GERMANY IN SCIENCE 19 



wonderful change in conditions. The building of the Panama 

 canal was made possible by the discoveries to which I have 

 alluded. Where in the days of DeLesseps men died like flies by 

 scores and hundreds, under Dr. Gorgas men lived as healthily 

 as they would here in Pittsburgh. 



But I hear some of you ask ' 'What about military science" ? 

 Well, it was Mirabeau who said that 'The national industry 

 of Prussia is war. " But Sir Roger Bacon, an Englishman, 

 invented gunpowder. A Swiss chemist invented gun-cotton. 

 The bayonet is French in its origin. Cannon were first used 

 by the English against the Scotch in 1327, and by the French 

 against the Flemish in 1338. Cannon were at first cast hollow, 

 and the balls were made of stone. Later they were cast solid 

 and bored out, but while this improved their appearance it 

 lessened their strength. General T. J. Rodman, Chief of ord- 

 nance of the U. S. Army, whose wife, by the way, was a daugh- 

 ter of the Rev. Dr. John Black, one of the early professors in 

 the University of Pittsburgh, reverted to the method of cast- 

 ing cannon hollow over a core which was cooled by running 

 water. The work was done here in Pittsburgh, and the big 

 guns used in the civil war, known as "Rodman guns/' which 

 won their way to victory, were mostly cast at the old "Fort 

 Pitt Foundry, ' ' belonging to the firm of Knapp & Wade. Can- 

 non are now "built up" as you know, rings of steel being 

 successively shrunk around the barrel-tube within. The first 

 built-up guns were made by Chambers &Tread well, Americans, 

 and by Blakely, an Englishmen. Breech-loading devices are 

 quite old in their origin, and go back to a time when there 

 were no Prussians to use them. The rifling of small gun- 

 barrels we must allow to be a Teutonic invention, the claim to 

 have first employed it being in dispute between Gaspard 

 Kollner of Vienna, who is said to have rifled gun-barrels in 

 1498, and Augustus Kotter of Nuremberg, who is said to have 

 practiced the art from 1500 to 1520. It is proper to state that 

 the invention was originally intended to enable the barrel to be 

 more easily cleaned, and not to improve the trajectory. Ma- 

 chinery for turning gun-stocks and other irregular shapes 



