11. A Failed British Sword Design
At first blush, it seems hard to screw up the design of a sword: hilt, blade, a point, and a sharp edge on one or both sides. Yet British designers managed to do that with the 1796 British Infantry Officers Sword, commonly known as the “1796 Spadroon“. Unlike many failed designs, it was not scrapped at the trial stage, but was widely distributed to the British Army and became the standard-issue sidearm of line regiment officers throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Its defects were particularly problematic in an era when officers’ swords were still routinely used as weapons in combat and had not yet been relegated to mere decorative accouterments to dress uniforms as is the case today.
Spadroons – straight-bladed, flat-backed, single-edged light swords of the cut and thrust type – were not bad weapons in of themselves. However, the designers of the 1796 Spadroon managed to take a concept as simple as a sword – something that had been around for millennia – to the drawing board and screw it up. They came and produced a weapon that failed to cut, thrust, defend, and was poorly constructed to boot. The first problem was the hilt. It was that of a smallsword – a weapon intended solely to thrust into opponents, such as a rapier. That made the 1796 Spadroon ergonomically unsound and ill-suited for the handgrip necessary to cut and slash.
