laststandonzombieisland

Watching Napolean recently (can’t really recommend it, rewatch The Duellists instead), I was reminded by just how prevalent “grenadier” formations were in the Napoleonic Wars and the century that preceded them.

You know, these guys:

And, while not all “grenadiers” by the 1800s actually carried grenades, they were still very much in use, especially on ships and in ramparts. But how well did they work?

To answer that question, the guys over at Ordnance Lab went to work and made a batch of period-correct cast iron black powder hand grenades and compared them to the more modern M67 baseball.

Black powder grenades are the great grandparents of the modern hand grenades we are all familiar with today. Before the days of fancy mechanical-pyrotechnic fuses, steel bodies, and high explosives, our ancestors tossed primitive hulls full of black powder and hoped for the best. Someone asked us to see if these things would work long ago. Well, we finally got to testing out how effective these primitive black powder grenades really are. We made a bunch of these black powder grenades and testing their fragmentation abilities as well as how effective they are as as battle field weapon. I guess this makes us now history experts on ancient weapons.

Enjoy!