Did you know that the invention of black powder is credited to the Chinese
over 750 years ago?
Or that it took the Chinese close to 100 years before they learned to
use it as an implement of war?
Well, not so my brothers and I.
One summer while playing mountain climber in the garage, one of us
kicked over a number of boxes and in so doing unearthed a heavy wooden crate.
Digging into that wooden crate we found some strange looking tools, a cloth bag
with come birdshot, a few bullets, and a can with gunpowder in it.
Now, we might not have recognized the reloading tools for what they
were, but the gunpowder was instantly recognized. Not only was it recognized for what it was, it
was recognized for what it could be.
It could be hours of joyful destruction, that’s what it could be. Not that we thought of it that way, and
luckily not that we ever destroyed anything of consequence with the stuff, but
destruction in a can is what it really was.
Unlike the Chinese, it didn’t take us long to make the jump from “Hey, we
have some powder here” to “Hey, we can make a cannon”. Maybe a millisecond, perhaps two, but definitely
not three.
Unfortunately Mom and Dad were due home from work at any time, so we
carefully replaced the can in the wooden crate and carefully restacked the
knocked over boxes to mask the fact that we had found the gunpowder.
Next day we biked down to the Carnegie Library to do some
research. Times then weren’t like they
are now. The Internet has made most any
information immediately available and even better, you can watch videos of
people make almost anything. Heck, this
was back even before the Anarchists’ Cookbook had been published.
So we looked in lots of books.
Not for instructions to make a cannon, although there might have been
some in the library somewhere. But because
while we had a need for the information, there was no way we were going to let
that gray-haired nosy librarian know what we were up to by asking her for
instruction on how to build a cannon.
So we looked at lots of pictures.
Pictures of Knights and castles, Civil war paintings, and battleships.
We looked at pictures of anything that lobbed a projectile using gunpowder.
All that “book learning” got us headed down the “right” track. Now the local constabulary, assembly of
preachers and priests, school teacher’s union, and the gaggle of busybodies
might not agree with that. But, right or
not, we had the beginning of a plan.
So it was off to Stark’s Bargain House an old scrap yard down between
the railroad tracks in town. We just
knew we would find a big old cylinder that we could use as a cannon barrel
there and some round balls made of metal to use as cannon balls.
Old man Stark had bought up an old humped back corrugated metal “Quonset
hut” that was backed up to the Western Pacific tracks down near “Joe’s-ville”
and gathered together all the stuff that people had wanted to throw out but
were too lazy to drag out to the dump on Vasco road. He had old rusty washers and dryers,
Refrigerators with sprung doors, buckets of hinges and nails and railroad
spikes. Metal bed frames in the yard,
and musty books and fabric inside.
Lanterns, and stoves, rotting rubber wheels and broken bikes; yep, that
there place simply had everything a true blooded boy need back then.
I remember finding a great big old piece of pipe there, must have been
at least 6 inch stuff. And long. Long enough that if we could have afforded it,
we probably would have not been able to afford the hernia care required after
dragging it home. But we couldn’t talk
him out of that for our pocket change.
And even if we had, he didn’t have any 30 pound cannon balls that would fit
it.
Dejected, we left the “emporium of the possible” with our tails
dragging and our hands in our pockets.
Back to home we started digging around the house and finally realized
that we had some marbles that were just about the right size to fill a piece of
pipe. And as luck would have it, we
found a short piece of the right sized pipe and a single metal pipe cap in the
supplies dad had on his workbench.
The next day, we carefully drilled a hole near the end of the short
piece of pipe, close to the threads.
Then we wrenched on the cap, and found some wood to make a “gun carriage”
out of (see I told you there was some book learning involved here, if nothing
else, we learned the term “gun carriage”).
Then gunpowder, cannon, and marbles in hand, we set out to find a
firing range.
Now the key to a good firing range when you are testing a completely
unscientifically designed destructive device is fairly simple. You need a long stretch of fairly flat
ground, some way to determine where your cannon ball is going to land, and a
big pile of dirt.
The dirt pile serves two purposes; first, it is to act as a backstop to
hold the cannon in place. Second, and
more importantly, it has to be big enough to hide behind.
We found just what we needed.
Out south of town an old grape vineyard had been torn out to make room
for a bunch or tract homes. The field
had been cleared and mostly leveled. There
were a number of piles of dirt, and as luck would have it, they had flooded a
large area with a thin layer of water that would allow us to see the marble
splash down.
To my child-sized memory, the flooded area ran for a half mile or more
between our cannon dirt pile and South Livermore Avenue. In truth it was closer to a quarter mile.
Barry charged the cannon with a liberal pour of powder and pushed the
marble in place with a stick. Then he
set the cannon carriage down butted up against the pile of dirt and poured a
pile of gunpowder over the touch hole and a trail away from it about 10 inches.
Jeff and I took cover, staring carefully
downrange. Barry lit the end of the powder trail and threw himself behind the
pile of dirt.
A little knowledge about how much powder constituted a proper charge would
likely have come in handy that day. But
even without that, the cannon went off.
The dirt pile behind it may have slowed it up some, I suppose, as the
cannon ramped up the front wall of the pile and launched itself backwards into
space. The thing must have been tossed a
good hundred yards or more.
The4 sound was deafening. The
smoke was astounding.
And that marble?
I have often wondered about that marble. Never saw a ripple in that big old pond of
water. So, either the marble cleared the
pond, crossed South Livermore Avenue and ended up on Old Man Baranus’ place
somewhere (embedded in the side of his barn is a distinct possibility).
Or we just plain vaporized that dang thing.
© Copyright 2015, Marty
Vandermolen, all Rights Reserved
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