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Updated: July 21, 2025
Only one miner had arrived at Thompson's Flat that summer. He was a middle-aged man who said that his name was Montgomery Carleton a name which instantly awoke the resentment of the camp, and was speedily converted into "Monte Carlo" by the resentful miners, who intimated very plainly that no man could carry a fifteen-inch name in that camp and live.
"Not at all, thank you so much," said Miss Mapp, hearing her heart beat in her throat.... If she had had a naval fifteen-inch gun handy, and had known how to fire it, she would, with a sense of duty accomplished, have discharged it point-blank at the Order of the Member of the British Empire, and at anybody else who might be within range....
They flung javelins a few rods by the strength of the arm; we throw great iron shells, starting with an initial velocity of fifteen hundred feet a second and going ten miles. The air pressure against the front of a fifteen-inch shell going at that speed is 2,865 pounds. That ton and a half of resistance of gas in front must be much more than overcome by gas behind.
Meantime, the Government had resolved on the capture of New Orleans, and entered with zeal upon the work of fitting out a squadron, as well as an army, for its reduction. The squadron was to consist of a fleet of armed steamers, and twenty bomb-schooners, each carrying gigantic mortars, fifteen-inch shells.
An unpleasant beast, we agreed, who wanted smothering! On the 22nd it was evident, from the Austrian shelling, that quite a number of fresh heavy howitzers, both twelve- and fifteen-inch, had appeared behind the Austrian lines. A few, no doubt, of those thousand guns from Russia! We heard that the Italian offensive was not coming off after all.
About the same time a similar instrument of nine and a half inches aperture was imported for the National Observatory at Washington. To this period also belongs the construction of the Cambridge Observatory, with its fifteen-inch refracting telescope. Another of the same size was produced for the Royal Observatory at Pulkova, Russia.
Upon a time she braced her iron jacket about her, girded her huge sides with fifteen-inch pistolry, and went rolling her clumsy volume down the bay to mash Fort Taylor to rubbish and débacle. The sea staggered under her ponderous gliding and groaned about her massive bulk as she wended her awkward course toward the bay-shore over against the fort.
Heavily loaded with express packages, with fifty or sixty thousand letters, and with several hundred fifteen-inch solid shot, packed ready for delivery by Admiral Du Pont at or into Fort Sumter, the trim craft passed over a sea like glass, except that now and then was a dying groan or heave of the storm of a week before. A pleasant Sunday at sea was spent with worship, sermon, and song.
In March of 1915 I saw the first fifteen-inch howitzer open fire. We called this monster "grandma," and there was a little group of generals on the Scherpenberg, near Kemmel, to see the effect of the first shell. Its target was on the lower slope of the Wytschaete Ridge, where some trenches were to be attacked for reasons only known by our generals and by God.
With the loss of the Tecumseh, the ironclad portion of the fleet was reduced to the Manhattan, armed with two fifteen-inch guns, and the Chickasaw and Winnebago of two eleven-inch guns each; but one of the Manhattan's guns became disabled early in the action, by a bit of iron lodging in the vent, and the Winnebago's turrets would not turn, so that her guns could be pointed only by manoeuvring the vessel.
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