60 Fun Facts About Cannons

The word 'cannon' comes from the Old Italian cannone, meaning what?

Large tube: Italian took canna, a reed or tube, and added -one, its ending for 'big', because a cannon of any age is at heart one long, thick tube.

In which country did the cannon most likely first appear, possibly as early as the 12th century?

China: soldiers there loaded scrap iron and pottery shards into the fire lance, a bamboo gunpowder flamethrower on a pole, and when the bamboo gave way to metal the cannon was born.

Which gun, cast under Mongol rule in 1298, is the oldest surviving cannon to carry its own production date?

The Xanadu Gun: found in the ruins of Kublai Khan's summer capital, it carries a serial number beside its date, a sign that gun-making there was already organised production.

Troops of which dynasty carried hand cannons into battle against the rebel prince Nayan in the 1280s?

Yuan: the commander Li Ting led ten picked men into the rebel camp by night and set off their guns, causing such confusion that the enemy soldiers attacked and killed each other.

The earliest known European picture of a gun, from the 1320s, shows it firing what?

A feathered arrow: the vase-shaped gun appears only as an unexplained picture in the border of Walter de Milemete's treatise on kingship for the future Edward III, whose text never describes it.

The Loshult gun, often called Europe's oldest surviving cannon, was dug up in which Nordic country?

Sweden: the little bronze Loshult gun turned up in Scania, a province that still belonged to Denmark when it was cast and only passed to the Swedish crown in 1658.

English cannon called ribaldis were first recorded in preparations for which 1346 battle?

Crécy: the chronicler Villani wrote that the guns 'made a noise like thunder', adding to the panic of Genoese crossbowmen already under the longbows, though accounts differ on how many they killed.

Which Shakespeare character calls his ragged recruits 'food for powder', the idea behind the phrase 'cannon fodder'?

Falstaff: he shrugs that his pitiful recruits will 'fill a pit as well as better' men, and in 1814 Chateaubriand accused Napoleon's regime of calling its conscripts 'chair à canon', cannon flesh.

Mehmed the Conqueror's giant bombards battered down the walls of which city in 1453?

Constantinople: the Hungarian gunfounder Orban first offered his skills to its emperor, who could not afford him, so he cast his great bombard for the sultan instead.

Which scientist pictured a ball fired from a mountaintop cannon so fast that it would circle the whole Earth?

Isaac Newton: his point was that a ball shot fast enough keeps falling around the Earth without ever landing, so the Moon is held up by the same gravity that pulls a cannonball down.

The shortest war on record ended within an hour in 1896 when British warships shelled the palace of which sultanate?

Zanzibar: Prince Khalid seized the palace and ignored a 9 a.m. ultimatum, so the ships' guns set it ablaze, and before the hour was out he had fled to the German consulate.

Sultan Abdulaziz gave the Dardanelles Gun, a giant 15th-century Ottoman bombard, to which European monarch in the 1860s?

Queen Victoria: the present came some sixty years after Ottoman gunners had loaded these same ancient bombards and fired them at a British fleet forcing the Dardanelles in 1807.

Mons Meg, the giant bombard given to King James II of Scots, is displayed at which castle?

Edinburgh Castle: named for the Belgian town of Mons where she was made, the gun spent 75 years in exile at the Tower of London before cavalry escorted her home in 1829.

Henry Knox dragged Fort Ticonderoga's captured cannon across the snow in 1775–76 to drive the British out of which city?

Boston: Washington's men set the guns on Dorchester Heights in a single night, and General Howe, waking to find his fleet and garrison under their muzzles, sailed away on 17 March.

The Tsar Cannon, a huge bronze bombard cast in 1586, is displayed in the grounds of which fortress?

The Kremlin: the giant was never used in war, and both its ornate carriage and the oversized cannonballs stacked beside it are decorations added in the 1830s.

What did the US Army's 280 mm cannon fire for the first time in a 1953 test in the Nevada desert?

A nuclear shell: codenamed Grable, it burst 19 seconds after leaving the barrel, and although 20 of the guns were built it remains the only atomic round a cannon has ever fired.

When Ivan III set up Russia's first cannon foundry in 1475, in which city was it?

Moscow: the Italian architect Aristotele Fioravanti, invited to the city to build its Dormition Cathedral, is credited with helping set up the works, where Russia first cast guns of its own.

The Jaivana at Jaigarh Fort, the world's largest wheeled cannon when made in 1720, was fired how many times?

The single test firing under Sawai Jai Singh II used 100 kg of powder and, legend says, threw the ball some 35 km.

By Raffles's account, which Javanese empire of the 1320s made the small kingdoms it protected hand over their cannon?

Majapahit: gunpowder weapons had reached Java with Kublai Khan's invasion fleet in 1293, and a generation later the empire was gathering every protected kingdom's guns into its own hands.

Admiral Yi Sun-sin's cannon-armed 'turtle ships' fought off a Japanese invasion fleet in the 1590s for which kingdom?

Korea: the turtle ship's roofed deck was studded with spikes to keep Japanese boarding parties off, while its crew fired their cannon from under cover.

The culverin, a long cannon of the 1500s, took its name from the Latin word for which creature?

A snake: Latin colubra, by way of French couleuvrine, first named a crude hand-held gun and only later passed to the long-barrelled cannon.

Which US frigate was nicknamed 'Old Ironsides' after British cannonballs were seen bouncing off its oak hull in 1812?

USS Constitution: a sailor is said to have shouted that her sides were made of iron, and her own broadsides left HMS Guerriere so wrecked that the prize was burned the next morning.

What name was given to the coarse-grained gunpowder that replaced fine 'serpentine' powder and burned faster and more evenly?

Corned powder: wetting the mix and breaking the dried cake into grains about the size of corn made a charge so much stronger that it could burst older guns.

As cannon battered down tall castle walls, engineers answered with which new style of low, thick, angled defences?

Bastion forts: their pointed corner bastions let the defenders' guns sweep every stretch of wall, leaving attackers no blind spot to shelter in.

Settlers who refused to return a borrowed cannon in 1835 flew a 'Come and Take It' flag, starting which conflict?

The Texas Revolution: Mexico had lent the town of Gonzales the gun in 1831 to ward off raids, and when troops came to take it back the settlers fired it at their camp.

Which king transformed field artillery in the Thirty Years' War by giving every regiment its own light, mobile guns?

Gustavus Adolphus: at Breitenfeld in 1631 his gunners fired three to five volleys for every one from the Imperial guns, and Tilly's veteran army broke and fled.

The mortar, a short, thick-barrelled gun, was designed to do what?

Lob shot at a steep angle over walls: that let besiegers drop their fire on targets sheltering behind defences that no flat-shooting cannon could reach.

The carronade, the Royal Navy's short-barrelled 'smasher' adopted in 1779, took its name from an ironworks in which country?

Scotland: the Carron works at Falkirk sold the stubby gun first to merchant ships, whose small crews could handle it, before navy captains came to call it the smasher.

Napoleon's dispersal of a royalist mob in Paris with cannon fire in October 1795 became known as what?

The whiff of grapeshot: the phrase is the historian Thomas Carlyle's, written decades later, though it is often credited to Bonaparte, who had sent Murat riding through the night to fetch the guns.

Why did one gunner press his thumb over a cannon's vent while it was being loaded?

To starve embers of air: with the vent sealed, no draught could fan a spark left by the last shot, which would have set off the fresh charge in the loaders' faces.

The 1850s French 12-pounder 'Napoleon' became a mainstay of both sides' artillery in which war?

American Civil War: both armies copied the gun, which was named not for the famous emperor but for his nephew Napoleon III, who had pushed its development.

Which British engineer gave his name to the rifled, breech-loading gun that Britain's army adopted in the late 1850s?

William Armstrong: he gave his patents to the nation and was knighted for it, yet within a few years the government stopped ordering his breech-loader and went back to muzzle-loading guns.

The phrase 'loose cannon' recalls the danger of a heavy gun breaking free and careering about where?

On a warship's deck: a gun sliding with every roll could wreck both ship and crew, a terror that a scene in Victor Hugo's 1874 novel Ninety-Three probably turned into a figure of speech.

The giant German howitzers that smashed the Belgian forts at Liège in 1914 were known by which nickname?

Big Bertha: German soldiers coined the name at Liège, by most accounts for the heiress of the firm that built the guns, and the Allies were soon using it for any huge German gun.

In Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon, a giant cannon fires its crew spaceward from which US state?

Florida: Verne's Gun Club picks a hill on its Gulf coast after a newspaper war with Texas, a century before real Moon rockets rose from Cape Canaveral on the state's other coast.

When the Paris Gun first shelled Paris in March 1918, how did Parisians at first explain the blasts?

Bombs from unseen aircraft: no gun could be heard, so a plane or Zeppelin flying too high to see was blamed, until shell fragments gathered within hours showed the city was under fire from over 100 km away.

Shells from the Paris Gun reached a maximum altitude of about 42 km, a record that stood until which weapon flew in 1942?

Each shell took 182 seconds to reach the city and left the barrel at 1,640 metres per second.

Because of its extreme range, gunners aiming the Paris Gun had to allow for which phenomenon?

The Coriolis effect: each shell spent about three minutes in flight, long enough for the Earth to turn noticeably beneath it, so the aim was offset to match.

Schwerer Gustav, the German 80 cm railway gun, was designed to destroy which fortifications?

The Maginot Line: the Wehrmacht simply drove around it before the gun was ready, so the monster first fired in anger two years later, at the Soviet fortress of Sevastopol.

A giant 'supergun' was being built for which leader when its designer, Gerald Bull, was shot dead in 1990?

Saddam Hussein: the Canadian engineer was shot outside his Brussels flat, and weeks later British customs seized the huge barrel sections of his Project Babylon, crated up as industrial pipes.

Which Essen firm built Germany's giant guns of both world wars, among them the Paris Gun and Schwerer Gustav?

Krupp: after the war a Nuremberg tribunal convicted the firm's head, Alfried Krupp, over its use of slave labour, yet he was freed in 1951 and back in control two years later.

Which English football club, founded in Woolwich in 1886, wears a cannon on its crest?

Arsenal: munitions workers named the club for their workplace, the Royal Arsenal gun factory, and although it left Woolwich for north London in 1913 it kept the nickname the Gunners.

The 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger rotary cannon is mounted in which aircraft?

A-10 Thunderbolt II: the whole airframe was designed around the gun, which sits so squarely on the centreline that the nose wheel had to be moved off to one side.

Which orchestral work by Tchaikovsky is famously performed with live cannon fire?

The 1812 Overture: Tchaikovsky told his patron the piece would be 'very loud and noisy' and probably without artistic merit, because he had written it without warmth or love.

Which AC/DC song, punctuated by cannon fire, plays when the Columbus Blue Jackets' goal cannon goes off?

For Those About to Rock: the band added the guns after hearing the salutes at Charles and Diana's 1981 wedding on a television in the next room while working on the song.

The historian Ahmad al-Hassan claims the Mamluks fired 'the first cannon in history' at the Mongols in which 1260 battle?

Ain Jalut: the claim rests on Arabic manuals written decades after the battle, and historians such as Joseph Needham find no firm account of a metal-barrelled cannon in the region until a century later.

How many shots are fired in the gun salute traditionally given to a head of state?

21: a ship that fired off its guns was briefly disarmed, a sign it came in peace, and guns on shore, with more powder to spare, answered each of a ship's seven shots with three.

What are the two cylinders projecting from a cannon's sides, used to mount it on its carriage?

Trunnions: because they sit near the barrel's balance point, the crew could tilt the muzzle up or down without lifting the gun off its carriage.

What is 'windage' in a muzzle-loading cannon?

The gap between the ball and the bore: the barrel was cut a little wide so the shot would slide down, but the wider the gap, the less of the powder's force reached the ball.

What name was given to disabling a cannon before a retreat by hammering a metal plug into its touch hole?

Spiking: a barbed steel spike, or even a snapped-off bayonet tip, went in flush, and the gun stayed useless until someone could drill the vent clear.

In 1770s cannon drill, at what elevation did a ball reach its greatest range, about ten times its level range?

Any shot fired above the horizontal was known as 'random-shot'.

By legend, which heroine took her fallen husband's place at his cannon during the Battle of Monmouth in 1778?

Molly Pitcher: the nickname comes from the water she is said to have carried to cool the guns and their crews, and the tale is most often attached to Mary Ludwig Hays, an artilleryman's wife.

Mid-19th-century gunners fired a cannon by jerking which cord, hooked to a friction primer in the vent?

A lanyard: the tug dragged a roughened wire through a match-like compound in the primer, so the gun fired instantly with no burning slow match held near the powder.

What were 'Quaker guns', used by Colonel William Washington in 1780 and later by the Confederates?

Logs painted to look like cannon: the name plays on the Quakers' refusal to fight, and the trick worked in 1780, when a barn full of Loyalists surrendered to Washington's pine log.

The bombs 'bursting in air' in the US national anthem were British mortar shells fired at which fort in 1814?

Fort McHenry: Francis Scott Key watched the night-long shelling of Baltimore's harbour fort from a truce ship, and on seeing the flag still up at dawn began his verses on the back of a letter.

Luftwaffe night fighters' upward-firing cannon were nicknamed 'Schräge Musik', German slang for which kind of music?

Jazz: 'schräg' means slanted as well as off-key, a pun on guns tilted up to rake a bomber from the blind spot beneath it, and early victims often blamed anti-aircraft fire from the ground.

Which NFL team fires the cannons of a replica ship in its stadium each time it scores?

Tampa Bay Buccaneers: the pirate ship in the end zone of Raymond James Stadium fires seven shots for a touchdown and three for a field goal, one for every point.

Which European kingdom sent musketeers and cannon to help Abyssinia in its 16th-century war with the Adal Sultanate?

Portugal: its 400 musketeers were led by Cristóvão da Gama, a son of the explorer Vasco, who was captured and executed after the Ottomans sent guns and gunmen to Adal's side.

Which Kipling hero is first seen sitting astride Zam-Zammah, the great bronze cannon outside the Lahore Museum?

Kim: the novel opens with the boy on the gun 'in defiance of municipal orders', and the real cannon, cast in Lahore in about 1757, is now known as Kim's Gun.

Iron cannon raised from the seabed are first given which treatment to draw out the salt that would rust them away?

Electrolysis: months in a tank with a low current pull the chlorides out of the iron, and a later coat of tannic acid turns the gun blue-black and holds off new rust.