Henry Shrapnel
British Army general
Lieutenant-General Henry Scrope Shrapnel (3 June 1761 – 13 March 1842) was a British Army officer who served in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He invented the shrapnel shell, which was named after him.
Biography
Henry Shrapnel was born at Midway Manor in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, England, the ninth child of Zachariah Shrapnel and his wife Lydia. He was commissioned as a Royal Artillery lieutenant in 1779, serving first in Newfoundland. He returned to England in 1784, when he began to experiment with hollow cannonballs filled with lead shot that burst in mid-air.
In 1787 he was posted to Gibraltar where he began demonstrations of his anti-personnel weapon which impressed senior officers commanding the fortress. From Gibraltar, Shrapnel was sent to the West Indies in 1791. Shrapnel served in Flanders, where he was wounded in 1793. He was promoted to major on 1 November 1803 after eight years as a captain.
In 1803, the British Army adopted a similar but elongated explosive shell which immediately acquired the inventor's name.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henry Shrapnel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.