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Long Cecil is a unique one-off gun, designed by George Labram, a United States citizen, and built in the workshops of the De Beers mining company in Kimberley for use by the British during the Siege of Kimberley in the Second Boer War. In 1902, during Cecil Rhodes' funeral procession in Cape Town, his coffin was carried on top of the Long Cecil carriage. Today the gun is located on the stylobate (facing the Free State) of the Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley. At some time before 1915 Pratt & Whitney built a model of this gun as a gift to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. == Construction == The defenders at Kimberley had only the relatively small RML 2.5 inch Mountain Gun at their disposal and therefore lacked a weapon that could effectively match those fielded by the surrounding Boers. Labram and Edward Goffe, Chief Draughtsman at the mine, reviewed the limited number of textbooks and publications on gunmaking that were available in Kimberley. From this and calculations on what it would require to build a gun capable of firing a shell over , they decided that it was feasible to build the gun with the materials at hand.〔 Construction of the gun began on 26 December 1899 with rough-turning of the barrel,〔 but some of the tools required for rifling the barrel were not available and first had to be manufactured on site.〔 The barrel was constructed from a , billet of mild steel. The steel billet was originally ordered as a shaft for one of the De Beers workshop machines.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Long Cecil」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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