I noticed, a while ago, that a website about weird gizmos mentioned a potato Gatling Gun! but the link to that contraption was dead. That only increased my curiosity. I then wondered about the original inventor of that “toy”, but only got this:
Hold on a second. There’s potato guns, and then there’s potato guns, more properly called cannons.
The guns proper are a mostly harmless toy–they’ll shoot a little piece of potato that might startle somebody, but it’s not gonna do any damage. They’re good for scaring the cat.
Potato cannons, on the other hand, are Bad Mothers. The one I had in high school could shoot a 1/2 potato about 400 ft, and it got over there really quick. It’s not the sort of thing you’d fire at anything you don’t want destroyed.
The gatling gun that ringo linked to is just six cannons linked together. The reload time is on the order of minutes, so it really can’t be used for rapid-fire stuff.
Is there a line between a gun and a cannon? Because our gun was dangerous as all hell. The barrel was about 3ft long (2 1/2" diameter), so I wouldn’t consider it a cannon. All though the cap about blew my buddys knuckles off when we got the bright idea to put a valve stem into it and inject it with compress air mixed with ether. So believe me, they can cause great harm. Even without the compressed air <---- important.
here’s a great site that shows the evolution of spud cannons up to a semi-auto version. I came across it after going to a monty python theme party where a guy had created an air cannon that shot stuffed bunnies into the crowd.
The non-dangerous potato gun doesn’t shoot a whole potato. It’s shaped like a pistol. You stick the end of the gun into a potato, and it pulls out a little pellet, maybe 3/8 inch in diameter and about as thick. When you squeeze the “trigger,” air pressure pops the potato pellet out. It shoots the pellet hard enough that it will go about 10 feet, and not hard enough to harm anything. But it does shoot accurately enough that you can do some target practice.
A potato cannon on the other hand…well, that’s some serious firepower.
Potato cannons are often called potato guns, though. As we found out on our honeymoon in Idaho. I really wanted to find some of the potato guns that I described above. I figured that they’d be a popular souvenir-type item in Idaho, and I thought it would be fun to get a bunch of them and bring them back for friends and family. But when we told people that we were looking for a dozen potato guns, they at us like we were total psychos and told us that they were illegal in the state of Idaho. I simply could not figure out why the harmless little potato guns would be outlawed. Finally, I discovered that in Idaho, the thing that I would call a potato cannon is referred to as a potato gun. No wonder they thought I was crazy–they thought I wanted bring a dozen potato cannons home to New Jersey!
Come to think of it, a potato cannon would be a great weapon for New Jersey. Could you imagine them trying to do a ballistics report on a potato? You could compost the evidence!
