Modern Use
Battering rams still have a use in modern times. SWAT teams and other police forces often employ small, one- man or two-man metal rams for forcing open locked portals or effecting a door breaching. Modern battering rams sometimes incorporate a cylinder, along the length of which a piston fires automatically upon striking a hard object—thus enhancing the momentum of the impact significantly.
Read more about this topic: Battering Ram
Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“Not so many years ago there there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel—movement through space—provided the universal metaphor for change.... One of the subtle confusions—perhaps one of the secret terrors—of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)