HUDSON MAXIM
American Inventor of High Explosives and Other Materials of War
(Photo by White.)
The New York Times on July 11 printed an interview with Hudson Maxim, the inventor of explosives, in which Mr. Maxim said:
Modern war is a warfare of explosives. The highly developed methods of defense, designed especially against explosives, are practically proof against everything but them.
Attacking forces must disemburrow the defending forces; they must be blasted out of the ground. This warfare amounts, literally, to that. It is as if boys hunted woodchucks with dynamite.
Each of the hard-won successes of the war has been a victory for well-placed high explosives. In the last fight around Przemysl the Germans fired in one hour, from field guns, 200,000 shells carrying high explosives.
Reports indicate that the result of this was literally unprecedented. It actually changed the topography of the country. Valleys were dug and hills razed.
Recently Lloyd George used an expressive phrase. "The trenches," he said, "were sprayed with exploding shells."
Such "spraying" only could be possible through the use of an incredible number of explosive projectiles.
America's plants for the production of explosives, cartridges, shrapnel, and rifles have so increased their capacity that we have today ten times the capacity which we had at the time of the war's outbreak, and, for certain things, the increase has been even greater. By the middle of next winter our capacity will be thirtyfold what it was at the beginning of the war.