Shooting Shells of a Hundred Tons 



It will destroy half a city at one shot 

 and an entire city with three shells 



By Charles Beecher Bunnell 



THE English are said to be 

 using 2 1 -inch guns which 

 fire 4,000-pound projectiles 

 capable of burying 

 themselves in the 

 ground a depth of 

 thirty-five feet at a 

 distance of ten miles. 

 But they are mere 

 pop-guns compared 

 with the gun that I 

 have designed. My 

 gun will fire a shot 

 one hundred miles. 

 One of these weap- 

 ons placed at Port- 

 land, Maine, would 

 protect her entire 

 coast from Mt. Des- 

 ert to the Massa- 

 chusetts line. An- 

 other such gun at 

 Newport, Rhode Is- 

 land, would protect 

 the entire Massachu- 

 setts, Rhode Island 

 and Connecticut 

 coasts as far as 

 Bridgeport. A third 

 gun at Lakewood, 

 New Jersey, would reach from Bridgeport, 

 Connecticut, to Cape May, covering as 

 well the entire State of New Jersey. 



And if we go farther and plant these big 

 guns as thick as lighthouses, all the vulner- 

 able points on the Atlantic seaboard would 

 be placed under instant gun fire. That's 

 quicker than sending out ships or troops, 

 although this gun will not do away with 

 either. For instance, thirty seconds after 

 Boston was attacked, the guns at Newport 

 would be shelling the enemy's fleet, who 

 could not locate the attack or reply to it. 

 From Lakewood, New Jersey, the harbor 

 of New York would be under absolute con- 

 trol; so would Philadelphia, Cape May, and 

 the Delaware River. The whole State of 

 New Jersey would be in its protective 

 range. The moral effect of such a powerful 

 and deadly weapon should not be under- 

 estimated. The artillery of few, if any, 



Elevation of the big gun is controlled by 

 a left-hand wheel operating three dials 

 — a degree dial, a second dial and a 

 minute dial — while point of compass is 

 controlled by a right-hand wheel with 

 three other dials geared similarly 



ships can match it, 

 for two reasons: the 

 cost of a ship to 

 carry such a gun 

 would be impover- 

 ishing, and there is 

 no way of locating 

 satisfactorily an un- 

 seen object one hun- 

 dred miles away. 



The explosion of 

 the shell sixty feet 

 from an ordinary 

 ship would swamp it 

 and thereby prevent 

 firing of the ship's 

 guns. The concus- 

 sion alone would de- 

 stroy the crew and 

 leave the men dead 

 without mutilation. 

 I have shown the 

 accompanying pic- 

 ture to ordinance of- 

 ficers. "Anyone who 

 laughs at that de- 

 sign is foolish, in 

 view of what's hap- 

 pening every day," 

 said one man who is 

 on Major General Wood's staff. Other 

 Staff Officers said: "I'm very much inter- 

 ested in that gun." — "That gun will shoot a 

 hundred miles." — "Do you realize what 

 that range means to us?" — "That's what 

 we want, big guns and lots of them." — "Go 

 ahead and God bless you." 



The rifle is 375 feet long and weighs 

 39,277 tons without mountings. It has a 

 bore of 60 inches. It throws a shell 26.5 

 feet long weighing 100 tons a distance of 

 70 miles at 20 degrees elevation or 100 

 miles at 45 degrees. 



The weight of the shell fired by this gun 

 is always uniform no matter what form of 

 explosive is employed. Its nose is ellips- 

 oidal for the reason that a round shot goes 

 to the left and down, while the conical 

 shot goes to the right and up of any gun's 

 axis. The nose of my shell is the mean 

 between these two extremes. 



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