now invented a
“THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE STEERING OF TORPEDOES DO NOT ALWAYS SQUARE.”
method of steering a submarine boat by a special sounding apparatus on the bottom, which automatically records changes in level. But before this apparatus can prove of any practical value it would be necessary that an absolutely accurate chart of the bottom of the sea all over the globe must be prepared. As a complete survey of the whole of the bottom of the ocean would be a work of at least a hundred years, it may safely be predicted that no reader of Cassell’s Magazine will be alive when submarine boats steered by the mechanism suggested by this ingenious Frenchman are recognised as practical implements of naval warfare.
Any powerful explosive is dear to the heart of the war crank. Occasionally he busies himself in trying to evolve some new explosive which shall be about a thousand times more powerful than any of the existing ones; but as a rule he is content to take those he finds ready to hand, and to exercise his ingenuity in discovering new and diabolical uses for them. A shell charged with dynamite is
“THE PICTURE IS DISTINCTLY AN IMPRESSIVE ONE.”
about as infernal an engine of destruction as can well be conceived. A couple of dozen of such shells, if dropped into London, would probably be sufficient totally to wreck the metropolis and all that therein is in five or six minutes. Hitherto dynamite shells have not come within the category of practical warfare, for the simple reason that they are as dangerous to those who fire them off as to the objects they are meant to destroy. They cannot be fired with powder from an ordinary gun with any degree of safety, because the shock to the explosive is so violent that as a rule the dynamite goes off before it is clear of the gun, with disastrous results to everyone and everything surrounding it.
But a certain Captain Zalinski has invented a cannon from which dynamite can be fired without any danger except to those against whom it is directed. In the Zalinski gun the dynamite or melinite, instead of being fired by a charge of gunpowder, is projected from the gun by the force of compressed air. It is, in fact, nothing more or less than a pneumatic cannon. In addition to other obvious advantages, the inventor of the pneumatic gun claims for it that it is perfectly noiseless. The weapon is about twenty yards long, and is supported by girders, which give it somewhat the appearance of a small railway bridge.
In point of sheer ghoulishness no war crank has come within measurable distance of one Richard S. Cantle, an American doctor, who made himself very prominent at the time of the Spanish-American war by his persevering attempt to induce the American Government to adopt his method of destroying their foes. Doctor Cantle was pursuing the peaceful tenor of his medical studies when he was drawn into the bypaths of destructiveness by devoting his attention too exclusively to the power wielded by the nimble microbe. Certain politicians in this country are continually advocating public granaries for the storage of Wheat in case of our ports being blockaded. Doctor Cantle also urged the necessity for
