I was drifting asleep and started thinking about cannons in battle. I don’t know why.
I started thinking about one fo the Zulu movies. I recall the British firing cannons into a mob of Zulus. The effect shown was a buch of Zulus falling down backward in the line of fire. How real is this? How far would a cannonball go through a mob of people at point-blank? I know this depends on the size of the cannon and whatnot and whether the cannon was rifled perhaps.
I seem to recall seeing somewhere that you could use two cannons to simultaneously fire two cannonballs connected by a heavy chain? Is this true? Could you use 10 cannons to launch 10 cannonballs connected by heavy chain and wipe out an entire battlefield? How about piano wire? Multiple cannonballs connected to a big net? How did they get the firing timing right? What if one cannon goes off but another cannon does not fire on time?
Was it possible back in the day to design a cannon to fire a flat razor-sharp disc, such as a large rotary saw blade? I guess it might not be too sharp on the part closest to the gunpowder once it’s fired.
What other creative fun things did they shoot from cannons back in the day (pre-1900)? What could they have shot but perhaps nobody thought of it until after warfare changed too much to implement it?
I seem to recall also seeing some civil war cannons that were very thick and short and stubby instead of having long barrels. What was the purpose of this? The look like they would be very inaccurate.
(2) Are you sure you aren’t thinking of chain shot? This was a projectile fired from a single cannon, it had two balls connected by a chain (it was used to destroy the rigging on enemy ships).
(4) Sounds like mortars - those are indirect fire weapons (they lob shells high in the air, handy when you or your opponent are behind cover), not direct fire weapons which have the barrel aimed directly at the target.
People tried link cannonballs by chains but it is difficult to time the shots well enough and they still may not hit anything. I think they were more trouble than they were worth on the battlefield.
I think you are talking about mortars, Hear are some illustrations.
One fun thing you could shoot from a cannon was heated shot. They would put the iron ball in a furnace until it was red hot. Then they would load the cannon: powder, wad (VERY important for heated shot. It kept the red hot shot from igniting the powder) then the shot. When fired into a wooden ship, the hot shot would ignite the wood in which it embedded itself.
I’ve been looking on google, but can’t find a reference to this, but I distinctly remember reading about a battle where the army ran out of ammo for their cannon, so began loading cheese as shot. Perhaps this is fiction, but I can’t find it on a simple google seach. Does this sound at all familiar to anybody?
I remember this from a children’s book about Napoleon (also where I first heard of grape shot). Another mention of fun times with weapons was skipping cannonballs. I’ve only heard of it the once, Nelson apparantly had his men do it. I’m not sure why or where (or indeed when) but it was on a Q&A section of a paper in a follow up to a question on the bouncing bomb.
When pushed, anything handy became shot: rocks, flatware, bones from last night’s dinner, Fido…anything you could lay your hands on. See the Wiki article on grapeshot.
“Why” is easy. A skipping cannonball, at range, will impact its target at or very near the waterline. If your goal is to sink enemy warships instead of capturing them, this is a desired outcome of your cannon fire.
Pretty far. Figure the force required to hurl a six pound ball a distance of a mile or more and then note that each human body it passed through would probably not reduce its force appreciably.
Here is a site that discusses Field Artillery in the [U.S.] Civil War. Near the bottom of the page is a chart for the use of the (much larger than a field gun) 20 pounder. It notes that 19 1/2 pounds of case shot (bullet sized rather than shotgun sized shot) at 1° of elevation could be hurled 620 yards. Point blank would not go as far, but it would be pretty devestating to anyone in front of it.
The “standard” fields guns tended to be six-pounders and twelve-pounders, so the effects would not be as extreme, but they would still take out far more than a single line of advancing infantry.
Chain shot was always fired from the single cannon. (On the courthouse lawn at Athens, GA is a double barrled cannon that was cast at the Athens foundry in the hopes that they could fire chained shot at advancing Federal troops. The idea being that the two barrels would have a common fire hole allowing them to be fired simultaneously. Unfortunately, there is NO WAY to guarantee that the firing will be EXACTLY simultaneous and they gave it up after the first tests resulted in the ball from the first barrel to go off finding itself “anchored” by the ball in the second barrel and whipping around the cannon.
There were a lot of different objects placed into cannons, but noting resembling disks. (They would have been rather pointless. A flat surface would have been likely to slow itself down with bad aerodynamics and the “teeth” would have inflicted no more harm than just having an objecct hitting a human body at a high rate of speed.)
They used different sizes of shot, for fairly small buckshot up to stuff an inch or more across. They delevoped cannister that charried shot instide a case that exploded over the heads of oncoming troops. The Navy had chain shot (two balls joined by a length of chain) and bar shot (like exercise weights) that tumbles so that it would catch more sail and rip it more thrououghly. “Hot shot” has been mentioned. In an emergency, particularly with the older smooth bore weapons, bolts, nuts, bits of chain, and rocks were occasionally employed as a sort of ad hoc case shot.
The original exploding shot was used only in mortars firing a high arc trajectory. Originally, cannons and howitzers would deliver the gundpowder-filled “shell” too quickly to the target where it would rupture before it could actually explode. In the 1820s, the Paixhans of the French Navy theorized that shells could be designed to be fired from cannon. It took until the 1850s before he could develop the techniquies and fuses that made it practical and the majority of exploding shells used from that point on were designed with fuses in the base that caused them to explode in the air near troops. (So all the movies of any war prior to the U.S. Civil war that shows cannon shels exploding when they hit is simply a Hollywood anachronism.) I have not yet been able to discover when the first shells to use contact fuses were employed, but it too did not precede the U.S. Civil War by many years, if at all.
The site to which I linked displays a number of different types of shot used in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Depending on just how “stubby” you mean, they were either mortars or howitzers. Mortars were massive weapons that were only used in sieges to loft large exploding shells over the walls of forts, so they did not have to have pinpoint accuracy, to begin with. Howitzers are mid length bewtween guns and mortars. They are also used to hurl shells over obstacles such as hills.
The other possible weapon you may have seen could have been a naval carronade. They were also very large bore, short barreled weapons that could be reloaded more swiftly than a longer barreled gun and, due to the properties of gunpowder at the time, they were actually more accurate than longer guns for the close ranges in which they were employed. They were never intended for land warfare, although a desperate army would employ whatever weapon it could get its hands on.
I’ve been re-reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver and there’s a good bit of pirate ship action in that book. One of the main characters takes some time smashing up old china plates to use in a cannon.
Stephenson uses the term “blunderbuss” for these big bags of trash-to-become-shrapnel but according to what I see online about what a “blunderbuss” is…he’s wrong.
2 things shot at the same time will go off at different times. There are no 2 identical anything mechanical. Mythbusters hasn’t figured that out in years ad screwing things up. Two computers set uo identically are different. It is just the way it is. When you want two things th move at the same time,one has to go along for a ride.
Henri-Joseph Paixhans (His guns and shells were actually adopted earlier than I had thought, although only on ships and were still not actually used effectively until the 1850s.)
Civil War Artillery Projectiles (Decent information of projectiles and fuzes, although the site is frames based, making it difficult to link to individual pages)
I pretty sure that there is a Brady photo, (the guy who took all those Civil War photos) with a guy posed so it looked like the cannon was his enormous penis.