^* Anglo-French rivalry has been a constant for centuries, and extends into the world of war fighting just as it does into cuisine and car manufacture. Soldierly distaste for Gribeauval’s purloining of John Wilkinson’s work is matched by French irritation that the word shrapnel derives from Sir Henry Shrapnel’s invention of this most deadly of weapons, a shell that hurls lethal metal debris around upon detonation. The British Sir Henry didn’t invent it; a Frenchman named Bernard Forest de Bélidor did, assisted in the field by the aforementioned M. de Gribeauval.