Maximite was adopted by the United States Army in 1901. It was during that same year that the experiments were conducted with the Gathmann shell at Sandy Hook. I attended those experiments. Two Kruppized armorplates, each eleven-and-a-half inches thick, sixteen feet long, and seven-and-a-half feet wide, and each weighing 47,000 pounds, were set up, one as a target for the Gathmann shell and the other as a target for the regular United States twelve-inch Army Rifle. Each of the plates was backed by supports to represent the same strength as though mounted on a battleship. The Gathmann shell weighed about eighteen hundred pounds, and carried about five hundred pounds of guncotton, while the Government twelve-inch shell weighed a thousand pounds and carried only twenty-three pounds of Maximite. The Gathmann shell had a soft nose, which collapsed on the plate at the instant before the explosion of the shell, so that the guncotton might explode fairly against the side of the plate. At the first shot of the Gathmann gun, the projectile struck the plate squarely and exploded, but the only effect upon the plate was to leave a great yellow smudge on its face. The plate was neither cracked nor pushed back. Several more shots of the Gathmann gun were fired, and although, under the heavy pummeling, the plate was pushed back and broken through, up and down, it was not otherwise injured. Then the Government twelve-inch gun was fired at the other plate. The first shell contained nineteen pounds of high explosive, and it passed through the plate, leaving a clean round hole, and exploded behind the plate without breaking it. The next shell contained twenty-three pounds of Maximite, and the fuze was timed to go off a little quicker. This shell exploded in the plate when about two-thirds through, with the result that a hole was blown in the plate as big as a barrel, and the plate shattered into fragments. One would think that these tests would suffice forever to seal the doom of the Gathmann type of shell. Nevertheless, it matters not what Army and Navy officers may learn by experience, or know without experience, Congress does not know and does not understand, and depends far more upon think-so than upon experience. The result is that Government officers are often compelled, as in the case of the Zalinski dynamite gun and the Gathmann shell, to waste large sums of money while they know very well beforehand exactly what the results will be, and that the tests will prove the devices to be abject failures. Even after the failure of the Gathmann shell, another shell of almost identical conception and purpose was made and tested under a Congressional appropriation, to be relegated to the scrap-heap of failures.