Lieutenant General Henry Shrapnel

... was a British army officer, born in 1761 in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire. In 1784, while a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, he invented what he called "spherical case" ammunition: a hollow cannonball filled with lead shot, that burst in mid–air. He saw it as an anti–personnel weapon. In 1803, the British Army adopted a similar but elongated explosive shell, which immediately acquired the inventor's name. Over time, that name came to be used to mean any fragmentation from artillery shells, and fragmentation in general – figurative as well as literal.