For All Your Pounding Needs!

I'm busy for the next week or so with my thesis experiment, so I'm pillaging an everything2 entry I wrote in order to prevent anybody from blanking my page for a little while.  That means that today you're going to get a history lesson, and not just any old history lesson, a Canadian history lesson.  So gather round, folks, and I'll tell you the story of the MacAdam shovel.

Our story begins in October of 1911, when Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister of Canada, Sir Robert Laird Borden (whose portrait currently graces the $100 bill), appointed Sir Samuel Hughes as Minister of Militia and Defence.  A veteran of the Boer War, Hughes was hated by the average solider, who blamed him for the poor state of their equipment.  There was some truth to this, in that Hughes, an ardent nationalist, prefered to choose Canadian products over superior foreign ones.  The most infamous of these decisions saw the selection of the Ross rifle, which had been deemed unsuitable for military use by the US Army, the British War Office, and the North-West Mounted Police, over the more reliable British-made Lee-Ensfield MkIII.  However, perhaps his most baffling decision, and certainly the most obvious example of the favouritism which he was sometimes accussed of, was the MacAdam shovel.

The MacAdam shovel was invented by Hughes, who based it off of a pre-WWI Swiss design, and patented under the name of his personal secretary, although military correspondence of the time sometimes refers to it as a 'Hughes shovel'.  Designed to serve as an entrenching tool, the shovel had an alternate use thanks to an egg-shaped hole in the steel blade.  This hole was designed to allow soliders to sight their rifle, whilst simultaneously providing protection from enemy fire.  Of course, this hole made the shovel virtually useless for digging, and the blade is rumoured to have provided little protection from gunfire — the metal reportedly being too weak to stop a bullet.

As if these flaws weren't enough, the shovel's handle was made out of iron, with the total weight of over five pounds making the shovel too heavy for any practical use.  But, despite all this, Hughes still had confidence in his invention and ordered over twenty thousand of the devices for military use.  It is unlikely that any of these ever saw actual combat action, and most are believed to have been melted down for scrap.  All that remains, or at least all I can find, of this ill-fated tool are some references in military correspondence and photos of Hughes proudly holding his invention.

Sources: Department of National Defence, National Archives, everything2

Today's title is worth one point.  Go nuts.