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The 100-ton gun (also known as the Armstrong 100-ton gun) [6] was a british coastal defense gun and is the world's largest black powder cannon. It was a 17.72-inch (450 mm) rifled muzzle-loading (RML) gun made by Elswick Ordnance Company, the armaments division of the British manufacturing company Armstrong Whitworth, owned by William Armstrong.
In 2010 Gibraltar and Malta jointly issued a four-stamp set of stamps featuring the two countries' 100-ton guns. Two stamps show the gun at Napier of Magdala Battery, and two the gun at Fort Rinella. One of each pair is a view from 1882, and the other is a view from 2010.
It was not until March 1883 that the guns arrived at Gibraltar, aboard the SS Stanley, and it took from 12 July to 1 September to move the gun to the battery. The gun was finally mounted on its barbette on 12 September 1883. [2] The battery's design was similar to that of the 100 ton gun batteries on the British-ruled island of Malta.
At Napier of Magdala Battery one of the two 100-ton RML 17.72 inch guns is still in situ and has been restored, along with a 3.7 inch quick-firing anti-aircraft gun. The site is now run by the Gibraltar Tourist Board in conjunction with the Nature Reserve.
The battery is the site of the 100-ton gun, installed in the late 19th century, and one of the only two remaining in the world. (The other is located at the Rinella Battery in Malta.) The weapon was one of two 100-ton guns that Gibraltar received in the late 19th century.
In 1883 the British government installed one Armstrong 100 ton gun in a battery in Gibraltar that they named the Napier of Magdala Battery [34] and in 1891 a statue of Napier on horseback by Sir Joseph Boehm was unveiled in front of Carlton House Gardens in London: it was moved to Queen's Gate, Kensington in 1920. [35]
These include O'Hara's Battery, the 100 ton gun at Napier of Magdala Battery, the Military Heritage Centre at Princess Caroline's Battery and the Parson's Lodge Battery. [6] In the late 1990s the trust arranged for the restoration of Parson's Lodge Battery, which in 1884 had three 10 inches (250 mm) muzzled loading rifled guns. [7]
The British installed a second pair of 100-ton guns to defend Gibraltar, mounting one each in Victoria Battery (1879) and Napier of Magdala Battery (1883), which did not have Cambridge or Rinella's self-defence capabilities. The gun at Cambridge was eventually scrapped, and today only two 100-ton guns survive, at Rinella and Napier of Magdala.