Dear all, My name is James Nye, and I am a visiting fellow in the History Department of King’s College London. I am a historian of technology and also of business history, trying to combine the two wherever possible. My recent book (Oct 2014) is A Long Time in Making : The History of Smiths, which charts the history of what many people know as Smiths Industries. It has chapters on their involvement in both the Great War and WWII. The firm made significant quantities of munitions, and in particular fuzes (e.g. the Type 206 fuze for the Admiralty, used in AA shells). My involvement in forums is always down to the fact there are questions outside my field of expertise and which are not easily answered with simple searches, whereas forums usually contain experts that can offer answers or opinions. I have been posed a simply and interesting question, to which I had no answer, and thought I would pose it here, which I shall do in a minute. Kind regards, James
