Mills bomb rod and the gas check grenade could be thrown as a standard hand-grenade. Mills bomb "Mills bomb" is the popular name for a series of prominent British hand grenades. They were the first modern fragmentation grenades used by the British Army and saw widespread use in World War I. William Mills, a hand grenade designer from Sunderland, patented, developed and manufactured the "Mills bomb" at the Mills Munition Factory in Birmingham, England, in 1915. The Mills bomb was inspired by an earlier design by Belgian captain Leon Roland. Roland and Mills were later engaged in a patent lawsuit. Col. Arthur
Science and invention in Birmingham Berners-Lee, a mathematician and computer scientist from Birmingham, works in the team that develops the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercial stored program electronic computer. Berners-Lee is demobilized from the British Army in 1947 with the rank of Major. By the late 1960s Berners-Lee leads the Medical Development Team of ICT and then ICL and is involved in some of the earliest developments in the applications of computers in medicine, and his text compression ideas are taken up by an early electronic patient record system. Berners-Lee later marries Mary Lee Woods (also from Birmingham). Woods studies at Birmingham University