When one of our progenitors wrathfully seized a
handful of pebbles and flung them at the flock of birds in his garden,
he discovered the principle of the scatter projectile. Perhaps its
simplest application was in the stone mortar (fig. 43). For this weapon,
round stones about the size of a man's fist (and, by 1750, hand
grenades) were dumped into a two-handled basket and let down into the
bore. This primitive charge was used at close range against personnel in
a fortification, where the effect of the descending projectiles would be
uncommonly like a short but severe barrage of over-sized hailstones.
There were 6,000 stones in the ammunition inventory for Castillo de San
Marcos in 1707.
FIGURE 43—SPANISH 16-INCH PEDRERO (1788).
This mortar fired baskets of
One of the earliest kinds of scatter projectiles was
case shot, or canister, used at Constantinople in 1453. The name comes
from its case, or can, usually metal, which was filled with scrap,
musket balls, or slugs (fig. 41). Somewhat similar, but with larger iron
balls and no metal case, was grape shot, so-called from the grape-like
appearance of the clustered balls. A stand of grape in the 1700's
consisted of a wooden disk at the base of a short wooden rod that served
as the core around which the balls stood (fig. 41). The whole assembly
was bagged in cloth and reinforced with a net of heavy cord. In later
years grape was made by bagging two or three tiers of balls, each tier
separated by an iron disk. Grape could disable men at almost 900 yards
and was much used during the 1700's. Eventually, it was almost replaced
by case shot, which was more effective at shorter ranges (400 to 700
yards). Incidentally, there were 2,000 sacks of grape at the Castillo in
1740, more than any other type projectile.
Spherical case shot (fig. 41) was an attempt to carry
the effectiveness of grape and canister beyond its previous range, by
means of a bursting shell. It was the forerunner of the shrapnel used so
much in World War I and was invented by Lt. Henry Shrapnel, of the
British Army, in 1784. There had been previous attempts to produce a
projectile of this kind, such as the German Zimmerman's "hail shot" of
1573—case shot with a bursting charge and a primitive time fuze—but
Shrapnel's invention was the first air-bursting case shot which, in
technical words, "imparted directional velocity" to the bullets it
contained. Shrapnel's new shell was first used against the French in
1808, but was not called by its inventor's name until 1852.
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