LATEST ARTILLERY WONDER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 380, 2 May 1908, Page 4

LATEST ARTILLERY WONDER.

The cable from New York recently informed us of the latest artillery wonder —Mr. Fred Baugerter’s masterpiece, a “ noiseless, smokeless, flashlesss, colourless, fumeless gun,” which it is claimed can throw two million bullets an hour.” Mr. Baugerter is a Brooklyn engineer, a Swiss by birth, and has been in New York three years. Compressed air is not the force used so that not even a hissingsound is produced. No dynamite, gun-cotton, nitroglycerine, or other chemical or explosive is employed to send the Niagara of bullets hurtling a mile through space at the rate of 500 a second, or 30,000 a minute, when the gun is worked at ordinary speed and 2,000,000 an hour it it is pushed to its maximum capacity. The velocity of the projectiles is from 1500 feet to 3000 feet a second, according to the will of the operator. There is no recoil, the gun never gets heated, it cannot explode, and two men can operate it. The cost of firing 1,000,000 bullets half an inch in diameter would be about £2. The expense of firing i.ooo, 000 bullets requiring powder and shells is more than ,£4OOO. The gun works automatically. If the operators were to place 2,000,000 balls in the magazine and return on the powder, the men could go to dinner and take a walk for an hour, confident that while they had gone the gun would continue to hurl bullets so long as one was left in the hopper. The plan of the inventor is to mount the new gun on a truck similar to a motorcar, to be run by a hundred horsepower motor which would give the carriage a speed of sixty miles an hour. The outfit, when ready for action, would weigh about 50001 b.