Spreading explosive news

News of Chinese explosives spread west along the ancient trade route, the Silk Road

(see Chapter 6). The Arabs got primitive firearms by the late thirteenth century. In

1267, the recipe for gunpowder turned up in Europe in the hands of English scientist

Roger Bacon.

Less than a century later, European armies began using crude cannons. Archers with

longbows, not their innovative comrades who were trying out noisy, stinky little

firepots, decided the Battle of Crécy, mentioned earlier in this chapter, but the

primitive cannon was a sign of things to come. The early European cannon was called

a firepot because it was pot-shaped. It propelled an arrow (yes, an arrow) with

impressive force but little reliability and no accuracy. The earliest European gunmakers

were craftsmen who, until then, had made church bells. Often they melted down bells

to make cannons. Soon the gunmakers found out that a tubular barrel worked better

and that it should propel a metal shot. You could knock down a castle gate or level a

house that way.

Bringing in the big guns

By the early sixteenth century, the Italian writer Niccolo Machiavelli observed,

“No wall exists, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days.”

Guns were already big, although some of the biggest didn’t work so well. In the early

fifteenth century some early cannon, sometimes called bombards, weighed 1,500

pounds and discharged balls 30 inches in diameter. How did anybody back then make

a cast-metal barrel that big? At first, it wasn’t cast but rather pieced together out of

forged iron staves, like the curved boards used to form a pickle barrel. Iron hoops held

the staves together — temporarily, anyway.

In 1445, artillerymen in Burgundy (then an independent principality and later part of

France) were firing a bombard made of staves and hoops at invading Turks when a

hoop burst. The crazy thing is that they fired it again. Two more hoops and a stave

blew apart on the next shot. In 1460, one of King James II of Scotland’s big guns

exploded and killed him and many members of his royal party.

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