Early fire arms : Cannons

Early fire arms : cannons

The starting of the fire arms can be traced back to 8th century where Chinese used the gunpowder technology to fire projectiles at the enemies.
Later in the early 12th century the cannons were used in the wars in CHINA.
Hand cannons have come into existence in the early 14th century where the big cannons were reduced in the size and the projectiles were kept small. The canon and the projectiles were carried separately the the firing place.
Now as the start of the firearms was cannons, lets discuss the basic working of the connons..

Operation:

The cannons were were very large and cannot be transported easily from one place to another dynamically. Usually they wee placed on the defense fort walls.

Cannons have a large cylinder structure in which the gunpowder is assimilated at the closed end and projectile is pressed to the gun powder.

Usually these projectiles were made of iron and were heavy.

When the gun powder is lit by a fire the compressed gun powder gets ignited and releases a high pressure.

The cannon being closed at one end the pressure must be exerted only on the other end where the projectile is placed against the pressure.

The pressure created by the blast of the gun powder pushes the projectile with high force such that the cannon ball/projectile is thrown from the cannon barrel.

If the barrel length is long, the the distance covered by the cannon ball is also is large and vice-verse.

The above picture shows the cannons used olden days.

After this type of cannon there came the portable cannons, which is illustrated in the picture below:

In the early 14th century there came the small canons which are portable by soldiers, which are "hand cannons"

These all developments take us to the modern "grenade launcher", whose existence can be traced to hand cannons. the working of the grenade launchers are very similar to that of the hand cannons. But we dont use the iron projectile/cannon balls in the case of grenade launchers.

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