Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914 265quick-moving targets. In short, Goliath confronted David over
again—this time on the sea.
Torpedoes, lethal to armored ships at ranges of 500 to 600 yards,
were bad enough, but the embarrassments of the Royal Navy were
rendered even more acute by a simultaneous revolution in gunnery
which made muzzle-loading hopelessly inefficient. The most impor
tant change was in the propellant. By shaping grains of powder with
interior hollows so that each grain could burn simultaneously from in
side out as well as from outside in, it proved possible to equalize the
rate of chemical change that occurred within a gun barrel from first ig
nition to the end of the burn. This improvement, mainly the work of
an American army officer, Thomas J. Rodman (d. 1871), was com
bined in the 1880s with the invention of new nitrocellulose explosives
(here the French took the lead) to produce much more powerful,
smokeless propellants.
The sustained push that a well-regulated explosion could communi
cate to a projectile increased muzzle velocities very greatly. It also
made longer gun barrels necessary, since the expanding gases of the
regulated explosion could continue to accelerate the projectile for a
far longer time than had been possible when a sharp initial impetus
petered out as the powder grains burned down to nothingness, dimin
ishing the rate of gas generation as the burning surfaces shrank in area.
Longer barrels, in turn, made muzzle-loading impossible; and in 1879
the British officially decided that the navy had to have breech-loading
guns. What finally persuaded the Admiralty that muzzle-loaders were
hopeless was Krupp’s spectacular demonstration of what his big guns
could do. He set up a special firing range for the purpose at Meppen
(see plate b on p. 266) and in 1878 and 1879 conducted a series of test
firings that showed foreign and German observers, invited as potential
customers, how vastly superior long-barreled, breech-loading steel
guns had become.^5
Decision to abandon muzzle-loaders, the sole form of gun approved
by the British Board of Ordnance since 1864, presented the Wool
wich arsenal with a crisis it was ill prepared to meet. Conversion to
breech-loading was expensive and difficult in itself; but costs were
enormously increased by the fact that simultaneously the arsenal
would have to convert from wrought iron to steel as the basic gun-
- R. F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone (Oxford, 1973), pp. 144–45; William Manches
ter, The Arms of Krupp (Boston, 1964), pp. 176–77; Ian V. Hogg, A History of Artillery
(London, 1974), pp. 82–92.