What makes cannonballs explode

The ball would skip off the surface. Elongated solid projectiles called bolts were developed for use with rifled cannons, which had a spiral groove cut on the inside of the barrel to start the projectile spinning and improve accuracy. But round balls were the most common solid shot used in the Civil War, and those are what you see today welded into a pyramid shape and set next to a cannon in a town square. Did cannonballs explode? As an adult, he crisscrossed the Virginia countryside in search of wartime relics - century weapons, battle flags, even artillery shells buried in the red clay.

He sometimes put on diving gear to feel for treasures hidden in the black muck of river bottoms. But in February, White's hobby cost him his life: A cannonball he was restoring exploded, killing him in his driveway. More than years after the end of the war the pitted the North against the South over slavery, the cannonball was still powerful enough to send a chunk of shrapnel through the front porch of a house a quarter-mile from White's home in the leafy Richmond suburb of Chester, Virginia.

White's death shook the close-knit fraternity of relic collectors and raised concerns about the dangers of other Civil War munitions that lay buried beneath old battlefields. Explosives experts said the fatal blast defied extraordinary odds. John F. Biemeck, formerly of the Army Ordnance Corps. White, 53, was one of thousands of American hobbyists who comb former battlegrounds for artifacts using metal detectors, pickaxes, shovels and trowels. Henry Shrapnel of the British Army invented spherical case shot.

He put the small projectiles inside a thin-walled hollow iron shell and added a wooden tube with slow-burning powder that could be cut to the lengths corresponding to the number of seconds the cannoneer wanted the fuse to burn before exploding the ball in front of enemy formations.

The momentum of the ball would carry the iron shell fragments and small balls shrapnel into the opposing ranks. The U. Ordnance Department soon adopted this revolutionary idea, but American officers found that the wooden and paper fuses were susceptible to moisture and shrinkage that resulted in duds or premature explosions, sometimes even before the fired round left the muzzle of the cannon.

Allegheny Arsenal worked to remedy this problem and to ensure safety while storing and transporting exploding-type cannonballs in horse-drawn caissons that bounced over all kinds of roads and terrain. In the late s, the arsenal began producing shells and spherical case shot fitted with Bormann fuses.

This waterproof pewter fuse screwed into the iron ball. It featured a sealed powder channel that could be exposed by the gunner, who used a chisel to punch a small hole through a number between 1 and 5 cast into the face of the fuse. The numbers corresponded to how many seconds the gunner wanted the fuse to burn. When the cannon fired, the flame of the propelling charge wrapped around the ball and ignited the exposed powder train, which in turn sparked the bursting charge after burning for the selected number of seconds.

Contrary to Hollywood films and popular lore, these cannonballs did not explode on contact. Percussion fuses were not used on spherical projectiles. These shells and spherical case shot were designed to explode only when a flame reached the interior charge.

Another widely held misconception is that black powder becomes unstable over time. In fact, the opposite is true. List of Discoveries of Galileo Galilei. Modern Uses of a Catapult.

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