First published here

Actually, bc, I was indeed involved in Project Excalibur, although it was top secret, so I can't talk about it (in response to your post at 4:42 today, and SonofCarl's original post at 2:59 p.m.). Ah, what the hell--it's been nearly 200 years, I guess that stupid thing must be declassified by now. Anyway, if I tell you about it, what can they do? Throw me in jail?

This is going to be a long post, so boodlers may feel free to skim past it. Anyway, first things first. The sonic disruptor was not powered by methane, as you conjectured (methane is much too smelly, for one thing) but by beer. Yes, but not your average European beer, but a 100-percent all-American (well, North American) 178-proof belly-ripping brainstopper that would cross your eyes and leave you with a headache the next morning the likes of which you just wouldn't countenance. As you know, King George III (or G3 as we liked to call him) was mad as a hatter whose fez got shrunk in a Boston nor'easter. Well, it was G3's idea one year to create a special technology task force to develop a special weapons division at Smedlington-'pon-Tipsley, on the banks of the River Chortle. It was there that prototypes of the now-infamous sonic disruptor were designed and built. The first version, of course, was a wood-burning model, sort of a proof-of-concept thing, but of course was totally impractical, because you can hardly have a secret weapon that first requires several hundred stout yeoman to go out into the woods and chop down several hundred metric tonnes of firewood to power the damn thing. Takes too long and anyway the enemy would say, "By jove and yoicks, see that massive column of black smoke over yonder? The bloody enemy are firing up their sonic disruption weapon. I daresay we shall experience a surprise attack in another day or two."

Well, you can't have that now, can you?

So work continued. Steam was tried but with similar results. Candles? Zip. Toasted cheese? Actually counterproductive. Oil pressed from the glands of ferrets? Too smokey. Even methane was tested and rejected because if the wind was blowing from the wrong direction, the enemy would smell the sonic disruptor warming up. Finally, one day down at the pub, one of the discouraged engineers had a brainstorm (which was actually sitting in a tall mug in front of him): A nice room-temperature Watney's ale. Its potency would have to be dramatically increased, of course, but industrial chemists soon found ways to boost it to 178 proof by using special blends of brewers yeast and lengthening the fermentation period to three fortnights, a furlong, and two tuppences. Consequently, as you might imagine, man, did that stuff have a head on it. Wooo-eeee. It was like that urethane foam insulation they spray in your attic.

So the main source of fuel and power for the sonic disruptor was discovered and a new prototype was built. But where to test it? Obviously not in Smedlington-'pon-Tipsley--why, such an infernal device would obliterate a good bit of the Cotswolds! The obvious solution was to pack up the thing in crates and ship it to Canada for final assembly and testing. A secret base was established near York (yes, now Toronto, as you point out), called Area XXXXVVI (the king always wanted everything spelled out for him the long way, and wouldn't abide abbreviating it down to the much more reader-friendly version, Area LI). Now, at this time I was a stringer for a couple of papers, the Liverpool Lackey back in England, and its North American "zone" edition, the Saskatoon Grit-Picayune, covering the Great Lakes region, St. Lawrence canal, Northwest Territory, etc. A few years earlier, I had even interviewed Clark of Lewis and Clark fame. Lewis wouldn't come out of his tent, and claimed to be suffering from ill humours. There was a lot of moaning sounds coming from his tent, and Sacagawea (I use the old proper spelling of her name, not Sacajawea that Dye and Biddle screwed up, those clowns) was in there with him apparently trying to ease the pain. He must have had quite a fever, because I distinctly heard him beg her to "prime his powderhorn." I figured it was the delirium speaking. The next morning he was remarkably recovered, though, and even had a kind of spring in his step. (You see how I was a keen observer of the human scene back then.) They set out in their canoes down the river headed west in search of the Pacific, and I made a prophetic note in my reporter's notebook I can remember to this day: "Boy, guess we'll never see THOSE guys again."

But I digress. Neither the Lackey nor the Pick-a-tune (as we affectionately nicknamed the ol' Grit-Picayune) paid worth a farthing, typical rags that they were, so I was augmenting my income as I traveled around the region by selling firewater to the Indians (hey, don't give me that look; a man's gotta make a living, and everyone knows journalists are moral scum). I was getting close to deadline and was worried about filing some sort of story. (Due to the slow speed of communication back then, shipping my parchment scribblings down the St. Lawrence and then across the Atlantic to Liverpool took so long that my deadline was "autumn." File your story even one day after the first frost, and you missed the deadline and had to face an angry editor as well as the snickering of your colleagues, who had filed THEIR stuff no later than late harvest, the suck-ups.) So there I was, thrashing through the wilderness, when I came upon Area XXXXVVI and the top secret testing facility where the sonic disruptor had just been completed. The place was surrounded by a tall split-rail fence that was electrified by Leyden jars every couple dozen feet. Fortunately, I managed to climb through the split-rail fence without getting electrocuted. When I got to the test facility, there was the sonic disruptor being loaded onto a giant sled so it could be dragged down a plank road that led in a southerly direction into the primeval forest. I had my press pass stuck in the band of my coonskin cap, of course, and after showing the British soldiers and engineers my press credentials, they told me they were shipping the sonic disruptor off for its first field test. I begged and pleaded to be allowed to come along on the expedition, and they reluctantly agreed to "embed" me, only because my deadline was autumn, and there wasn't much chance my story would hit the streets--well, the footpaths--before the test. So there I was, embedded with a British Army unit in one of the greatest scientific endeavors of the age.

It turns out the British were a bit skeptical about how the sonic disruptor was going to work, so they came up with a scheme to deliver the weapon to a tribe of Shawnee Indians down in Indiana, led by a chief named Tecumseh. Yes, that Tecumseh. The British thinking was, best case scenario, the weapon works and Tecumseh and his folks defeat the Americans. Worst case scenario, the weapon backfires in some way or malfunctions, blowing up and killing a bunch of Indians and one embedded pesky ink-stained wretch from the fourth estate--moi. Meanwhile, the British soldiers and engineers are a hundred miles away, out of harm's way.

So the British turned the sonic disruptor over to Tecumseh and his people, and beat a hasty retreat back to Canada, all as SonofCarl said. The Indians were initially pretty skeptical of me, but then I showed them a secret about the sonic disruptor. You may remember I said it was powered by a souped-up version of British dark beer, about 10,000 gallons of it. Well, it was darned hard work dragging that thing through the wilderness back home to the banks of the Wabash, and I had burned through my per diem long ago, so I started selling some of that beer to the Indians. Every couple of hours we stop for a rest, and I'd open up the tap, we'd all have a couple of snorts, fall asleep, wake up with awful pounding migraines, and proceed on our not-so-merry way. The good news was, every time we stopped to drain off some lager, the sonic disruptor got lighter in weight and was that much easier to drag. And Tecumseh had him a medicine man who had interned in pharmacology at Johns Hopkins. Aspirin hadn't yet been invented, but the medicine man, a skillful hunter named Tom-Tom Sun, had found a way to use roots and barks to make an early form of acetaminophen. When hunter Tom-Tom Sun mixed the acetaminophen with a couple drops of laudanum (which was basically opium dissolved in alcohol), he had a pretty powerful headache medicine that would not only kill the migraine but give you a pretty good buzz, if not put you into a sound sleep. I gotta say, that hunter, Tom-Tom Sun, was one conscientious medicine man. He tested that formula every which way--injected it, smoked in a peace pipe, drank it, made pills out of it, stuffed it up his nose; he even made a bong out of piece of pipe from the sonic disruptor. You name it, hunter Tom-Tom Sun experimented with his special headache medicine until he got it dead right. And he didn't just test it on his fellow Indians; no sir, he tested it on himself, repeatedly, by drinking more sonic disruptor beer than anybody else, and then taking large quantities of his elixir until he turned himself into a zombie. That was one dedicated medicine man.
Well, there came a day as we neared Prophetstown, Indiana, that our advance scouts reported the approach of the American force, led by Gen. William Henry Harrison, who was governor of the Indiana Territory. (Little-known fact: It was Harrison who coined the phrase, "Hey, baby, Hoosier daddy?") This was in early November, and it was getting pretty cold; Tecumseh himself had gone far to the south, ostensibly to recruit more Indians to his Indian confederation, but I was skeptical, since he always seemed to spend the winter trying to talk the Miami Indians into coming north, returning every year empty-handed after Spring Break. The night before the battle, the Shawnees were pretty hepped up about the coming fight. I opened up the taps that night to help them ward off the cold, and I guess we overdid things. That night around the Shawnee campfires, it was like the toga scene from Animal House. I mean we all got blasted. Blitzed. Blotto. During the long march down from York we had pretty much drained most of the beer from the sonic disruptor, and what little was left by the time we got to the Tippecanoe River we polished off that evening. The next morning, the Shawnees were one hung-over bunch of sad-sack Indians; I confess I was considerably under the weather myself. There was a small snowfall during the pre-dawn hours, and the sound of those snowflakes crashing into the earth was positively deafening. Hunter Tom-Tom Sun handed out copious amount of his laudanum-laced acetaminophen, but it was too little too late. You all know what happened next.
Harrison and his troops attacked and utterly defeated the Shawnees at what history now calls the Battle of Tippecanoe. We'll never know how that battle might have gone had the Indians not been so drunk, or hung over, or stoned out of their minds on hunter Tom-Tom Sun's medicine. Tecumseh's war against the Americans continued on, of course, and melded into the War of 1812, which began the next year. And Harrison, now a war hero, when on to become president of the United States using the famous battlecry from that cold, miserable day in November, 1811: "Tippecanoe and Tylenol II."

Epilogue

I never did tell you the secret of how the sonic disruptor worked--or was supposed to work. As SonofCarl noted in his post, the sonic disruptor was supposed to unleash a giant earthquake, which would unhinge the enemy and unseat him from his horse, if he happened to be riding one at the time. The ground would shake, trees would topple, chasms in the earth would open up, and so on. Here's how the disruptor really was designed to work. Next to the huge wrought-iron tank that held the beer was a giant bladder made out of stomach lining from sheep raised in the Orkney Isles of Scotland; think of it as a giant bagpipe device, or perhaps an exploding haggis (not a pretty picture, I know, but then, war isn't pretty). At the critical moment the weapon was supposed to be fired, a small container of enzymes and chemicals was to be plunged into the tank of high-test, high-octane brewski. You all know what the byproduct of drinking a lot of beer is. Yes, let us not hesitate from saying it; we�re all adults here. Flatulence. The sonic disruptor operated by creating a dense cloud of beer flatulence so strong, so powerful, that its sudden release would make the earth shake and blow snowy owls from treetops a thousand yards away from ground zero. But in order to do this you had to collect the beer flatulence in the giant bladder until it reached critical mass and achieved internal nuclear fission. The sound wave and subsequent shock wave of the sonic disruptor were calculated to leave a crater 400 yards wide, 60 feet deep, and set off an earthquake of approximately 9.3 on the Richter scale if only the Richter scale had been invented, which at that time it wasn't. And of course the sound would obliterate your eardrums, hence the weapon's name.

On the afternoon of the battle, with victory already assured, Harrison and his troops seized the sonic disruptor. They knew not how close they had come to flatulent annihilation themselves. I myself missed the battle, since sometime during the night I had apparently crawled off into the bushes and woke up about two in the afternoon with a screamer in my head so bad that I could only open one eye all that day and into the evening. And as a war correspondent I was quite neutral in how the battle was fought, but for some reason Harrison and his men thought I was some kind of hero for "tricking" the Shawnee into drinking the sonic disruptor's fuel supply. So hell, I played along. Thus is history written--and distorted, and legends made.
And again as SonofCarl noted, American troops dragged the sonic disruptor back to York, and intended to use it to scare the town into surrender. However, there was a problem. Over the course of time, the giant flatulence containment device--the sheep stomach bladder--had suffered greatly from gunshots and arrow strikes during the battle of Tippecanoe, and was in bad condition. As the Americans attempted to fire up the weapon, instead of containing the beer flatulence the giant bladder began to leak, setting fire to the city of York. The rest, as they say, is history. The British retaliated by sailing up the Chesapeake and attacking and burning Washington, D.C., and then Baltimore, where Francis Scott Key wrote the Star-Spangled Banner.
What is less well-known is what happened to the sonic disruptor after the sacking of York, Canada. American troops dragged what was left of the device--mainly its huge and heavy beer vat tank--back to the United States. They attempted to repair the giant bladder, and having no access to the special breed of Scottish sheep searched for a new kind of animal stomach lining with which to make a new bladder. Curiously and ironically, it was an Indian who suggested what became the solution. He said he knew of a tribe of Indians in the American Southwest who raised a special kind of goat whose stomach was so tough that it might do nicely as a material for the bladder. So the Americans sent an expedition into what is now New Mexico, and negotiated with the Hopi Indians to obtain several thousand head of their special mountain goats, with which to sew together a new containment bladder. This they did, and attached it to the sonic disruptor main tank. Transportation being such a problem, they decided to put the weapon on a riverboat and send it down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then by clipper ship to Washington. (I last saw it as the riverboat departed, and I went back north to file my story. Oh fateful decision, that!). And you all know what happened next, but may not know the "why." During the voyage down the Mississippi, the sonic disruptor (which had been refilled with beer mixed with an especially potent blend of American-made moonshine) was constantly jostled by small wakes and waves on the river, and accidentally began to activate itself. The giant bladder began to fill with deadly beer and moonshine flatulence as the crew struggled in vain to figure out how to shut down the runaway reactor. A few miles north of New Madrid, Missouri, the giant Hopi cushion went critical and detonated. The result was the New Madrid earthquake, which scientists have retrospectively estimated to have been about 8.0 on the Richter Scale. The detonation and earthquake were so strong that the Mississippi temporarily reversed its course, and church bells in Boston rang due to the shock wave. The date was Feb. 7, 1812.

So that, bc and SonofCarl, is the never-before told story of the sonic disruptor and the New Madrid Earthquake. And I was there (well, not for the earthquake part).