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William Howard Livens was the son of the Chief Engineer at Ruston & Hornsby in Lincoln. He experimented with weapons for trench warfare. Gas warfare was very primitive early in the war.

The Livens Projector provided troops with an apparatus to launch canisters of boiling oil and poison gas into the German trenches.

With the help of his father, Fredrick Howard Livens, the projector went from idea to production in just one week. It was cheap to make and deploy.
Ruston鈥檚 factory in Lincoln went on to make a quarter of a million parts for poison gas and flame projectors.

The initial range of the Livens Projector was 180 metres. Later models reached distances of 1,200 metres.

While the 1925 Geneva Protocol banned the use of chemical weapons it wasn鈥檛 until the 1990s that their production and storage was rendered a taboo. The Nobel Peace Prize of 2013 was awarded to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Location: Lincoln, Lincolnshire LN5 7FD
Image shows French troops using flamethrowers to flush out Germans from their shelters, Cantigny, France, 1918
Photograph courtesy of Getty Images

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