Grenade

The grenade is a small explosive weapon designed to be thrown by hand or, later, launched from a firearm, consisting of a container holding an explosive charge and a fuse or other detonation mechanism, and organized military use of the hand grenade developed in European armies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward. Early grenades were typically iron or ceramic spheres filled with gunpowder and lit with a slow match before being thrown, and armies of the period formed specialist grenadier units, often chosen for their size and strength needed to throw the heavy early grenades an effective distance, whose name and distinctive tall headgear later survived in some armies as an elite infantry designation long after grenadiers stopped actually carrying grenades. The weapon fell out of common use during much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as reliable fuses became harder to produce affordably at scale, before returning to widespread use once modern impact and timed-fuse designs were developed for the trench warfare of the First World War.