Shrapnel shell

The shell was devised at the end of the eighteenth century by the British artillery officer Henry Shrapnel, and the British army adopted it in 1803. A shrapnel shell had a case filled with lead balls and a small powder charge. The time fuze burst it in front of or above the target, and the balls flew on at the shell's speed, wounding soldiers over a wide area. In 1914 it was the main field-gun round of every army; British field guns fired nothing but shrapnel until October 1914.

In trench warfare shrapnel proved of little use: it did not destroy trenches or dugouts, and it cut wire only if the fuze was set very precisely. Armies therefore turned to high explosive, although the British long kept a large share of shrapnel, which told at Aubers in 1915 and on the Somme in 1916. Shrapnel remained in the creeping barrages that covered the infantry. The Polish general Tadeusz Rozwadowski designed a shell that burst both in the air and on impact. Today any shell splinter is loosely called shrapnel.