Shrapnel shells were anti-personnel artillery munitions which carried a large number of individual
bullets close to the target and then ejected them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike the target individually. They relied almost entirely on the shell's velocity for their lethality. The munition has been obsolete since the end of
World War I for anti-personnel use, when it was superseded by high-explosive shells for that role. The functioning and principles behind Shrapnel shells are fundamentally different from high-explosive shell fragmentation.
Shrapnel is named after Major-General
Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842), a
British artillery officer, whose
experiments, initially conducted in his own time and at his own expense, culminated in the
design and development of a new type of
artillery shell.