SHRAPNEL

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4221, 8 December 1939, Page 7

SHRAPNEL

ITS EARLIEST USE. Shrapnel, which has been in use for more than a hundred years, is still the most efficient ammunition against troops in the open. It is the invention of a British soldier, Henry Shrapnel, who entered the Royal Artillery in 1779 ,and retired from the active list in 1825 with the rank of majorgeneral. It is said that shrapnel was first used at the siege of Surinan in 1804; its efficiency was acknowledged in the Peninsula war and at Waterloo.

For many years after the invention of gunpowder inventors tried to discover a means of discharging a shower of bullets over a wide area, Among

the ingenious contrivances tried was grape shot, consisting of a bag of bullets rammed down the muzzle of a cannon. A later development was to substitute for the bag a metal case lightly put together which would fall asunder and scatter the bullets upon leaving the muzzle of the gun. This was called case shot. But grape and case, though destructive at short range, were of little value at a distance much beyond 200 yds., and this was unpleasantly close to the enemy in the days of slow loading by muzzle. The problem which Shrapnel set himself was to produce what may be called a long range grape, and he solved it by the invention of a spherical shell filled with bullets, which could be burst by a time fuse at the range required.