Seems in all the movies that contain cannonballs being used as the primary weapon of choice, they tend to explode on contact with the target, or the ground. I find this hard to believe.
I`m thinkning they would just explode as the initial charge went off if that were the case,- or they could have an secondary fuse that was lit and designed to ignite the internal charges well after the ball was sent on its merry way.
Back in the day, in real life, would/could they be made to explode??
They had a secondary fuse, like you said. They didn’t explode on impact.
“…bombs bursting in air…”
Cannon balls as used in the US Civil War, or on Naval ships of that time, did not normally explode. They were mostly solid iron or lead balls.
Just like modern bullets, or the “minnie balls” (solid round lead balls) used in the guns of that time; they did not explode, they just shot holes in people. Cannon balls put bigger holes in people, or ships, or walls, etc. But that was good enough (or bad enough, if you were the target.)
I think the explosive charges used were called ‘gernades’.
If you search on my username and “cannonballs” in GQ, you’ll find several useful threads, as I asked this question once before and have linked back to it in subsequent threads. (I’m out the door in a few minutes, so no time to search – could someone post the links?)
Confusingly enough, the minnie ball was not actually a ball, but had an appearance more like that of a modern bullet. Here is a National Park Service page with a picture. The minnie ball was used with rifles, whereas the true round balls were used in muskets.
While much of the round ammo used was solid, as previously mentioned, there were round shells that exploded as well, with either a timed fuse or percussion fuse. This site sells reproductions of the various shell types. So, to answer the OP, yes, there were round shells that exploded on impact.
I once found an unexploded round shell in the Greenbrier Historical Society; the friendly folks at the local WV State Police barracks took it away for proper disposal.
The most comprehensive discussion of cannonballs was in Scarlett67’s Do cannonballs explode?
(One point that I did not see specifically addressed in re-reading the thead: While the earliest exploding bombs (fired from mortars) were spherical, just as were the solid shot cannonballs, I know of know flat-trajectory exploding shells that were spherical. Concurrent with the design of the exploding shell with a fuze that was fired from a cannon instead of a mortar was the adoption of the “bullet” shaped projectile.)
Interestingly, I have never found the origin (either by date or country, much less inventer) of the contact fuze. The majority (perhaps all) of the fuzes used during the U.S. Civil War continued to be the timed fuze that was developed in the 1850s. (The design was intended to explode above the heads of the opposing forces, not bury itself partially into the ground where much of the explosion might be absorbed.)
Other threads:
Why do cannonballs explode in “period” movies?
How did cannons kill people?
The percussion fuse was patented in the US in 1862 (admittedly we’re talking for use in almost exclusively cylindrical shells by this point, not spherical shot); prior to this, only timed fuses, whether mechanical or power train of some sort would have been used in shells. But this was still an expensive piece of work, as well as being tempermental, and probably failed often. I suspect a lot of Generals preferred to take no chances and stick with older, tried and true fuse types. Look at these neat cutaways of US Civil War 4-second time fuses that were ignited by the firing of the gun itself.
The mathematical calcuations involved in planning that a time-fused shell arrived at the intended target on time were quite involved (then as now); particularly where a high-angle mortar was involved: siege mortars in Napoleonic warfare.
Here’s a very good page with excellent photos of the “new” percussion (impact) fuse from the Civil War, as well as cutaways of explosive shells (and canister shot, case-shot, etc), from the Chicago Public Library
Note the
That sounds unlikely to me. How would you maintain the proper orientation of a round ball in flight, so it would strike the fuse?
Note the what? Speak up, man! Or preview.
Tomndebb, just saw your post; and on actually reading the 1863
US Patent specification for the contact fuse, I see that old Issac P. Tice actually refers to it as "an “Improvement in Concussion-Fuse for Shells.” Which could easily mean that he is only taking a pre-existing fuse and improving on the design–so the Chi-town Public Library site (which is now not working for me) seems to have jumped the gun in stating that the percussion fuse was patented in 1862 (and I repeated their error).
Berkut, I stand corrected. You are absolutely correct that with spherical shells there would be no way of guaranteeing that the percussion cap would impact the target. However, when the requirement was that the shell burst on impact (e.g., bombarding fortifications) the gun crew could choose a timed fuse that would cause the round to explode at or very near the point of impact.
