To recapitulate and perhaps add a little, all artillery used during the Wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the period 1792-1815, was smooth bored and mussel loading. There was a variety of ammunition available to gunners. Ammunition for ground forces was:
Common shot or solid shot. A cast iron ball. It was used to batter fortifications and against personnel at a distance.
Common shell. A hollow cast iron ball with a powder charge and a fuse of some sort. It was fired from a special kind of cannon called a howitzer that had a powder chamber smaller than its bore. The idea was that the discharge of the cannon would ignite the fuse on the shell and a predetermined time later the shell would burst sending chucks of broken cast iron flying around with lethal effect. It did not always work. At Waterloo, Hugomont was set on fire by howitzers firing common shell.
Canister. A rigid container of iron or lead balls used for close range anti-personnel work. It could be effective out to 200 or 300 yards depending on the size of the cannon. The objective was to fire just ahead of the target so that the target was blanketed with canister balls coming in on the fly and on the rebound. At Waterloo, Mercer’s Battery broke up French cavalry with double charges of canister. At Friedland (I think), in 1807, French Artillery came up to just outside musketry range and broke up the Russian infantry formations with canister.
Grape or grapeshot was primarily naval ammunition. It was rendered obsolescent for field artillery by canister.
Mortar bombs were much like common shell but generally bigger and fired from mortars in a high, arching trajectory. Mortars were used against large fixed targets like towns.
Hot shot, common shot heated in a furnace until it was hot enough to set fire to wooden structures was primarily used by permanent costal batteries because the equipment was pretty elaborate and because it was so dangerous to deal with the stuff around gun powder.
Spherical case, or Shrapnel, named after it inventor, a British artillery officer, was like common shell but had thinner walls and contained a bunch of canister balls and a small bursting charge. In theory it would burst in the air above the target and shower canister balls down on the target. It was long-range canister. Because of unreliable fuses it was not very effective.
As far as artillery was concerned the serious killers were common shot and canister. Neither was very dramatic in cinema terms. Canister produced a cloud of dust and common shot just burst its way through. In the French Army Museum in Paris (an institution devoted to showing that Charles DeGaulle single handedly won WWII), there is a breastplate worn by a French cuirassier at Waterloo. There is a four-inch hole in it, the consequence of being struck by a solid shot.
