Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/459

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THE APPLICATIONS OF EXPLOSIVES.
445

cemented in the cavity with carnauba wax, for shell filled in the former manner, but unfused, were repeatedly fired, in 1887 and 1888, at Newport, R. I., from 24-pounder Dahlgren howitzers and

Sims-Dudley Pneumatic Gun, limbered up.
(Courtesy of the Scientific American.)

20-pounder muzzle-loading rifles with service charges of powder, and though they were fired point blank into the masonry escarpment of the old fort on Rose Island, but fifty yards distant from the muzzle, so that the shells were broken up or distorted and the gun cotton in them subjected to a powerful compression, yet not only was there no premature explosion, but none of the shell

Sims-Dudley Pneumatic Gun, in Battery.
(Courtesy of the Scientific American.)

exploded by impact. About the same time fused shell containing cemented gun cotton were fired in Germany, with an initial velocity of fourteen hundred feet per second, and they passed com-