Dumb Waiter

DUMB WAITER, originally a small oblong or circular table to hold reserve plates, knives and forks, and other necessaries for a meal. It came into use in England towards the end of the i8th century, and some exceedingly elegant examples were designed by Sheraton and his school. They were usually circular, with three diminishing tiers, sometimes surrounded by a continuous or inter rupted pierced gallery in wood or brass. The smaller varieties are now much used in England for the display of small silver objects in drawing-rooms.

" The term has more recently been extended to mean the small elevator used to convey household commodities from one floor to another in modern apartments. It is a box-like structure, about 2 feet square, built within the walls, and run with a rope and pulley.

a town and cantonment in British India, in t

he district of the Twenty-four Parganas, 44 m. N.E. of Calcutta. The name is derived from dam damn, meaning a raised mound, a battery. Dum-Dum was the headquarters of the Bengal artillery from 1783 to 1853, when they were transferred to Meerut. It contains an army rifle and ammunition factory. The town is divided between two municipalities, North Dum-Dum (pop. 9,885) and South Dum-Dum (pop. 18,471). It was at Dum-Dum that Siraj-ud-daula signed the treaty of 1757 with Clive.

At the Dum-Dum foundry the hollow-nosed "Dum-Dum" (Mark IV.) bullets were manufactured, the supposed use of which by the British during the Boer War caused considerable comment in 1899. Their peculiarity consisted in their expanding on impact and thus creating an ugly wound, and they had been adopted in Indian frontier fighting owing to the failure of the usual type of bullets to stop the rushes of fanatical tribesmen. They were not, in fact, used during the Boer War. Other and improvised forms of expanding bullet were used in India and the Sudan, the commonest methods of securing expansion being to file down the point until the lead core was exposed and to make longitudinal slits in the nickel envelope. All these forms of bullet have come to be described colloquially, and even in diplomatic correspond ence as "dum-dum bullets," and their alleged use by Russian troops in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 formed the sub ject of a protest on the part of the Japanese government. An In ternational declaration was made at the second Hague Confer ence, July 29, 1899, forbidding the use of these bullets. The United States did not participate in this declaration. During the World War actual charges were made by the belligerents of the use of illegal bullets, but there was no evidence forthcoming that such use (if any) was authorized by any power.