Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/882

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��Popular Science Monthly

��BULLET TRAVELS

��lOOO' YARDS

��SOUND [^SECONDS BEHIND BULLET

���mingled with the irregular crashing of the bullets — a. high-pitched whine, with an occasional vicious yowl punctuating the noise. This came from the ricochet- ting bullets, striking the ground short of the target and then glancing off and pursuing their erratic course through the air, their velocity much diminished, their travel changed to an end-over-end whirl, and the bullets themselves defaced and battered by the impact with the ground.

Back of the target the bullets passing through it went into the waters of the lake several hundred yards out, with the noise of heavy blows, almost as hollow and heavy as the impact of a well-swung carpet beater on a huge, loose carpet. Almost the same sound comes when a bullet strikes flesh, human or otherwise.

Normally the sound of the progress of the modern military bullet up to nearly, a mile, is the high-pitched, ear-splitting vicious crash. At longer ranges it hums, probably from an increasingly unsteady flight. Or possibly it hums all the time, but the sound is killed by the vicious crash that accompanies the bullet while it is traveling fast.

Under some conditions of air and background, not yet clear to me, bullets hiss. The sound is noticeable at the skirmish, on the six hundred yard range at Camp Perry, and at the great matches. It is never heard at the range of the writer's club, situated in the hills with every chance for sound to be echoed back and reproduced, nor has the writer heard it on any other range. However, this hissing noise is audible only at the firing point. Trial out along the flight of the bullets developed that either they did not hiss to the person so located or else the hiss was covered up by the usual crash, which amounts to the same thing in the end.

Never do bullets howl unless they have been tipped out of normal flight by striking some obstacle. The howl is merely the noise of a more or less jagged missile whirling end-over-end, while the normal bullet, traveling nor-

Sound is slower than a bullet. Bullet crash

and rifle report are heard one after the other.

The crash is due to air rushing in to fill the

vacuum behind the bullet

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