Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/42

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to secure a distant position, at which the smaller guns of the Emdcn could do the Sydney very little harm.

These photographs indicate the frightful effect of naval gunnery and suggest the tremendousness of naval power. In naval ships, large guns are installed that can be taken at great speed all over the world, and fired with great precision over long distances, and with great effect. In the photographs, we see grear masses of steel, crumpled like paper; we see the ship's side penetrated; we see the bridge from which the Captain and the officers usually directed the ship, an undistinguishable wreck of iron and brass; we see the funnels made veritable scrapiron; we see the spar-deck torn up; we see the ship itself reduced from the condition of a rapidly cruising man-of-war to that of an inert mass of torn and twisted iron. All this was done in little more than an hour.

Although the Emden was not a very powerful ship compared with many others she was nevertheless a strong and well-built vessel, and could not have been wrecked except by tremendous power. The power of armies is exerted for the most part by muskets, which cannot be heavier than single men can carry and by field artillery and siege artillery, intended for use against men and lightly constructed buildings of wood and stone and brick.

The value of a bullet fired from a musket, or of a large projectile fired from a gun, is due to its ability to penetrate the resisting envelope of a man in one case, or a ship in the other case. Naturally, the measure of that power is the energy of the projectile, which energy is dependent on both mass and velocity. As was shown in the November number of the, the energy of a fourteen-inch shell fired say from our Nevada, is about equal to that of sixty thousand muskets when the projectiles start. But after the musket bullet has gone a little more than a mile, it falls to the earth, its energy reduced to zero, while the fourteen-inch projectile has hardly started. If the Emden had been fired at by muskets at the dis-