Mace (spray)

Mace is the genericized trademark of Chemical Mace, the brand name of an early type of aerosol self defense spray invented by Allan Lee Litman in 1965. The first commercial product of its type, Litman's design packaged phenacyl chloride (CN) tear gas dissolved in hydrocarbon solvents into a small aerosol spray can, usable in almost any environment and strong enough (when sprayed in the face) to act as a credible deterrent and incapacitant. Its popularity led to the brand name being shortened to simply "Mace" for all defense sprays (regardless of the composition).

History

The original formulation consisted of 1% CN in a solvent of 2-butanol, propylene glycol, cyclohexene, and dipropylene glycol methyl ether.

Chemical Mace was originally invented in 1965 by Allan Lee Litman, founder and co-owner of Pittsburgh-based General Ordnance Equipment Corporation (GOEC), after his wife, Doris, was threatened on the street. In 1987, Chemical Mace was sold to Smith & Wesson and manufactured by their Lake Erie Chemical division. Smith & Wesson subsequently transferred ownership to Jon E. Goodrich along with the rest of the chemical division in what is now Mace Security International. Though the design has been expanded on, the original Chemical Mace formula using only CN has since been discontinued. Due to the potentially toxic nature of CN and the generally superior incapacitating qualities of oleoresin capsicum (OC) pepper spray in most situations, the early CN has been mostly supplanted by OC formulas in police use, although Mace Security International still retains a popular "Triple Action" formula combining CN, OC and an ultraviolet marker dye.

Mace

Mace may refer to:

Personal names

Fiction

Mace (weapon)

A mace is a blunt weapon, a type of club or virge that uses a heavy head on the end of a handle to deliver powerful blows. A mace typically consists of a strong, heavy, wooden or metal shaft, often reinforced with metal, featuring a head made of stone, copper, bronze, iron, or steel.

The head of a military mace can be shaped with flanges or knobs to allow greater penetration of plate armour. The length of maces can vary considerably. The maces of foot soldiers were usually quite short (two or three feet, or seventy to ninety centimetres). The maces of cavalrymen were longer and thus better suited for blows delivered from horseback. Two-handed maces could be even larger.

Maces are rarely used today for actual combat, but a large number of government bodies (for instance, the British House of Commons and the U.S. Congress), universities and other institutions have ceremonial maces and continue to display them as symbols of authority. They are often paraded in academic, parliamentary or civic rituals and processions.

MGM-13 Mace

The Martin Mace (designated as TM-76 tactical missile until 1963, then as MGM-13 for mobile-launched and CGM-13 for container-launched versions) is a tactical cruise missile developed from the MGM-1 Matador. It was replaced by the MGM-31 Pershing missile by Robert McNamara, and later in its role as a cruise missile for West Germany, by the BGM-109G Ground Launched Cruise Missile.

History

Development began in 1954 as an improved version of the MGM-1 Matador. Like the Matador, the Mace was a tactical surface-launched missile designed to destroy ground targets. It was first designed as the TM-76 and later the MGM-13.

Mace was launched from a transporter erector launcher or a hardened bunker using a solid rocket booster for initial acceleration and an Allison J33-A-41 turbojet for flight. The Goodyear Aircraft Corporation developed ATRAN (Automatic Terrain Recognition And Navigation, a radar map-matching system) in which the return from a radar scanning antenna was matched with a series of "maps" carried on board the missile which corrected the flight path if it deviated from the film map. In August 1952, Air Materiel Command initiated the mating of the Goodyear ATRAN with the MGM-1 Matador. This mating resulted in a production contract in June 1954. ATRAN was difficult to jam and was not range-limited by line-of sight, but its range was restricted by the availability of radar maps. In time, it became possible to construct radar maps from topographic maps.

Spray

Spray can refer to:

Solar flare

A solar flare is a sudden flash of brightness observed near the Sun's surface. It involves a very broad spectrum of emissions, requiring an energy release of up to 6 × 10²⁵joules of energy (roughly the equivalent of 160,000,000,000 megatons of TNT, over 25,000 times more energy than released from the impact of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter). Flares are often, but not always, accompanied by a spectacular coronal mass ejection. The flare ejects clouds of electrons, ions, and atoms through the corona of the sun into space. These clouds typically reach Earth a day or two after the event. The term is also used to refer to similar phenomena in other stars, where the term stellar flare applies.

Solar flares affect all layers of the solar atmosphere (photosphere, chromosphere, and corona), when the plasma medium is heated to tens of millions of Kelvin, while the cosmic-ray-like electrons, protons, and heavier ions are accelerated to near the speed of light. They produce radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum at all wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays, although most of the energy is spread over frequencies outside the visual range and for this reason the majority of the flares are not visible to the naked eye and must be observed with special instruments. Flares occur in active regions around sunspots, where intense magnetic fields penetrate the photosphere to link the corona to the solar interior. Flares are powered by the sudden (timescales of minutes to tens of minutes) release of magnetic energy stored in the corona. The same energy releases may produce coronal mass ejections (CME), although the relation between CMEs and flares is still not well established.

Spray (sailing vessel)

The Spray was an 36-foot-9-inch (11.20 m) oyster sloop which Joshua Slocum rebuilt and single-handedly sailed around the world, the first voyage of its kind. The Spray was lost with Captain Slocum aboard sometime on or after November 14, 1909, after sailing from Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, bound for South America.

History

In 1892, a friend, Captain Eben Pierce, offered Slocum a ship that "wants some repairs". Slocum went to Fairhaven, Massachusetts to find that the "ship" was a rotting old oyster sloop named Spray, propped-up in a field. Despite the major overhaul of the ship, Slocum kept her name Spray, noting, "Now, it is a law in Lloyd's that the Jane repaired all out of the old until she is entirely new is still the Jane."

Its days as a fishing boat, probably as a Chesapeake Bay oysterman, had come to an end by 1885, and it was a derelict, a slowly deteriorating hulk sitting in a makeshift ship's-cradle in a seaside meadow on Poverty Point in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, when Captain Eben Pierce of that town offered it to Joshua Slocum as a gift. Slocum came to Fairhaven to look at the Spray (sorry sight that it was), and he undertook to repair and refit it over the next thirteen months.