[Kzin]

Reading Sharpe's Havoc, where the British are fighting the French for Portugal, spring 1809, and came across this origin for the word "shrapnel":

The first to fire was a five-and-a-half-inch howitzer, the British equivalent of the cannon that had bombarded Sharpe on the watchtower hill. It was loaded with a spherical case shot, a weapon that only Britain deployed, which had been invented by Lieutenant Colonel Shrapnel and the manner of its working was kept a closely guarded secret. The shell, which was packed with musket balls about a central charge of powder, was designed to shower those balls and the scraps of its casing down onto enemy troops, yet to work properly it had to explode well short of its target so that the shot's forward momentum carried the lethal missiles on to the enemy, and that precision demanded that the gunners cut their fuses with exquisite skill. The howitzer's gunner had that skill. The howitzer boomed and rocked back on its trail, the shell arced over the river, leaving the telltale wisp of fuse smoke in its wake, then exploded twenty yards short and twenty feet above the leading French gun just as it was being unlimbered. The explosion tore the air red and white, the bullets and shattered casing screamed down and every horse in the French team was eviscerated, and every man in the French gun crew, all fourteen of them, was either killed or wounded, while the gun itself was thrown off its carriage.