Harpoon - (goll. Harpoen), Harpoon m. Throwing spear , prison , for the battle of a sea animal; knitting needle , sock, cuticle ; is fired by a firewood, on a tail, a cutoff or a cable (Dal V.I. Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language ). Presumably, the harpoon was first used in the Mesolithic , however, in Katanda (Congo) bone harpoons with notches were made 75 - 174 thousand years ago [1] .
The first versions of the harpoons were made of wood and only the tips they had were made of metal. As a rule, the teeth at the tips were directed in different directions, and on one could be from 3 to 5 teeth .
Gain experience [ who? ] , to the tip it was decided [by whom? ] attach the cable , because without it the prey often managed to leave. And already in harpoon guns there was an automatic mechanism that allowed to attract a victim who fell under a spear .
Also, a spear is called a spear , which is automatically ejected from an underwater gun or spear gun . In the latter case, an explosive charge can be placed at the end of the harpoon tip to destroy large marine mammals.
In the “space age”, harpoons, also began to be called devices with a similar principle of operation for fixing spacecraft descent when landing on small celestial bodies [2] .
Content
In Culture
Herman Melville devoted many pages to describing the profession of harpooner in his famous Moby Dick novel about whalers, in which, in particular, the metaphysics of the “principle of harpooning” is examined in detail.
Notes
- ↑ Progressive cultures of Africa
- ↑ All the most important about the historical mission of Rosetta // "Popular Mechanics", October 2014.
See also
- Whaler
- Harpoon gun
Literature
- Borodin N.A. , Karyshev N.A. Fisheries // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.