Articles from Scientific American
When the sun came up in 1935, it found that Jews had been designated a preferred risk by the insurance companies of the day. One member of the medical community looked into their reasoning:
That the Jews are the most nervous of all civilized peoples in the civilized world has been established as almost axiomatic in the medical profession.
A black and white magazine illustration from the cover of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN that appeared six months after President Wilson’s declaration of war against Germany in order to let Uncle Sam’s taxpayer’s understand what it will cost them to put a million and a half men in the field.
During much of the war, inventors from all combatant nations had been trying to make a artillery projectile that could eradicate the obstacle that had become one of the symbols of trench warfare: barbed-wire. No one seemed up to the task and in the end, wire-cutters were still the best way to deal with the problem.
This article is about one inventor’s failed effort to create a time fuse artillery shell that would deploy hooks that grab the wire as it goes speeding by and thereby saving the day. Needless to say, the hook thing didn’t work out terribly well and the difficulty inherit with time fuse artillery shells would be perfected in the inter-war years.
An Honorable Mention was certainly in order for the British inventor Edward Dartford Holmes who thought up a three tiered, time fuse anti-artillery shell:
Briefly, his scheme calls for a shrapnel shell containing a number of compartments which are each exploded in turn at predetermined intervals.
