Grenade

[3] Rudimentary incendiary grenades appeared in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, not long after the reign of Leo III (717–741).

In Song China (960–1279), weapons known as 'thunder crash bombs' (震天雷) were created when soldiers packed gunpowder into ceramic or metal containers fitted with fuses.

They are sent flying towards the enemy camp from an eruptor (mu pào), and when they get there a sound like a thunder-clap is heard, and flashes of light appear.

If ten of these shells are fired successfully into the enemy camp, the whole place will be set ablaze...[8]Grenade-like devices were also known in ancient India.

In a 12th-century Persian historiography, the Mojmal al-Tawarikh,[9] a terracotta elephant filled with explosives set with a fuse was placed hidden in the van and exploded as the invading army approached.

[10] A type of grenade called the 'flying impact thunder crash bomb' (飛擊震天雷) was developed in the late 16th century and first used in September 1, 1592 by the Joseon Dynasty during the Japanese invasions of Korea.

[13] A hoard of several hundred ceramic hand grenades was discovered during construction in front of a bastion of the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt, Germany, dated to the 17th century.

The word grenade was also used during the events surrounding the Glorious Revolution in 1688, where cricket ball-sized (8.81 to 9 in (224 to 229 mm) in circumference) iron spheres packed with gunpowder and fitted with slow-burning wicks were first used against the Jacobites in the battles of Killiecrankie and Glen Shiel.

In a letter to his sister, Colonel Hugh Robert Hibbert described an improvised grenade that was employed by British troops during the Crimean War (1854–1856):[17] We have a new invention to annoy our friends in their pits.

It consists in filling empty soda water bottles full of powder, old twisted nails and any other sharp or cutting thing we can find at the time, sticking a bit of tow in for a fuse then lighting it and throwing it quickly into our neighbors' pit where it bursts, to their great annoyance.

You may imagine their rage at seeing a soda water bottle come tumbling into a hole full of men with a little fuse burning away as proud as a real shell exploding and burying itself into soft parts of the flesh.In March 1868 during the Paraguayan War, the Paraguayan troops used hand grenades in their attempt to board Brazilian ironclad warships with canoes.

[19][20] During the Siege of Mafeking in the Second Boer War, the defenders used fishing rods and a mechanical spring device to throw improvised grenades.

[22] Around the turn of the 20th century, the ineffectiveness of the available types of hand grenades, coupled with their levels of danger to the user and difficulty of operation, meant that they were regarded as increasingly obsolete pieces of military equipment.

Hale's chief competitor was Nils Waltersen Aasen, who invented his design in 1906 in Norway, receiving a patent for it in England.

Aasen formed the Aasenske Granatkompani in Denmark, which before the First World War produced and exported hand grenades in large numbers across Europe.

It contained explosive material with an iron fragmentation band, with an impact fuze, detonating when the top of the grenade hit the ground.

A long cane handle (approximately 16 inches or 40 cm) allowed the user to throw the grenade farther than the blast of the explosion.

[25] Before the beginning of the Second Balkan War, Serbian General Stepa Stepanović ordered that bomb equipped squads (consisting of one non-commissioned officer and 16 soldiers each.)

[22] After the Second World War, the general design of hand grenades has been fundamentally unchanged, with pin-and-lever being the predominant igniter system with the major powers, though incremental and evolutionary improvements continuously were made.

[33] These grenades are usually classed as offensive weapons because the effective casualty radius is much less than the distance it can be thrown, and its explosive power works better within more confined spaces such as fortifications or buildings, where entrenched defenders often occupy.

[36] During the Great War, handgrenades were frequently used by troops, lacking other means to defend against enemy tanks threatening to over-run the position, to various success.

The Interwar period saw some limited development of grenades specifically intended to defeat armour, but it was not until the outbreak of WWII serious efforts were made.

On detonation, these balls, and fragments from the rubber casing explode outward in all directions as reduced lethality projectiles, which may ricochet.

[49] Concerned with a number of serious incidents and accidents involving hand grenades, Ian Kinley at the Swedish Försvarets materielverk identified the two main issues as the time-fuze's burntime variation with temperature (slows down in cold and speeds up in heat) and the springs, the striker spring in particular, coming pre-tensioned from the factory by mechanism designs that had not changed much since the 1930s.

The main difference, apart from a fully environmentally stable delay, is that the springs now are twist-tensioned by the thrower after the transport safety (pin and ring) has been removed, thus eliminating the possibility of unintentional arming of the hand grenade.