HOW WEAPONS GOT THEIR NAMES

Northern Advocate, 6 January 1937, Page 9

HOW WEAPONS GOT THEIR NAMES

We spell shrapnel with a small “s” nowadays, but when it is spelt with a capital letter it recalls a poignant instance of the miseries of inventors.

Henry Shrapnel an officer in the British army from which he retired with the rank of Lieutenant-General, was the originator of the shell, which first came into use in Wellington campaigns, and was highly praised' by the Iron Duke. It continued to be employed right up to the Great War, when shrapnel-helmets were devised as protection against it. The inventor however, was fobbed off with a miserably inadequate pension, and was even denied the baronetcy which had been promised him. He died an embittered and disappointed man, like so many inventors of useful things, both mort’al and peaceful.

Forgotten Colt. Another forgotten inventor is Samuel Colt, of Hartford, Connecticut. whose revolver revolutionised small arms. It was a long time before the usefulness of the weapon was realised, and Colt was to suffer all the bitterness of neglect and ridicule. At long last, some United States officers carried revolvers in the war with Mexico, and proved in a practical manner the utility of a pistol which could fire six ,shots without reloading. By the time the Civil War came the Colt was in universal use; and it was the forerunner of many other makes of revolvers.' Mention of the Civil War reminds us that it is to that conflict that we owe the monitor, with a small “m.” Vessels of this kind were used in the Great War. In 1914, those monitors being built in England for the Brazilian Government were hastily bought by the British Admiralty and commissioned.

It was in 1862 that a Swedish en gineer named Ericsson built for the authorities at Washington an ugly, ungainly armored vessel; which he called the Monitor. The combat of this contrivance with the Confederate craft, the Merreinac, created worldwide interest, for it was the first time that armor-plate had been used for the protection of warships.

Mysterious Explosive, That mysterious explosive, lyddite, is now spelt with a small “1.” but it owes its name to an obscure spot in the east coast marshes of England, where the first experiments were carried out.

Lyddite first became popularly known in the South African war of 1899-1902, when the authorities realised that they possessed an explosive of hitherto unprecedented power. That other potent substance, melinite, was named after its inventor.

The South African war was responsible for a bit of soldier slang being adopted into the official vocabulary. The war had not been in progress very long when the cheerful British soldiery christened the machine gun used by the Boers a “pom-pom,” because of its report.

It was officially known as a maxim gun, being one of the many varieties of weapon invented by the prolific Sir Hiram Maxim. But the name “pompom was so apt that when the British finally took to using this particular gun was so described in official documents.

Tank—Unofficial Name. This is on all-fours with the designation “tank” for the armed and armored contraption which helped to win some of the final battles of the Great War. There is a mystery about the genius who hit on the name, which was emphatically not the official one; but nobody calls them anything else now, either officially or unofficially.

There is an interesting bit of history connected with the name “Brown Bess,” affectionately bestowed by the soldiers of Wellington on their muskets. During the War of American Independence the British found that the brightly gleaming barrels of their muskets made them much too conspicuous to the keen eyes of the Americans. There was accordingly an order that all barrels were to be browned, hence the nickname.

About the time of the Crimean War came the Enfield musket, so called because it was made at the Royal small arzns factory at that place. This was succeeded by the Martini-Henry, wind) had this double name because the action was the invention of an American called Martini and the barrel! that of a Briton called Henry. Most modern weapons are simply called after their inventors, and thus we see immortalised the names of Krag. Enksen, Mauser. Madsen. Darne Bergmann. and so on.