; TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION G. 937 
I had occasion recently to look into the question of the guns employed in the 
siege of Sebastopol, and found that in that great siege no less than 317 iron 
ordnance were used by this:country. At the close of the siege it was found that 
8 had burst, 101 had been condemned as unserviceable, while 59 were destroyed by 
the enemy’s fire. 
The 95 ewt. 68-pounder gun seems to have been about the largest gun that could 
safely be made of cast-iron, and that in it the limit of safety was nearly reached, 
was shown by the fact that a serious percentage of this calibre burst or otherwise 
failed. With the spherical shot the column of metal per unit of area to be put in 
motion by the charge was small, and to this the guns probably owed their natcy: 
When the same charge was used, and cylinders representing double, treble, or 
_ quadruple the normal weight of the shot were fired, the end was rapidly reached, 
_ the guns frequently bursting before cylinders four or five times the weight of the 
shot were employed. 
But the fact that a stronger and more reliable material than cast-iron was 
necessary, was shortly to be emphasised in a much more striking manner. The 
great superiority of rifled to smooth-bored ordnance in every respect, in power, 
in range, in accuracy, in destructive effect of shrapnel and common shell, was 
in this country demonstrated by Lord Armstrong and others. This led to 
numerous attempts to utilise cast-iron for rifled ordnance. The whole of these 
efforts resulted in failure. Although the charges were feebler than with smooth- 
bored guns, these experimental guns burst one after the other with alarming 
rapidity, generally before many rounds had been fired. The matter was not made 
much better when the expedient was adopted of strengthening these guns by hoops 
‘or rings shrunk on externally. Failures with this arrangement were little less 
‘frequent, the cast-iron bursting under the jackets, and the only plans in which cast- 
iron was used with any success were those proposed respectively by Sir W. Palliser 
and Mr. Parsons, who inserted, the one a coiled wrought-iron, and the other a steel 
tube in a cast-iron gun block. 
But the country that suffered most severely from the use of cast-iron was the 
‘United States. Their great civil war took place just when efforts were being made 
in every country to introduce rifled artillery. Naturally every nerve was strained 
to manufacture these guns, and naturally the resources that came most readily to 
hand were first employed. 
A report presented by the Joint Committee on Ordnance to the United States 
Senate in 1869 gives the history of these guns, which were nearly all either cast- 
iron or cast-iron reinforced with hoops in the way I have described. I have heard 
the existence of internal strains disputed, but in this report we read that ten guns 
‘burst, that is flew to pieces, when lying on chocks, without ever having had a shot 
fired from them, and 98 others cracked or became ruptured under like conditions. 
In the ‘Summary of Burst Guns’ in the same report, it is stated that 147 
burst and 21 were condemned as unserviceable; 29 of them being smooth-bore and 
139 rifled ordnance. But perhaps the most striking passage is that which relates 
that in the action before Fort Fisher al/ the Parrott guns in the fleet burst, and 
that by the bursting of five of these guns during the first bombardment, 45 men 
were killed and wounded, while only 11 men were killed or wounded by the 
enemy’s fire. 
The muzzle velocity given by the smooth-bored, cast-iron guns may be taken 
approximately at 1,600 f. s., and at the maximum elevation with which they 
were generally fired their range was about 3,000 yards. The 32-pounder, with a 
charge of one-third the weight of the shot and an elevation of 10°, gave nearly 2,800 
yards, and the 68-pounder, with a charge of about one-fourth, nearly 3,000 yards. 
The same gun, with an eccentric shot, and an elevation of 24°, gave a maximum 
range of 6,500 yards. 
But it must not be supposed because the range tables gave 3,000 yards as 
practically the extreme range of the ordnance of 35 years ago, that our guns 
possessed any high efficiency at that distance. At short distances, from 300 to 500 
yards, dependent on the calibre, the smooth-bored guns were reasonably accurate, 
but the errors multiplied with the distance in so rapidly increasing a ratio that 
1890. 3 P 
