Cannons Trivia
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60 free Cannons trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This cannons trivia quiz covers the big guns from 13th-century China to the rotary autocannon in the nose of an A-10. The easy questions ask what the word cannon originally meant, where the weapon was born, which city's walls fell to Ottoman bombards in 1453, which overture calls for live artillery and which rock band saluted with it. Then it works through the early history: the fire lance, the Xanadu Gun, Walter de Milemete's 1326 drawing, the ribaldis at Crécy, Orban's giant bombard and the shift to bastion forts. The hard end is for people who know a culverin from a saker: the sixteen English calibres, the carronade, Gustavus Adolphus's cartridges, Napoleon's whiff of grapeshot, the 12-pounder Napoleon, Armstrong's rifled breech-loader, Mons Meg's Burgundian gift, the Tsar Cannon that was never fired in anger, the Dardanelles Gun given to Queen Victoria, Bertha Krupp's namesake, the Paris Gun's Coriolis maths and Schwerer Gustav's 7-tonne shells. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on the cannon and the individual guns named before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our military history, Napoleonic Wars and World War I quizzes are natural next stops.
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Q 01The word 'cannon' comes from the Old Italian cannone, meaning what?
Large tube
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.
Q 02In which country did the cannon most likely first appear, possibly as early as the 12th century?
China
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.
Q 03Which gun, cast under Mongol rule in 1298, is the oldest surviving cannon to carry its own production date?
The Xanadu Gun
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.
Q 04Troops of which dynasty carried hand cannons into battle against the rebel prince Nayan in the 1280s?
Yuan
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.
Q 05The earliest known European picture of a gun, from the 1320s, shows it firing what?
A feathered arrow
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.
Q 06The Loshult gun, often called Europe's oldest surviving cannon, was dug up in which Nordic country?
Sweden
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.
Q 07English cannon called ribaldis were first recorded in preparations for which 1346 battle?
Crécy
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.
Q 08Which Shakespeare character calls his ragged recruits 'food for powder', the idea behind the phrase 'cannon fodder'?
Falstaff
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.
Q 09Mehmed the Conqueror's giant bombards battered down the walls of which city in 1453?
Constantinople
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.
Q 10Which scientist pictured a ball fired from a mountaintop cannon so fast that it would circle the whole Earth?
Isaac Newton
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.
Q 11The shortest war on record ended within an hour in 1896 when British warships shelled the palace of which sultanate?
Zanzibar
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.
Q 12Sultan Abdulaziz gave the Dardanelles Gun, a giant 15th-century Ottoman bombard, to which European monarch in the 1860s?
Queen Victoria
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.
Q 13Mons Meg, the giant bombard given to King James II of Scots, is displayed at which castle?
Edinburgh Castle
Q 21The culverin, a long cannon of the 1500s, took its name from the Latin word for which creature?
A snake
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.
Q 22Which US frigate was nicknamed 'Old Ironsides' after British cannonballs were seen bouncing off its oak hull in 1812?
USS Constitution
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.
Q 23What name was given to the coarse-grained gunpowder that replaced fine 'serpentine' powder and burned faster and more evenly?
Corned powder
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.
Q 14Henry Knox dragged Fort Ticonderoga's captured cannon across the snow in 1775–76 to drive the British out of which city?
Boston
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.
Q 15The Tsar Cannon, a huge bronze bombard cast in 1586, is displayed in the grounds of which fortress?
The Kremlin
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.
Q 16What did the US Army's 280 mm cannon fire for the first time in a 1953 test in the Nevada desert?
A nuclear shell
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.
Q 17When Ivan III set up Russia's first cannon foundry in 1475, in which city was it?
Moscow
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.
Q 18The Jaivana at Jaigarh Fort, the world's largest wheeled cannon when made in 1720, was fired how many times?
Once
The single test firing under Sawai Jai Singh II used 100 kg of powder and, legend says, threw the ball some 35 km.
Q 19By Raffles's account, which Javanese empire of the 1320s made the small kingdoms it protected hand over their cannon?
Majapahit
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.
Q 20Admiral Yi Sun-sin's cannon-armed 'turtle ships' fought off a Japanese invasion fleet in the 1590s for which kingdom?
Korea
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.
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.
Q 24As cannon battered down tall castle walls, engineers answered with which new style of low, thick, angled defences?
Bastion forts
Bastion forts: their pointed corner bastions let the defenders' guns sweep every stretch of wall, leaving attackers no blind spot to shelter in.
Q 25Settlers who refused to return a borrowed cannon in 1835 flew a 'Come and Take It' flag, starting which conflict?
The Texas Revolution
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.
Q 26Which king transformed field artillery in the Thirty Years' War by giving every regiment its own light, mobile guns?
Gustavus Adolphus
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.
Q 27The mortar, a short, thick-barrelled gun, was designed to do what?
Lob shot at a steep angle over walls
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.
Q 28The carronade, the Royal Navy's short-barrelled 'smasher' adopted in 1779, took its name from an ironworks in which country?
Scotland
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.
Q 29Napoleon's dispersal of a royalist mob in Paris with cannon fire in October 1795 became known as what?
The whiff of grapeshot
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.
Q 30Why did one gunner press his thumb over a cannon's vent while it was being loaded?
To starve embers of air
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.