First shot at a Tommy gun

QUESTION The BBC drama World On Fire showed a French soldier holding a Thompson submachine gun. Was this a standard weapon at the time?

THE Thompson submachine gun, a magazine- fed, automatic weapon designed to shoot handgun cartridges, was named after its inventor, John T. Thompson.

The first true submachine gun was the German MP18 in 1918, which later developed into the MP34.

Thompson envisioned a one-man, handheld machine gun. In 1921, he introduced the M1921 with vertical fore-grip and 100 round Type ‘C’ drum magazine.

Thompsons were used by the police from 1921. Ironically, the Tommy gun became synonymous with gangsters such as Al Capone, earning another nickname, the Chicago typewriter.

During World War II, a revised M1928A1 Tommy was issued to armoured and reconnaissance units. It was selective for semi or fully-automatic fire and fired a .45 calibre cartridge in 20 or 30- round magazines or a 50-round drum. Its rate of fire was 600 to 725 shots per minute.

Though it looked the part, the M1928A1 was heavy and expensive to make in terms of materials, time and machine tools. So Thompson developed the lightweight Thompson M1A1. This fired a .45 calibre cartridge in 20 or 30- round magazines, with a rate of fire of 700 shots per minute. It was reliable, continuing to operate in the worst battlefield conditions where similar weapons failed.

More than 1.5 million military Tommy guns were produced during World War II and used by Allied forces. It proved so durable that it was still being used during the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Justin Barrere, Horley, Surrey.

QUESTION Are polar bears left-handed?

THIS is one of a number of myths about polar bears, including the claims that they cover their black noses with their right paws and use tools when hunting, their hair conducts UV light to the skin and they are eaten by killer whales.

The left-handed theory comes from

Ready to fight: Winston Churchill tries a Tommy gun in Hartlepool in 1940 anthropologist Richard Nelson’s 1993 article Understanding Eskimo Science. He spent a year in the Sixties living in an Inuit community in the village of Wainwright in the north of Alaska.

He reported that if attacked by a polar bear, children were advised to jump to the right because the animals were lefthanded: ‘Elders say polar bears are lefthanded, so you have a slightly better chance to avoid their right paw, which is slower and less accurate.

‘I’m pleased to say I never had the chance for a field test. But in judging assertions like this, remember that Eskimos have had close contact with polar bears for several thousand years.’

Dr Ian Stirling is the world’s foremost expert on polar bears. From 1970 to 2007, he was a research scientist for the Canadian Wildlife Service, working on a long-term study of polar bears in Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba.

He concluded there is no evidence that polar bears are left-pawed. In fact, they appear to use their paws equally. He documented hundreds of hunts and no bear was seen putting a paw over its black nose while stalking a seal.

Neither do polar bears use blocks of ice as a tool to stun seals. Stirling believes this myth came about after observers noted that after failing to catch a seal, a frustrated polar bear may slap the ground or hurl chunks of ice.

A polar bear’s hair is, in fact, not white, but clear hollow tubes. They look white because they reflect the light. However, these tubes don’t conduct UV light to the animal’s black skin. This theory was disproved by physicist Daniel Koon in his 1998 paper Is Polar Bear Hair Fibre Optic?. There are no reported or documented cases of killer whales eating bears. Nathan Bradshaw, St Andrews, Fife.

QUESTION What is the longest word in

any language?

THERE is no standard answer to this because many languages, such as German, Dutch and Turkish, allow the creation of long words via agglutination (gluing words together).

According to the Guinness Book Of World Records, the longest known example is a compound word of 195 Sanskrit characters (428 letters in the Roman alphabet) describing the region in Tamil Nadu in India that appears in a 16th- century work by Tirumalamba, Queen of Vijayangara.

In his comedy Assemblywomen, written in 391 BC, Aristophanes invented a 173letter word for a fictional dish of various kinds of fish, red meat, fowl and sauces.

The Germans are famous for their compound words. The longest in everyday use is the 39-letter Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, which is the term for insurance companies providing legal protection.

In theory, a German word can be infinitely long. They are dubbed

Bandwurmworter (tapeworm words). Mark Twain observed: ‘ Some German words are so long that they have a perspective.’ A similar system works in Polish: their word for ‘of 999,999,999,999 years old’ is 176 letters long.

The 45-letter word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest English word in a major dictionary, but it was deliberately contrived.

A better bet is Floccinaucinihilipilification. At 29 letters, and meaning the act of estimating something as being worth so little as to be practically valueless, or the habit of doing so, it is the longest nontechnical, coined word in Oxford dictionaries of the English language.

Long compound words abound in chemistry. The longest is for a protein known as titin for short. It’s 189,819 letters long and would take three and a half hours to pronounce.

Kevin Allen, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion.

IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT. You can also email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published, but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.