The Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. features an exhibit which purportedly shows two bullets that collided and fused during the Civil War's Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862.
Upon seeing this historical curiosity in person, Destin Sandlin wasn't merely intrigued; he was inspired. Soon thereafter, the popular YouTuber and University of Alabama-Huntsville engineer decided to build an apparatus to smash together two modern-day bullets at near-muzzle speeds and film their forceful meeting with a high-speed camera.
Sandlin shared the entertaining and educational results on his YouTube channel, Smarter Every Day, three years ago. Last week, in the journal Royal Society Open Science, he officially entered his experiment into the scientific record.
As Sandlin detailed in his published paper, he purchased two 12-inch long stainless steel gun barrels and affixed them to a:
"rigid steel I-beam with the muzzles separated by a distance of 9 feet. The aim point of each barrel was slewed slightly off axis so the bullet flight paths aligned approximately 5 inches from the midpoint between the two guns."
He utilized Hornady 45 177 full metal jacket bullets, which have outer casings made up of 95% copper and 5% zinc, and interior slugs consisting of 97% lead and 3% antimony. The bullets' 'meeting' was captured with a slow motion camera filming at 113,8835 frames per second.Â
When all was in place, the fateful firing took place. The two bullets collided head-on, each traveling at 480 miles per hour.
As you can see from the frames, the bullets' casings blasted away in perceptibly flowery fashion, leaving the two mostly lead slugs behind to spectacularly deform. Sandlin subsequently recovered the flattened remnants.
Remember, lead is a uniquely soft, malleable, and dense metal, so these squashed remains might be a signature hallmark of lead bullets. One wonders what might happen if this experiment was repeated with bullets made of other metals – copper, steel, tungsten, or bismuth, for example...
Are you reading, Mr. Sandlin? Interested? We are!
Source:Â Destin Wilson Sandlin, Jason Cassibry; Hitting a bullet with a bullet: an analysis of colliding bullets using experimental data and explicit simulation methods. R. Soc. Open Sci. 1 July 2026; 13 (7): 251800. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251800
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