August 1884: The dynamite gun

In the summer of 1884 The Engineer got wind of a new kind of gun being developed and tested in the USA and wasn’t particularly impressed with what it had learned.

The weapon in question was a new dynamite gun, described by The Engineer as a ‘monster air gun for discharging projectiles charged with dynamite’ that was attracting considerable attention in America.

The Engineer, borrowing the gun’s technical details from Scientific American, described how it was undergoing US government trials under the supervision of a certain Lieutenant EL Zalinski.

In the days when The Engineer didn’t pull its punches, our correspondent noted, ‘The object of the gun is to enable what are termed ‘high explosives’ to be employed in projectiles - that is to say, dynamite and other forms of nitro-glycerine.

‘As many of our readers know, no projectile charged with any compound of nitro-glycerine would be allowed to be fired from our guns in this country…The shock of discharge in an ordinary gun is so liable to fire nitro-glycerine, and thus burst the gun, that even experimentally its use has been forbidden.’