The mortar takes its name from the kitchen bowl it resembled
The first mortars were squat iron bowls, so like the apothecary's mortar and pestle that they borrowed the name. Early ones lobbed stones so high that, at Belgrade in 1456, lookouts could reportedly track each shot and shout warnings before it landed.
Korea offers the earliest reported use, in a naval battle of 1413, with a gourd-shaped weapon called the wan'gu, whose earliest version dates to 1407 and which is usually credited to Ch'oe Hae-san. Mehmed the Conqueror first used mortars in a siege at Constantinople in 1453. Heavy early pieces such as the 15th-century Pumhart von Steyr were hard to move, and some sources called them potguns.
Mortars were central to Venice's conquest of the Morea from 1684 to 1699, a campaign in which an ammunition store inside the Parthenon exploded in 1687. In 1701 Baron Menno van Coehoorn designed a portable mortar whose shell fuse was lit by the firing gases, and it proved so popular that navies built bomb vessels to carry it. British troops used mobile mortars against the Jacobites at Glen Shiel in 1719, where high trajectories suited the rugged West Highlands. At Vicksburg in 1863, Ulysses S. Grant's men improvised mortars from bored-out logs of tough wood bound with iron bands.
Studying the 1904 to 1905 siege of Port Arthur, where heavy guns failed against wire and bunkers, the German army developed the Minenwerfer, or mine-thrower, in three calibres. Britain's answer came from Sir Wilfred Stokes in 1915. His design was rejected that June because it could not use existing ammunition, and only the intervention of munitions minister David Lloyd George got it built.
The Stokes mortar was a smoothbore tube on a base plate with a light bipod: a bomb dropped down the barrel struck a firing pin and launched, up to 25 rounds a minute over 730 metres. Its steep fall could drop rounds straight into trenches that flat-firing artillery could not reach. Later versions with fin-stabilised bombs reached 30 rounds a minute and over 2,300 metres, and France's Brandt designs became the pattern for light mortars worldwide.
Source: Mortar (weapon)
