March 5, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



229 



Veblen and Lieutenant Alger. In France, 

 similar work was done by Captain E. H. 

 Kent. It is seen that these experiments added 

 greatly to the effectiveness and therefore to 

 the value of the guns in question. The work 

 belongs to physics, notwithstanding the fact 

 that one of these civilian officers was and is 

 a professor of mathematics of the purest 

 quality. That he was able to bring himself 

 temporarily to neglect the fundamental con- 

 cepts of geometry, in which realm he is one 

 of our foremost thinkers, to enter into the 

 problems of the war with an eagerness for 

 close observation of actualities and a readi- 

 ness to try out new methods, is very greatly 

 to his credit. He is evidently a physicist by 

 intuition and a mathematician by profession. 

 It is to be noted (Fig. 4) that between the 

 summers of 1918 and 1919 the range of the 6- 

 inch seacoast gun had been increased from 

 about 14,000 yards to 28,000 yards^ for a 



2 The range of 14,000 yards for the 6-iiieh gun is 

 computed for a muzzle velocity of 3,000 feet per 

 second at 45° elevation, basing the computation on 

 the range obtained wi*h a muzzle velocity of 2600 

 f .8. It ought to be pointed out that the Army had 



muzzle velocity of 3,000 feet per second, by 

 variations in the form of the projectile sug- 

 gested by crude experiments. In the case of 

 the last projectile (Mark VIII.) there was 

 rather large dispersion. Had the cardboard 

 test been made it could have been foreseen that 

 there would be this dispersion, for the projec- 

 tile is evidently not sufficiently stable. In 

 Fig. 5 it is seen that one projectile (6-inch 

 Mark VIII.) has acquired a large yaw not far 

 from the gun. This accounts for the fact 

 that the dispersion for this projectile was 

 large, of the order of 3,000 yards in 28,000. 

 It may be contended that some of the ex- 

 periments and tests here recorded are too 

 crude to be classed as belonging to the domain 

 of physics. But let me remind you that 

 Galileo, who may be regarded as the father 

 of our science, climbed the tower of Pisa and 

 let fall two weights, one large and one small, 

 to show that they fell in the same way. We 



a 6-inch shell -which for a muzzle velocity of 2,600 

 feet per second bad a range of 15,000 yards at 15° 

 elevation, but this was a heavy projectile — 108 lbs. 

 — ^whUe that of the projectile experimented upon 

 was 90 lbs. 



