The pound solid iron ball was deadly out to 1, meters against the tightly packed infantry formations of the day. A canister round was essentially a tin can packed with musket balls, turning the gun into a huge shotgun.
The gun crews switched to canister as the attacking enemy infantry closed to within meters. Grape shot was a variation on canister, with usually a dozen 1. Grape was especially effective against cavalry out to ranges of meters. A later variation, spherical case shot, was a cross between a canister round and an explosive shell: A hollow sphere packed with musketlike balls and an explosive charge triggered by a powder-burning time fuze, spherical case exploded in the air over the heads of exposed troops out to 1, meters.
It was invented in the s by Royal Artillery officer Henry Shrapnel, whose name became synonymous with fragmented shell shot. In the early s U. Army Captain Thomas J. Rodman developed the gun that would become the high point of smoothbore, muzzle-loading artillery. By that time bronze had replaced cast iron in gun bores because the latter was too brittle to withstand the shock produced by the more rapidly burning black powders that had been developed.
In the usual methods of casting, an iron barrel cooled from the outside in, shrinking unevenly and producing flaws and cavities that caused structural weakness. Rodman devised a method to make stronger tubes by casting iron around a water-cooled core, so that the barrel cooled from the inside out, making the inside material more dense and the tube much stronger overall. The standard Rodman calibers were 8, 10, 15, and 20 inches, the last being the largest caliber gun ever cast in the United States.
Although the Rodman guns were generally too heavy for fieldpieces, they were widely used as siege, garrison, and seacoast guns by both sides in the Civil War and remained in service until the end of the century.
The barrel of the Armstrong gun was constructed from wrought iron, built up by shrinking successive layers of metal on top of each other. The result was a stronger and more reliable tube than one of conventional cast iron, and being harder than bronze, it made rifling more practical.
Rifled artillery, introduced several years earlier, improved range and accuracy. The vent piece was the forerunner of the modern sliding-wedge breechblock. The British used Armstrong guns until By the middle of the 19th century European gun makers were experimenting with steel, though it was a difficult material to manufacture in uniform quantities.
In German industrialist Alfred Krupp introduced the first reliable steel gun, and by the s all cannon tubes were being made of steel. Developed and manufactured at French government arsenals, it instantly made every other gun in the world obsolete, and all modern field artillery is descended directly from it.
Weighing only 2, pounds in action, it was towed by a team of six horses and fired a 75mm round weighing Its seven-man gun crew could fire six to 15 rounds per minute. After the tube recoiled, the system then returned it forward. The great tactical advantage of this system was that the gun did not have to be re-aimed every time it fired. Other innovations introduced with the French 75 included a rapid-acting, screw-type breech mechanism; a fixed round of ammunition projectile, propellant charge, and fuze all in one prepackaged unit that could be loaded in a single movement; an optical line-of-sight, gun-laying system; and steel shields to protect the gun crews from enemy small arms fire.
With World War I, machine gun fire forced all artillery to move back off the front lines. The French 75, like all light artillery, lacked the higher trajectory necessary for indirect fire, especially in rougher terrain.
Introduced in , Big Bertha weighed 93, pounds in action. It was transported in five pieces and assembled on site using a crane carried by a prime-mover tractor. It was capable of firing a mm round weighing 1, pounds out to a range of 9, meters with a high degree of accuracy. Its projectile had a hardened conical nose with the fuze at the base of the round, making it particularly effective for penetrating reinforced ferro-concrete fortifications.
Contrary to popular belief, they were not the guns that shelled Paris from a distance of 75 miles in Its maximum range of , meters far exceeded that of any gun built before.
Or since. Mortars had a short barrel, a higher curved trajectory and were mainly placed in trenches.
Shrapnel wounds were particularly brutal for soldiers. It was named for English officer Henry Shrapnel, who invented the design in the late 18th century. Artillery was more destructive than ever before. During the war, the artillery not only experienced considerable growth in absolute numbers, but also in terms of its relative share of the entire army.
This is demonstrated by the example of the French military: In , artillery-men made up 20 percent of the army; in , it was 38 percent. Storz, Dieter: Artillery , in: online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. DOI : Translated by: Reid, Christopher. Version 1. By Dieter Storz. Linnenkohl, Hans: Vom Einzelschuss zur Feuerwalze. Ortner, M. Technik, Organisation und Kampfverfahren , Vienna Militaria. Zabecki, David T. Citation Storz, Dieter: Artillery , in: online. Metadata Subjects.
Author Keywords. GND Subject Headings. LC Subject Headings. Rameau Subject Headings. Regional Section s. Thematic Section s. Classification Group. Images French trench mortar. French mm cannons. German 13 cm cannon. This gun fired high explosive and shrapnel shells and, later in the war, smoke, incendiary, and gas shells.
The artillery used different shells for different purposes. Shrapnel shells were timed to explode over enemy lines, sending down hundreds of tiny metal balls. This rain of metal, which exploded outward in a shotgun blast, caused terrible injuries to soldiers caught in the open. Trenches helped to protect against shrapnel, but even trenches were vulnerable to high explosive shells that burst like dynamite, leaving large craters in the ground and killing and maiming anyone caught in the blast.
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