However invalid may have been the arguments founded on these assertions--and that there was a serious flaw in them time was to show--there could be no doubt that, so far as considerations of defence were concerned, the conclusions reached were of important value. In the case of a merchant packet defending herself from boarding by a privateer, for example, a light, short-ranging gun throwing a large ball would give far more effective protection than a small-calibre long gun. And if, moreover, the former involved a dead weight less than a quarter, and a personnel less than half, of that involved by the latter, the consideration of its superiority in action was strongly reinforced, in the opinion of shipowners and masters, by less advertised considerations of weight, space, and equipment--very important in their relation to the speed and convenience of the vessel, and hence to all concerned. So the arguments of Robins, though propounded solely with reference to warships, yet applied with special force to the defensive armament of merchant ships. A conception of this fact led a very able artillerist, General Robert Melville, to propose, in 1774, a short eight-inch gun weighing only thirty-one hundredweight yet firing a nicely fitting sixty-eight pound ball with a charge of only five and a half pounds of powder. This piece he induced the Carron company to cast, appropriately naming it a Smasher. Of all the carronades the Smasher was the prototype. It possessed the special attributes of the carronades in the superlative degree; the carronade was a reproduction, to a convenient scale, of the Smasher. That General Melville was the prime inventor of the new type, has been placed beyond doubt by the inscription on a model subsequently presented to him by the Carron Company. The inscription runs: “Gift of the Carron Company to Lieut.-General Melville, inventor of the Smashers and lesser carronades for solid, ship, shell, and carcass shot, etc. First used against French ships in 1779.”[85]