A Terrible Weapon.

Feilding Star, Volume IV, Issue 43, 13 September 1883, Page 3

A Terrible Weapon.

The London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian says : — Colonel Fosbery created a sensation at a letcure he gave to an assembly of officers, small-arm inventors, and other experts recently at the Royal United Service Institution, by suddenly drawing from its place of hiding, under the table, a wonderful new gun, which he had just brought from Liege. He called it a " baby electric gun." It looked like a pretty carbine, but it had no mechanism and could not possibly go off until connected up to tho source of electric force. That done, it could be fired with amazing rapidity, 104 rounds having a few days previously been fired from it by its inventor, M. Pieper, of Liege, in two minutes. Col. Fosbery fired two rounds with infinitessimal powder charges. He had prepared himself by secreting under his vest a small circuit of wire and putting on a banderole, supporting what looked like a two-ounce phial, but wis in fact an electric accumulator with sufficient stored- up energy to discharge 200' 1 rounds. The cartridges were very innocent looking mites, and contained no detonating substances — nothing, in fact, but simply powder and a wad. The opinion was expressed that the electric gun must once more revolutionize the manufacture of small arms within a brief period.