Pre-modern Warfare:India And Elsewhere

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->According to one account, Shrapnel got the idea for his invention while with British forces under siege by the Spaniards at Gibraltar. He noticed that heavy cannon fire aimed at Spanish troops did not kill many of them, while bursting mortar shells killed more. He reasoned that if he could make a cannonball burst like a mortar shell and do it at a cannon's greater range, he could achieve the effect of massed small-arms fire on troops a cannon shot away. He invented a hollow cannonball stuffed with musket balls and loaded with a powder charge just strong enough to break the cannonball open. Set to a timed fuse, the charge, as he envisioned it, would explode and disperse the musket balls in a cone-shaped spray 50 or 75 yards from the target, to which they would continue with killing force derived from the original momentum of the projectile.
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It wasn't until WW I a century after the War of 1812 that military forces routinely equipped their soldiers with helmets to protect them from shrapnel raining down upon them. The shell adopted by the British in 1803 was designed to be fired from a cannon but as luck would have it another inventive Englishman, William Congreve heard about the shell and adopted it for his project.<b> At about the time the shrapnel shell was adopted by the British artillery Corp the British army in India was fighting a war against the natives   link</b>

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