Vertical cross section as laid in the ground ready for firing at 45° elevation.
EFFECTS OF LIVENS PROJECTOR SHELL.
The Ensign-Bickford Co., of Simsbury, Conn., produced 334,300 fuses for Livens shell; the Artillery Fuse Co., of Wilmington, Del., assembled 26,000 firing mechanisms; the E. I. du Pont Co., at its Pompton Lakes (N. J.) plant, manufactured 20,000 detonators, and 487,350 detonators were produced by the Aetna Explosives Co., at Port Ewan, N. Y.; while the American Can Co., at Lowell, Mass., assembled 256,231 firing mechanisms.
Shear wire pistols were used in the operation of the Livens projector. The Edison Phonograph Co., of Orange, N. J., produced 181,900 of these, and the Artillery Fuse Co., of Wilmington, Del., 11,747. The adapters and boosters of the shell were all built by the John Thompson Press, of New York. The Waterbury Brass Goods Co., of Waterbury, Conn., made the fuse casing. Adapters and boosters to the number of 334,500 were turned out by the former, and 299,900 fuse casings by the latter.
The manufacture of gas drums for the projectors was delayed for some time because of difficulties in welding certain parts of the drums. Acetylene and arc welding processes were tried out, and a good many shell were made by such welding; but the lack of expert welders for these processes, and the rejections of shell due to leakage in the welded joints, caused the manufacturer to turn to fire welding, the process for which had been developed by the Air-tight Steel Tank Co., of Pittsburgh, Pa. At the time the armistice was signed the welding problem had been overcome and the production was going forward at a rate to meet the requirements of the expected fighting in the spring of 1919. The shell delivered were produced as follows:
By the Federal Pressed Steel Co., of Milwaukee, Wis., 5,609; by the Pressed Steel Tank Co., also of Milwaukee, 20,536; by the Air-tight Steel Tank Co., of Pittsburgh, Pa., 600; by the National Tube Co., of Pittsburgh, 27,098; by the Truscon Steel Co., of Youngstown, Ohio, 19,880. The entire Livens shell program, as it existed in November, 1918, called for the production of 334,000 shell.
TRENCH MORTARS.
The production of trench mortars was not only an important part of our ordnance program but it was an undertaking absolutely new to American experience. Not only did we have to produce mortars, but we had to supply them with shell in great quantities, this latter in itself an enterprise of no mean proportions.