374 WEBSTER— BALLISTICS OF A GUN 



ity. I shall remind you by a few lantern slides of the concentration 

 of monuments of civilization to such a degree as probably exists 

 nowhere else in the world. 



The gun was obviously aimed to strike the Cathedral of Notre 

 Dame, cathedrals being the German specialty in this war. The 

 church in which eighty people were killed on Good Friday is easily 

 identified as the church of St. Gervais, which is across the street 

 from the Hotel de Ville, the slides of which shown are taken from 

 the top of that church. Other objects nearly in the line of the 

 " axe " are the Louvre, the Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Bon 

 Marche (a department store) ; I will not fatigue you with others. 



Even if the so-called ellipse of dispersion should be very large 

 it is easily seen that, if the shot should fall anywhere within a 

 circle of perhaps twenty-five miles in diameter, the moral effect 

 would be very great. 



The longest previous range used during the war was about 

 twenty-two miles with the gun with which the Germans bombarded 

 Dunkirk. In an article in Nature, March 28, 1918, which I have 

 just seen this morning, my friend Sir George Greenhill, the author 

 of the article on Ballistics in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, says : 



"In the language of sport the German gunner has 'wiped the eye' of our 

 artillery experts and defied all the timid preconceived notions of our old- 

 fashioned traditions. The Jubilee long-range artillery experiments of 30 

 years ago were considered the ne plus ultra of our authorities, and we were 

 stopped at that as they were declared of no military value. Today we have 

 the arrears to make up of those years of delay, but the Germans watched our 

 experiments with great interest, resumed them where we had left off and 

 carried the idea forward until it has culminated today in his latest achieve- 

 ment of artillery of a gun to fire 75 miles and bombard Paris from the 

 frontier." 



The Jubilee gun, referred to, fired a shell weighing 380 pounds 

 at an elevation of 40° with a muzzle velocity of 2,400 feet per 

 second, giving a range of 22,000 yards or 121/2 miles. - 



2 It is a singular coincidence that as I left my laboratory to attend the 

 meeting of the American Philosophical Society I remarked to my assistant, 

 " Nothing is likely to ' queer ' this paper except the fact that Sir George 

 Greenhill may have calculated the trajectory and published it in Nature." 

 As I entered the room, the Secretary, Dr. Hays, called my attention to Sir 

 George's paper and I was greatly relieved to find that it contained no figures 

 of the trajectory. 



