One To A Billion

[Feuer Frei!]

http://i51.tinypic.com/4r46xw.jpg

Those are two bullets, French and Russian collided in the air, back at 1854 during the war in Russia at Crimea peninsula. People say that a probability odds for this to happen is one to a billion, and to find such 150 years laters was also a great luck.

http://i55.tinypic.com/25s7ec4.jpg

Pretty dam amazing!

SOURCE (http://englishrussia.com/2009/02/23/one-to-a-billion/)

[GoldenRivet]

wow :o

[Armistead]

They have found several of those at different civil war battlefields here in the US, seen several in person from some of my friends I metal detect with, but think of thousands of men shooting at each other from 100 yards or less. They have a piece of tree, about 3ft long from Gettysburg that had over 800 bullets in it. In some battles they cut trees down with bullets.

Took hell of men to just stand there popping off 50cal rounds at almost point blank range.....

[Thomen]

Yea, these are amazing. :salute:
If you ever have the chance, visit the Gettysburg Battlefield Museum. They have a couple of these. :yeah:

[joegrundman]

let us guess from the total combatants about 300, 000 people, firing say 50 rounds each = 15,000,000 rounds

at least 6 bullets hit each other - pure ball-park figure

odds in the region of 2.5 million to 1. that order of magnitude anyway

[jumpy]

The Mythbusters managed to do it in an hours program :hmmm:

[Sailor Steve]

Getting hit by lightning, winning the lottery, falling out of an airplane and surviving, two bullets hitting each other...

The odds are extremely long, but it happens.

[Penguin]

wow, impressive! I've never seen this, though I knew people who collected stuff from battlefields. Thanks for the link!

[claybirdd]

truly amazing.

[Gargamel]

Getting hit by lightning, winning the lottery, falling out of an airplane and surviving, two bullets hitting each other...

The odds are extremely long, but it happens.

Law of Large numbers


But still pretty cool.

[Raptor1]

This is curious, as it looks like two Minié balls collided here. As far as I know, the Russians in the Crimean War used smoothbore muskets with rifles usually only issued to skirmishers, and even then they only begun to copy the Minié ball late in the war and didn't use it very much.

[Jimbuna]

The Mythbusters managed to do it in an hours program :hmmm:

LOL

Long odds...on any day.

[Betonov]

let us guess from the total combatants about 300, 000 people, firing say 50 rounds each = 15,000,000 rounds

at least 6 bullets hit each other - pure ball-park figure

odds in the region of 2.5 million to 1. that order of magnitude anyway

Are those numbers for perfect head-on collisions like the ones on the pics ??

Chances for that are very slim. More common should be bullets grazing eachother and hitting on an angle :hmmm:

[TorpX]

I have a book with a photograph of a rifle-musket where two bullets collided in the barrel (both in motion), disabling the weapon. The caption described it as a 'one in a billion shot'. When it happens "in flight", it would usually not be found, though.

[Platapus]

So with my rat-like paranoia and distrust for anything human, I wonder how hard it would be to take two authentic bullets and manufacture this melding?

unfortunately, I have been around humans far too long to trust them. :O:

[desirableroasted]

This is curious, as it looks like two Minié balls collided here. As far as I know, the Russians in the Crimean War used smoothbore muskets with rifles usually only issued to skirmishers, and even then they only begun to copy the Minié ball late in the war and didn't use it very much.

Thinking the very same thing. The chances of two minie balls colliding in the Crimean War? Vanishingly close to nil, if they were even used on the same battlefield.

From the American Civil War, there are many "examples," and thousands of fakes (I once counted 30 or so for sale at a rural flea market in South Carolina).

The one ball we can see has three grooves, not four. The fourth might have been obliterated, of course, but Civil War minie balls were three-grooved.

What catches my eye here, though, is the way the lead of the two rounds is melted together, with little apparent loss. Lead, while soft, is also fairly brittle -- slam a small piece of lead with a sledgehammer and you'll lose a lot to broken off bits. This looks a little "loss-less" for my taste.