torpedo was a hollow iron casting filled with explosives and covered in coal dust, deployed by the Confederate Secret Service during the American Civil War, and intended for doing harm to Union steam transportation. When it was shoveled into the firebox amongst the coal, the resulting explosion would at the very least damage the boiler and render the engines inoperable. At worst, a catastrophic boiler explosion would kill crewmen and passengers, start a fire, or even sink the vessel.

The coal torpedo was invented by Captain Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay of the Confederate Secret Service. During the Civil War, the term torpedo was used to indicate a wide range of explosive devices including what are now called land mines, naval mines, improvised explosive devices, and booby traps. Northern newspapers referred to Courtenay's coal bombs as torpedoes, or sometimes "infernal machines"; Courtenay himself called it his "coal shell". The torpedoes were manufactured at the 7th Avenue Artillery shop (across the street from Tredegar Iron Works) in Richmond, Virginia, in January 1864. The manufacturing process was similar to that used for artillery shells, except that actual pieces of coal were used as patterns for iron castings. The walls of the coal shell were about 3/8  inch thick, creating a hollow space inside sufficient to hold 3–4 ounces of gunpowder. After filling, the shell was closed with a threaded plug, then dipped in melted beeswax and rolled in coal dust, creating the appearance of a lump of coal. Finished coal torpedoes were about on a side and weighed The size and powder charge of the coal torpedo was similar to a 6 pound shrapnel shell (a hollow, four inch cannonball containing gunpowder and 24 musket balls as shrapnel) or the equivalent of three Civil War era hand grenades. Even so, the explosion of a coal torpedo under a ship's boiler would not by itself be sufficient to sink the vessel. The purpose of the coal torpedo was to burst the pressurized steam boiler, which had the potential to cause a tremendous secondary explosion. Boiler explosions were not uncommon in the early years of steam transportation and often resulted in the complete destruction of the vessel by fire. In action, the coal torpedo would leave little evidence that a boiler explosion was due to sabotage.

Courtenay had traveled to England in 1864 and remained there until 1867, trying to sell the "secret" of the coal torpedo to foreign governments. He approached the British War Office, but they turned him down after he would not agree to allow them to examine his invention before purchasing it. Other reports scoffed at the rumors, suggesting they were false stories planted by supporters of Samuel Plimsoll, a Member of Parliament who was trying to pass a bill reforming the shipping industry. Nothing was ever proven, but the reports stirred up popular interest in various supposed methods of sabotaging ships, and the coal torpedo even made an appearance in the short story, "That Little Square Box", by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in the collection The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales in 1890. Various forms of exploding coal, whether directly descended from Courtenay's original idea or independently developed, have surfaced multiple times throughout history. The Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish nationalist organization operating in the United States in the late 1860s–1870s, reportedly considered placing coal torpedoes in the furnaces of New York City hotels as well as English transatlantic steamships. They were a strong suspect in the destruction of the warship at Punta Arenas in 1881, but later evidence proved the explosion was accidental. Both the American OSS and the British SOE used forms of exploding coal in World War II. The German commandos who came ashore on Long Island in 1942 as part of Operation Pastorius carried plastic explosives disguised as coal for use against coal fired electric generating plants. Such a German coal torpedo was given to the British double agent Eddie Chapman (also known as "Agent Zig Zag") to sabotage the merchant ship City of Lancaster, but he passed it on to his MI5 handler instead. Similar devices were also made by the Japanese during World War II. Stanley Karnow hints in his book Vietnam: A History that the CIA prepared explosive coal for use against North Vietnamese railways during the Vietnam War.