The revolutionary weapon that changed warfare forever.
At the start of the 1800s, a new weapon appeared on the battlefields of Europe. It was the brainchild of an English officer who had spent thirty years perfecting it. A hollow artillery shell was filled with smaller musket balls, along with a charge of gunpowder ignited by a fuse. The shell could be launched long-distance at the enemy’s lines. When it exploded in midair, it spread a deadly carpet of metal shards over a wide area.
The inventor of the shell devoted all his free time to perfecting it, pouring his life savings into the project. The British army finally adopted the shell in 1803, and first used it in the Napoleonic Wars. It proved frighteningly lethal on massed troops, and so terrified French soldiers that they believed the British had poisoned their cannonballs.
Sir George Wood, commander of the British artillery, credited the new shell with playing a critical role in the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. “On this simple circumstance hinged entirely the turn of the battle,” he later wrote in a letter to the shell’s inventor.
Artillery became infinitely more terrifying and the name of the officer who invented the shell became known around the world:
Henry Shrapnel.
Napoleon ordered unexploded British shells disassembled so he could fathom their secrets—but he never managed to duplicate them.
Shrapnel’s shells were the “bombs bursting in air” that Francis Scott Key saw during the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812.