The grenade takes its name from the pomegranate
Byzantine soldiers hurled jars of Greek fire, Song Chinese troops packed gunpowder into iron shells they called thunder crash bombs, and in 1433 a Catalan fleet sailed for Sicily loaded with 200,000 copper pomegranates. That fruit may explain the word grenade, first applied to explosives at a siege in 1536.
The earliest ancestors were incendiary. Not long after the reign of Leo III in the eighth century, the Byzantine army realised that Greek fire, invented the century before, could be thrown in stone and ceramic jars as well as sprayed, and glass containers came later. In Song China soldiers filled ceramic or metal containers with gunpowder and fitted fuses; a military compendium of 1044, the Wujing Zongyao, contains recipes that historian Joseph Needham saw as the prototype of the hand grenade. A twelfth-century Persian history even describes a terracotta elephant in India packed with explosives and hidden in front of an advancing army.
Catalan troops were using hand grenades at the siege of Bonifacio by 1420. The copper pomegranates shipped from Barcelona in 1433 were built to burst into metal fragments rather than simply spread fire, which makes them true forerunners of the modern fragmentation type, and their sheer number suggests standard issue rather than experiment. In Korea, the Joseon army first fired its flying impact thunder crash bomb on 1 September 1592 during the Japanese invasions: a cast-iron sphere 20 centimetres wide and weighing 10 kilograms, with an adjustable fuse, launched from a mortar called a wangu.
The word's roots are disputed. One camp points to French grenade, pomegranate; the other to Latin granatus, filled with grain. Its first known use for an explosive comes from Charles V's siege of Arles in August 1536, and English writers recorded it, spelled granades, in 1591.
A modern hand grenade holds a filler charge, a detonator, a spring striker and two safeties. Pulling the transport pin and releasing the lever frees the striker to light a delay fuze that burns down to the detonator. Different designs rely on fragments, blast, smoke or gas, fire, or a focused jet of metal against armour. Long-handled stick grenades could be thrown farther, but Western armies abandoned them after the Second World War and Cold War.
Source: Grenade
