Sign 13 - Booster Removal Building

Little is known about the booster removal building. Fourteen feet wide and 18 feet deep, this structure stood at the easternmost end of the 155-millimeter plant. It was accessed by the plant railway system and was about 500-feet north from the TNT magazine at the east end of the 75-millimeter plant. It appears as a small structure in the distant background in only one of the more than 130 historic photographs taken of the site under construction in 1918.

The booster contained a powerful explosive wrapped in a metal jacket. It was placed in a special cavity within the top of each loaded shell, the shell’s charge enclosing it. The booster was filled with a substance that was easily exploded, typically tetryl. Bethlehem Loading Company’s New Castle, Delaware plant manufactured tetryl and then supplied the tetryl-filled boosters to the Mays Landing plant. Loaded shell production nationwide greatly outpaced booster and fuse production, however, creating a shortage of completed shells for shipment overseas.

A bomb is actually a series of explosions. First, the firing pin strikes the percussion primer or fuse, which explodes the detonator. The concussion of this explosion sets off the charge held in the booster. This in turn initiates the explosion of the main charge. Without the action of the booster on the shell explosive, the main charge would only be partially burned when the shell exploded and the remainder would waste itself in the open air. The booster had to be made with precision to fit perfectly into the booster cavity located at the top of the filled shell.

To meet the great demand for munitions of varying sizes, the production of boosters was simplified with the use of an adapter. The adapter is a metallic ring with screw threads on both the inside and the outside. The outside diameter varied with the size of the shell it was made to fit. But, the inside diameter is uniform, so the same size of booster and fuse could be screwed into different size shells.