This week we continue learning about Americans in the war and ride with Christiaan de Wet as he scurries back across the Orange River - his attempts at invading the Cape ending in failure.

There are also unusual peace moves afoot and a meeting between Lord Kitchener and Boer General Louis Botha takes place.

First, the small matter of George Labram, de Beers company mine engineer extraordinaire. Even by the standards of the day, his manufacturing ability and constant innovation must still rank as some of the most creative examples of how to use engineering skills in the midst of war.

He of course wasn’t the first innovator to help a town under attack - for example Archimedes brilliant use of a crane and claw to overturn attackers boats during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BCE.

Born into poverty in Detroit Michigan in 1859, George Labram’s education was spotty, but his sister remembered that “his spare time was taken up with books on machinery and engineering.”

In his mid-teens he went to work for a local machinery manufacturer, and eventually secured a better job in Chicago. Then he moved to the Silver King Mining Company in Arizona. Later, and after a stint running a Copper mine, he was spotted at the famous Chicago World Fair in 1893 when De Beers Consolidated Mines hired him to build and operate a mill in Kimberley.