History
The earliest form of aiming point was a pair of aiming posts for each gun, almost in line with one another when viewed through the gun's sight, and placed about 50 meters from the gun. There were at least two ways of using these but the simplest is to aim the sight mid-way between them.
Before the First World War the French introduced the collimateur. During that war the British introduced their first parallescope which was a horizontal mirror placed a few feet from the gun, the layer aimed his sight at its reflection. In the 1950s the parallescope was replaced by the prism parallescope that was more robust and easily positioned. In the 1970s the US introduced a modern version of the French device and called it a collimator. In the same period infra-red beacons had some very limited use.
In some special circumstances, such as when only one round or salvo was going to be fired (e.g. by nuclear artillery or a multiple rocket launcher), a director or aiming circle about a 100 meters away could be used as an aiming point.
Read more about this topic: Aiming Point
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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