Gunpowder and Ammunition, Their Origin and Progress

by H. W. L. Hime

The Britons set fire to the Roman Camp during Cæsar’s second invasion, 54 B.C., by discharging hot balls of clay among the tents.[566] At the attack on Placentia, A.D. 69, igneous missiles were employed (glandes et missilem ignem), and probably destroyed the amphitheatre.[567] As before mentioned, hot shot (for cannon) were invented by the Polish king, Stephen Bathory, in 1579.[568] Their greatest triumph was the destruction of d’Arçon’s floating batteries and a great part of the Spanish fleet at Gibraltar, 13th September 1782.

Incendiary Fireballs.

The gunners of old encountered great difficulties in their endeavours to introduce igneous projectiles. Their use in the early guns was not absolutely impossible, but it would have been fruitless; for to prove effective an igneous projectile, whether incendiary or explosive, must contain a considerable mass of combustible matter, and this condition could not be fulfilled with guns of very small calibre. When the calibre had greatly increased, during the last quarter of the fourteenth century, any attempt to employ such igneous projectiles as were in use with the machines must have ended in failure. The action of the machines was similar to that of a sling, and the shells (or envelopes) of their incendiary missiles were made just strong enough to resist the pressure to which they were subjected on discharge, although not strong enough to bear the shock of impact with the object they struck. This broke them up and scattered their blazing contents about. Such projectiles were evidently unfit for use in cannon; for the explosion of the charge would inevitably break them up in the bore, and their viscous contents would travel but a very short way. Owing to these difficulties the machines held their ground to the middle of the fifteenth century, if not longer, and the igneous projectiles ultimately constructed for cannon were developments of the hand-grenade.

In Fig. 31 of the plate from the MS. of Kyeser’s “Bellifortis,” 1405, given by Herr von Romocki (i. 169), we are shown a projectile which unquestionably belongs to the same family as the tonneau which terrified Joinville and his companions;[569] but this barrel could have only been discharged from a machine. Whether Figs. 26 and 28 of the same plate were thrown by hand or machine depended on their size, which we do not know. From their construction, with a mere covering of cloth or cordage, we may safely conclude that they were not gun-projectiles.

We are given a detailed account of fireballs in the German Firebook, 1400-50, belonging to the Royal Library, Berlin, MS. Germ. qu. 1018. Missiles are there described which consisted of an interior ball of gunpowder kneaded with spirits of wine, smeared over with thick incendiary matter, rolled tightly in a cover of cotton steeped in the same mixture, and secured by two metal bands at right angles to each other. They could be either thrown by hand or fired from a bombard. In the latter case a hole was bored through the ball and the plug which was used in bombards to close the end of the powder-chamber next the projectile, in order to admit the flame into the interior of the ball. The success of the missile, it was thought, depended on the hole through the ball being exactly opposite the hole through the plug, a condition which could be only fulfilled in a breechloading bombard. The inventor believed that the ball would explode, for he warns the gunner to throw it before the flame reaches the composition, lest it “blow his head off.”[570] It is obvious, however, that the gunner’s head was quite safe, although he might burn his fingers, when using these incendiary toys which are unknown to military history. The incendiary projectiles actually used in the fifteenth century were comparatively simple and of a different nature. Take, for instance, the incendiary cannon-projectile used at the siege of Weissenburg in 1469, just six years after Valturio had presented his book to the Sultan Mahomed II.[571] It consisted of a stone ball, considerably smaller than the bore of the gun, which was smeared over with thick incendiary matter and wrapped in a cloth soaked in the same mixture. This process was continued until the ball was the proper size for the bore.[572] Other incendiary missiles were tried,[573] but none of them, so far as I am aware, had anything in common with the unpractical projectile proposed in the Berlin Firebook.

Incendiary Shell.

A further step is taken in a later edition of the Firebook just quoted, but of the same period,[574] 1400-50. A quill full of incendiary matter is directed to be inserted in the hole through the ball above described, and the whole was enclosed in an envelope or shell of earthenware or iron. An earthenware ball could of course only be thrown by hand: an iron ball would be fired in general from a bombard. The metal shell was formed of two hemispheres of iron fastened together by bands, with a small hole to admit the flame to the quill. A similar envelope, of bronze, is suggested by

Valturio in his De Re Militari, 1463, p. 267;[575] but in this case the shell is filled with powder, which in all probability was driven in and compressed as tightly as possible with a mallet and drift.[576] The German writer undoubtedly believed that his shell would burst, for he uses such phrases as “chugel dye da springt” and “zerspringt und zerslecht alls umb.” Neither his shell or Valturio’s would have exploded except under the most exceptional circumstances.

The weakness of the shell leads Herr von Romocki to suppose that Valturio’s plate is wrong or grievously exaggerated. I see no grounds for this suspicion: the shell was purposely made weak, so that it might break into two pieces on impact and leave the incendiary charge free to do its work. The missile belonged to the same family as the incendiary projectiles thrown into Roveredo by the Swiss in 1487.[577] There the shell was filled with pitch and rosin: Valturio’s shell was charged with powder, but it was probably compressed tightly into the interior of the shell, and powder, especially serpentine powder, will not explode under such circumstances. When experimenting with gunpowder at New York, Doremus and Budd subjected good modern powder to such hydraulic pressure as to compress it into a solid block without interstices, and on ignition the mass burned quietly away.[578] Valturio’s charge was probably reduced to a state approximating more or less closely to that of the New York powder, and it would have exploded but rarely and occasionally. But the mere fact that the shell was made of bronze is a sufficient proof that it was an incendiary missile. Even had the charge been explosive, a bronze envelope would have been only ripped open by it, not broken into many pieces as iron would have been; a fact which Valturio must have known. Finally, the gunners of the fifteenth century were not in possession of a fuze that would have enabled them to carry on fire with explosive shell. The construction of such a fuze (as will be seen in the section on “Time Fuzes”) was the work of the following century.