[THE MAKING OF CANNON PROJECTILES.]
BY FRANKLIN MATTHEWS.
For twenty-five years the men who make material used in warfare have been engaged in the sharpest kind of a contest between themselves. On the one side they have been trying to make armor so tough and strong that it could withstand the heaviest shots, and on the other side they have been trying to make projectiles, which is another name for big bullets, that will go through this armor. Sometimes the armor men have been ahead, and sometimes the projectile men have been foremost. The armor men have usually forced the fighting, and then the projectile men have matched them. At present the projectile men say they are ahead, and that the armor men must make armor tougher and harder or they will be beaten.
TWO THIRTEEN-INCH SHELLS.
One having pierced and the other been stopped by armor plate.
All this struggle grew out of the war between Germany and France a quarter of a century ago. The experts noticed then that the cannons and powder were wasting a great deal of force, because the projectiles they threw couldn't begin to carry all the energy of the weapons. At once scientific men began to make a study how to produce projectiles that would do the full work of the guns, and year by year they have been improving these enormous bullets, until now marvellous results have been reached. A writer who made a study of these results said, not long ago, that the weight of the projectiles in a broadside in 1779 from the Bonhomme Richard, Paul Jones's famous flag-ship, which carried forty-two guns, weighed only fifty-seven more pounds than the shot of one of the 10-inch guns of our present second-class battle-ship Maine. The broadside of the guns of our famous old Constitution, in her fight in 1812 with the Java, weighed sixty-three pounds less than the shot of one of the 12-inch guns on the Monterey of the new navy. The twenty-three guns of the well-known Pensacola, the ship that did marvellous work in running by the batteries at New Orleans in 1862, in our civil war, threw less in a single discharge than two of the 13-inch guns of our first-class battle-ship Indiana could throw to-day. There is no use in having big guns and improved powder unless you have strong and tough projectiles to convey the power of the guns and powder against the target at which you are shooting. The experts put this in a different way by saying that the projectile is "the vehicle of the energy of the gun." This is a dry and scientific way of saying that there is no use in having a giant's strength if you have only pebbles to throw. We can all understand that.
There is no secret about the making of the big cannons in these days. There are many secrets, however, in the making of the powder used in these guns. There is much more secrecy in the way the projectiles are made. In fact, so secret is the process by which these enormous bullets are made that not even the naval officers, who are stationed at the factories where they are produced to see that each projectile answers the requirements, are allowed to witness the process of manufacture. The naval officers are not supposed to know what goes into the make-up of these bits of steel, except in a general way, nor how they are hardened so that they may pierce thick plates of toughened steel. I am sure, therefore, that those of you who read this will not expect me to reveal these secrets. Even if I knew them—and I confess that I don't—I couldn't be expected to tell them, and I am inclined to think that, after all, as is the case with secrets usually, they wouldn't be of much use to us after we did find them out. They would be as dry and as uninteresting as the hardest kind of a problem in arithmetic or algebra. When all would be told, we should probably find that they consisted of a lot of strange letters and figures, such as they use in chemistry, and there would be no pleasure in reading about that.
