Gerald Bull

Lore & Background

Gerald Vincent Bull was born on March 9, 1928 in North Bay, Ontario, to George L. Toussaint Bull, a solicitor, and Gertrude Isabelle LaBrosse. The family was well off until the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression forced them to move to Toronto. After his mother died in 1931 and his father suffered a breakdown, Bull was raised by relatives. He attended Regiopolis College, an all-boys Jesuit school, where he built balsa wood airplanes and graduated in 1944. Bull entered Queen's University but transferred to the University of Toronto's new aeronautical engineering course, graduating in 1948 with average marks. He then took a drafting job at A.V. Roe Canada before being accepted into the Institute of Aerodynamics at the University of Toronto, where he built a supersonic wind tunnel as part of his PhD work and completed his PhD in 1951, becoming the youngest PhD graduate in the institute's history.

Reader's Guide

Bull's career at the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment (CARDE) focused on using artillery to study supersonic flight, firing models from gun barrels as a low-cost alternative to wind tunnels. He later designed the Project Babylon supergun for Saddam Hussein's Iraq, continuing his lifelong goal of launching a satellite via artillery. His assassination on March 22, 1990, outside his Brussels apartment is believed to have been carried out by Israel's Mossad due to his work for Iraq, though no one has ever been charged. Bull's legacy is tied to his innovative but controversial artillery projects, which remain a subject of historical and geopolitical interest.

Did You Know?

• Bull became the youngest PhD graduate in the University of Toronto's Institute of Aerodynamics history at age 23.
• He built a supersonic wind tunnel as part of his PhD work, which was used during the opening of the new Institute grounds.
• Bull married Noemi 'Mimi' Gilbert on July 15, 1954. The anecdote about meeting her while dropping off fish at her father's house is not reliably documented.
• The claim that his father converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism to marry Gertrude LaBrosse is not consistently supported by mainstream sources.

A Family Shattered by Fortune

Gerald Vincent Bull was born on March 9, 1928, in North Bay, Ontario, into a comfortable professional household. His father, George L. Toussaint Bull, was a solicitor who had converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1909 specifically so he could wed Gertrude Isabelle LaBrosse; the couple went on to have ten children. George was even offered the title of King's Counsel the year Gerald was born. Then the 1929 Wall Street crash dismantled their world. Margin loans were called in within a year, forcing the family to relocate to Toronto in search of work. In April 1931, Gertrude died of complications while delivering her tenth child, Gordon. George suffered a nervous breakdown, fell into heavy drinking, and left the children in the care of his sister Laura, who died of cancer by mid-1934. Banks foreclosed on the family home. At fifty-eight, George remarried Rose Bleeker and scattered the children among relatives; Gerald ended up with his older sister Bernice. A boy born into privilege was now a displaced child in a fractured family.

An Unlikely Path into Engineering

By 1938, Gerald's maternal uncle Philip and aunt Edith LaBrosse, comfortably well off after winning roughly $175,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes, began hosting him for summer holidays and enrolled him at Regiopolis College, an all-boys Jesuit school in Kingston, Ontario. Though too young for the program, the school made an exception, and Gerald returned each summer. It was during these years that he took up designing and building balsa wood airplanes and joined the school's modelling club. He graduated in 1944, then entered Queen's University with hopes of attending military officers' training school. His uncle Philip visited the University of Toronto and secured a spot in the medical school, but Gerald turned it down, asking instead about the brand-new aeronautical engineering course. The department, still in its infancy with loose entry criteria, interviewed the sixteen-year-old and accepted him. Classmates and professors later recalled little evidence of brilliance; one professor noted simply that he 'certainly didn't stand out.' He graduated in 1948 with strictly average marks and took a drafting job at A.V. Roe Canada. Yet it was his boundless energy, not his grades, that led Dr. Gordon Patterson to personally recommend him for a funded position at the University of Toronto's new Institute of Aerodynamics.

From Wind Tunnels to Gun Barrels

At the Institute, Bull was paired with fellow student Doug Henshaw and given the task of building a supersonic wind tunnel, a rare device at the time. The project formed the basis of his September 1949 Master's thesis on the design and construction of advanced wind tunnels. When the Royal Canadian Air Force donated land adjacent to RCAF Station Downsview, operations relocated quickly, and the tunnel was slated to headline the new grounds' opening. The team pulled an all-nighter, finishing at 3:30 a.m., too exhausted to test it. The next morning, Air Marshal Wilfred Curtis pressed the start button to no effect, but Dr. Patterson reached around, pushed harder, and the machine worked perfectly. Bull had largely completed his PhD thesis on the same subject by 1950 when the Defence Research Board asked the Institute to lend an aerodynamicist to their Velvet Glove Missile project. Patterson chose Bull, leading to a successful period at the Canadian Armament and Research Development Establishment, or CARDE. There, Bull proposed building a wind tunnel for supersonic research, but his idea was dismissed as too expensive. Gunners on staff redirected him: firing model projectiles from existing gun barrels could gather aerodynamic data far more cheaply. As a proof of concept, they bored an Ordnance QF 17-pounder barrel to 3.9 inches. That simple suggestion set the course of his entire career.

The Supergun and a Bullet in Brussels

Bull's life became an all-consuming quest: applying the physics of long-range artillery to launch a satellite into orbit at a fraction of rocket cost. He moved from project to project, chasing that singular vision across borders and decades. The culmination was Project Babylon, a colossal supergun designed for Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government. The project drew intense international scrutiny and, ultimately, a fatal one. On March 22, 1990, Gerald Bull was shot dead outside his apartment in Brussels, Belgium. The assassination is widely believed to have been carried out by Israel's Mossad, motivated by his work for the Iraqi regime. No individual has ever been charged with the murder. The young man who had been sent to a Jesuit school to build balsa airplanes, who had been told by his professors that he 'certainly didn't stand out,' who had been redirected from wind tunnels to gun barrels by a practical suggestion from CARDE gunners, was killed for the very expertise that redirection had forged. His story remains one of the most consequential unsolved assassinations of the late twentieth century.

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