The record-union. [volume] (Sacramento, Calif.) 1891-1903, 1899-11-13


lish battleships had iron armor as thick
as twenty-four inches. The develop
ment of the gun soon showed that 1t
was impossible to keep pace with it by
mere additions to the thickness of the
simple armor, for a point was quickly
reached where 1t was impossible to car
ry the necessary weight of armor that
would be thick enough. Then came
the use of special plates-the compound
armor, where a hard face to break up
the projectile was welded to a softer
back to give the necessary strength.
This was followed by steel armor, and
then by the well known Harvey pro-
cess, which resembled the compound
armor in having hard face with a
softer back but where the plates were
made from a single ingot without any
welding. The Harvey process enabled
an enormously greater resistance to be
obtained with given weight Of armor,
but even it has been surpassed by the
Krupp process, which enables twelve
inches of thickness to give the Same
resistance as fifteen of Harveyized
plates
In connection with armor plates great
skill and ingenuity have been necessary
to provide for giving them the proper
shape and for enabling necessary ma
chine work to be done on them after
they are in position, inasmuch as the
hardening process makes it practically
impossible to do any work on the face
of the finished plates with ordinary
tools. Here an application of cleo
tricity for giving a local annealing
where it was necessary to work with
tools enabled the solution of this
problem.
The work of the artillerist is not con-
fined to the design and manufacture of
the guns and armor alone, but the gun
carriages are also important features
of this work, and here there has been a
great display of skill and ingenuity in
devising means for the ready manipu-
lation of these ponderous masses, ana
the control of the recoil due to the
enormous development of energy when
the gun Is discharged. This Is time
both of the manipulation by hand and
the control of the turntables, or tur-
rets, for the larger guns, and the ease
with Which turret and it's contained
guns, weighing several hundred tons,
can be controlled by a single lever so
that the pointing Of the gun Is almost
as simple as that of an ordinary mus
ket, is really surprising.
THE WORK OF THE CHEMIST.
The chemist has also had an impor-
tant part to play in connection with
ordnance work, in the development Of
powders which would enable. the enor-
nous energy necessary to be developed
with safety to the structure of the gun.
With the powder used during our civil
war it would be impossible to get the
results of to-day. The DEVELOPMENT
has been through what were known as
SLOW burning powders down to tho
sfnokeless powders of to-day, where the
saltpeter and charcoal of our ancestors
have been displaced by the combina-
ton resulting from the treatment of
cotton with nitric acid. The difference
in the energy Of the ordinary slow
burning powder and of the s1nokeless
powder now used can be seen by con-
sulting any tables where the two are
compared. One which I recently ex-
amined showed that guns otherwise
practically identical required with the
same weight of projectile three times
the weight of ordinary powder to get
the same velocity as with srnokeiess
powder
We must not forget, while discussing
ordnance, the remarkable development
of what are known as quick firing
guns" This, as you know, is really
the adaptation to large guns of the
kind of ammunition and breech me-
chanism used on the modern small
arms, and it has been carried so far
that modern quick firing guns are now
made of as large caliber as eight inch,
giving muzzle energy of over 10000
foot tons, while the number Of times
the gun can be discharged in a given
interval is about double that Of the or
binary breech loader. In the smaller
sizes of these quick firing guns, the
rapidity of fire is almost incredible. and
| remember being particularly struck
by the results of repeated trials show
ing that it was possible from a six
FOUNDER to have five projectiles in the
air at once
More than a quarter of a century ago
what are known as machine guns were
introduced; that is, weapons of small
cahber, approximating to that of ordi-
nary small arms and slightly larger,
We're SO arranged that the ammunition
could be fed almost continuously and
the rapidity of fire be so great that a
single weapon would be equal to COM