The Cannon's Rise: Song Fire Lances to Napoleon's Mud at Waterloo

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The word cannon traces back through Italian and Latin to the Greek word for a reed, and the weapon began as one. In 12th century Song dynasty China, the fire lance was a spear with a paper or bamboo tube packed with gunpowder and scraps of iron, gravel, and porcelain. Metal followed: the Wuwei bronze cannon of 1227, the Heilongjiang gun of about 1288, and the Xanadu gun of 1298, the earliest dated survivor, just 35 centimeters long and about 14 pounds. Gunpowder spread west, and at Crécy in 1346 the English fired ribaldequins loaded with grapeshot and large arrows to panic French horses.

By the late 1300s guns had grown into bombards, and Mehmed II brought 68 of them to Constantinople in 1453, ending the age of the castle. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden made artillery mobile with light four and nine pounders and prepackaged cartridges, proving it at Breitenfeld in 1631. Gunners such as Nathaniel Nye turned aiming into geometry, and Vauban answered with sloped star forts. Napoleon, trained as an artillery officer, massed guns into great batteries until rain at Waterloo swallowed his round shot in mud.

The Great Turkish Bombard of 1464 weighed 16,000 kilograms and could be heard 10 miles away.
On 13 Vendémiaire in 1795, Napoleon fired grapeshot point blank into royalist crowds in Paris, the famous whiff of grapeshot.
At Friedland the French massed 66 guns in one sector and fired 3,000 round shot and 500 rounds of grapeshot.
British cruisers shelled the Sultan's palace in the 1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War, which lasted about 38 minutes.
Chateaubriand coined the term cannon fodder in 1814, echoing Shakespeare's food for powder of 1598.

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