Early Ordnance

Master's thesis at the University of Amsterdam, about the socio-economic rise of three generations of the family Brants, and the role of their being agents of the Dutch-Swedisch family De Geer, who produced bar iron and cast iron ordnance for the Dutch market during the eighteenth century.

Currently, pyrotechnic devices are widely used in rocketry. They are described by the same system of equations as a muzzle-loading smooth-bore gun. Meanwhile, as shown in the previous works of the authors, modern ideas about the internal ballistics of these weapons, apparently, are not correct. The article continues the cycle of works on the creation of a mathematical model of these systems. The article assesses the degree of influence on the muzzle velocity of the heterogeneity of the powder grains. It is shown that, regardless of the distribution law (normal or not), with a sufficient degree of accuracy (about 1.5%), the combustion of such grains can be approximated by the combustion of identical grains of any diameter from the selected range. The only prerequisite is the condition of equality of the initial combustion area.

Currently, pyrotechnic devices are widely used in rocketry. They are described by the same system of equations as a muzzle-loading smooth-bore gun. Meanwhile, as shown in the previous works of the authors, modern ideas about the internal ballistics of these weapons, apparently, are not correct. The article continues the cycle of works on the creation of a mathematical model of these systems. The article assesses the degree of influence on the muzzle velocity of the heterogeneity of the powder grains. It is shown that, regardless of the distribution law (normal or not), with a sufficient degree of accuracy (about 1.5%), the combustion of such grains can be approximated by the combustion of identical grains of any diameter from the selected range. The only prerequisite is the condition of equality of the initial combustion area.

Oldest maps of England are presented here. The oldest map is on the Bewcastle Stone Cross, then there is the carvings on the Great Urswick Stone and on the Gainsford Stone. These carvings are evidently displaying a map of Northumbria and Cumbria.
This mapping is explained with maps and pictures.

It is clear that these complicated and well carved pictures had some meaning and were useful in some way.

The authors expect to be able at later date present maps of York, Northumberland and the Borderlands as well.

The authors would be obliged to get some critics and some information regarding such design elsewhere.

When guns were developed in Europe in the 14th century, the theory of projectile motion was not the one we are familiar with today due to Galileo and Newton but the one taught by Aristotle approximately 1700 years earlier. In addition to Aristotle's wide-ranging philosophical concerns, his theory arose from the observation in everyday life that if an object is moving something must be moving it. This idea works very well for the horse and cart but is puzzling if you apply it to a thrown stone or spear. Problems with Aristotle's theory of projectile motion were identified by one or two people between his time and the 14th century, particularly John Philoponus (6th century AD) and John Buridan (14th century AD). An archer or a spearman does not need a theory of projectile motion, just a great deal of practice. But once the gun was invented it became important to know what angle a barrel should be oriented at and how much propellant to use, particularly as gunpowder was expensi...

The decades of the 1860s and 1870s were characterized by one of the most thorough-going Technical Revolutions the world had ever seen, which has been characterized as the 'Second Industrial Revolution.' And this Revolution affected the world's Navies no less than every other human endeavor. In the field of ordnance, iron smooth-bore cannon firing solid round shot were replaced by rifled cannon, initially to lob elongated exploding shell with greater accuracy, but soon firing elongated solid shot needed to pierce armor plate. History recalls the many designers and/or manufacturers of the Great Guns. Yet the work of lesser known figures has been overlooked. This is a continuation of the story of Captain A.T. Blakely, R.A. by examining the work of John Mercer Brooke, a licensee, and his successor, Josiah Vavasseur. Context is provided by an examination of the gradual abandonment of the Armstrong System reliance on wrought iron and the eventual adoption of steel by the British Government.

When guns were developed in Europe in the 14th century, the theory of projectile motion was not the one we are familiar with today due to Galileo and Newton but the one taught by Aristotle approximately 1700 years earlier. In addition to Aristotle's wide-ranging philosophical concerns, his theory arose from the observation in everyday life that if an object is moving something must be moving it. This idea works very well for the horse and cart but is puzzling if you apply it to a thrown stone or spear. Problems with Aristotle's theory of projectile motion were identified by one or two people between his time and the 14th century, particularly John Philoponus (6th century AD) and John Buridan (14th century AD). An archer or a spearman does not need a theory of projectile motion, just a great deal of practice. But once the gun was invented it became important to know what angle a barrel should be oriented at and how much propellant to use, particularly as gunpowder was expensi...

Two identical spring-loaded cannons pointing backward are mounted on a frictionless railcart. The cannons are to be fired to propel the cart forward as rapidly as possible. Does it matter whether the two cannonballs are launched simultaneously or sequentially? The velocities and kinetic energies of the two balls and of the cart in various reference frames are analyzed in detail in order to explain the answer.

The earliest gunpowder, known as serpentine, is frequently mentioned by authors. It is said to have easily separated into its constituents in transit, readily absorbing moisture and lacking power. The origin of these assertions is obscure but they are faithfully repeated by each successive generation of author. No original source is cited and it reflects poorly on the scholarship of authors that no attempt has been made to verify these claims. This paper attempts to examine the facts in the light of current knowledge of powder handling technologies and ballistics. Although the energy potential depends only on the ratio of ingredients, the burning characteristics of serpentine powder are radically different from later, corned, powder and the influence of this on gun design is explored.

This study of the cannon in the historic walled City of Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland, covers their history and the technology of their production. The majority arrived in the City between 1600 and 1642, and the founders of most can be identified with certainty. The book also brings together the documentary evidence for the development of the city walls and defences, and the history of the use of the cannon during the Great Rebellion of 1641 and the Jacobite Siege in 1689.

This thesis describes the construction of two models of La Belle, a light frigate constructed in France during the late seventeenth century. The archaeological remains of La Belle are important as a unique example of a little understood vessel type and as an informative example of several construction techniques that were in use in the French shipyards at the end of the seventeenth century.


Using data recorded during the excavation and conservation of the original ship's timbers, historical documents, and contemporary drawings and models as guides, various configurations of La Belle's structure were created to determine her probable appearance. Whenever possible, the original materials and construction techniques were closely approximated to determine their effect on the overall appearance of the ship. Many of the artifacts excavated from the original vessel were reproduced in scale and incorporated into the model to determine their influence on the layout of the ship's structure.


The resulting model provides not only a picture of a specific ship type, but also, a glimpse into the technologies that existed at the time La Belle was constructed. The vessel may have been small in comparison to other naval vessels of the 17th century, but her contributions to our knowledge of shipbuilding and ship design are immense.

Scholars who study craft books and books of secrets in the Middle Ages can engage on internal debates about the modes of transmission or interpretations of numerous facets of these important treatises, but they can all agree on two relatively firm facts. First, in the past, technical knowledge was more an art (techne) than a science (scientia); that is, it was about doing rather than necessarily knowing for knowing's sake. To put it another way, it was decidedly not philosophia naturalis, with its emphasis on causes but rather ars practica, with an emphasis on doing and making. Second, practitioners of these arts tended to disseminate knowledge from one generation to the next more or less directly
through the apprenticeship system rather than through written texts. What this means, on both counts, is that in the Middle Ages and early modem period textbooks in the modem sense were generally unavailable, irrelevant, and simply not needed. The craft treatises, which survive then, can only represent a small fraction of the vast craft tradition, and that they were ever written down at all should give us pause to consider by whom and for what purpose.

Considering the craft of gunnery and its preserved treatises also adds another layer of interpretive difficulty: the study of the rise of gunnery overlaps chronologically with the Scientific Revolution and its historiography in a peculiar manner. For the Scientific Revolution, a traditional narrative exists of the increasing rationalization, quantification, and geometrization of nature. For the military use of gunpowder weaponry, the narrative argues that the gunners, seeking ever-more-accurate bombardment of fortifications, turned to exacting understandings of ballistic trajectories to accomplish this task. The conflation of these two narratives is that the gunners became "scientific," that is, using science in the modem sense, and by some extension, quantitative natural philosophy in the historical sense.

Focusing on the contemporary manuals, this conflation is found to be quite unfounded for gunnery before at least the later seventeenth century. The vast majority of gunners' manuals, treatises, notebooks, and manuals before the eighteenth century have much more in common with cookbooks than they do with the Principia of Newton or even The Two New Sciences of Galileo. Gunnery manuals, in particular, preserve collections of the description of a variety of substances, processes, and mixtures that provided aides memoire to the users and perhaps didactic tools for the preservation and transmission of such knowledge. This study analyzes a number of gunners manuals and notebooks for their content, range of coverage, and material knowledge, and then looks in-depth at a number of firework recipes across a number of manuals to understand the gunners' interests, background knowledge, and goals. The material demonstrates
their great felicity with material properties and substances, and at the same time a remarkable disinterest in philosophical frameworks in which these materials might have meaning (notably, alchemical connections are entirely absent, and even Scholastic terminology does not appear).

In the modern age of high-powered, nitrocellulose based artillery it is often difficult to describe or even to find information on early artillery performance. Writers in the 16th and 1 7th centuries wrote artillery treatises that laid out how artillerists should perform their duties and how the cannon ought to behave, but this is not to say that they are necessarily accurate records of what actually happened. What they write is often only qualitative in nature, for period artillerists could not have accurately measured the behaviour of a cannon shot, even if they had wanted to. The few texts we have that relate to the manufacture of the cannon are also often unsatisfactory in one way or another in terms of artillery performance: manufacturers either would not have been concerned with the performance of their products on the field or they could not have quantified it.

Perhaps the most glaring omission of these early writers, through no fault of their own, is the lack of any velocity data for the projectiles. Instead, we have ranges, but again, these are more often than not idealized ranges. This paper and its forthcoming companion paper intend to examine the external ballistics of spherical cannon balls using period gunnery treatises that recorded what was supposed to happen with cannonball flight, as well as modern information on fluid mechanics to attempt an explanation for their actual, or at least supposed, performance. This article is divided into two parts, historical perceptions of cannon ball ballistics and data from period gunnery texts, to suggest how contemporaries understood cannonball behavior. From these two we can derive some initial understanding of how they believed their ordnance behaved. … In the end the goal is understand both how users apprehended the behaviour of their cannon, how cannonballs actually fly, and particularly reconcile the two without resorting to an argument that the gunners were 'illiterate' or 'guessing' or simply 'clueless'. Period gunnery books were for something and purported to record the technical (read: real) effects of their technologies; that they do not always record what we would today consider 'correct' data is in itself worth investigating.

Le prima sei fasi di scavo e documentazione del sito di San Paolo hanno messo in luce otto pezzi di artiglieria in bronzo. Sette sono petriere da braga a retrocarica, mentre uno è uno smeriglio in bronzo ad avancarica. Due petriere quasi identiche hanno un grosso calibro mentre le altre hanno un calibro più piccolo e appartengono alla tipologia del moschetto. Tutte e sette le petriere sono state fabbricate con due metalli. La volata in bronzo fuso e la braga di contenimento del mascolo in ferro battuto. Sfortunatamente, la maggior parte delle braghe era in avanzato stato di corrosione, e per questo motivo non sono state recuperate dal fondale. Solo il moschetto N. 08/2009, recuperato dal mare durante lo scavo del 2009, aveva la braga completa ancora collegata così come parte della forcella usata per fissare il pezzo sulla fiancata della nave.

Tijekom prvih šest faza istraživanja lokaliteta kod Pličine Sv. Pavao pronađeno je osam brončanih topova. Sedam ih ima sistem punjenja odostraga od kojih dva najveća topa pripadaju kategoriji pedrijera, a pet manjih kategoriji moschetto. Jedini top s punjenjem sprijeda pripada kategoriji smirilja. Svih sedam topova s punjenjem odostraga izrađeno je kombinacijom dvaju metala. Cijev je lijevana od bronce dok je zatvarač od željeza. Nažalost, svi zatvarači su pronađeni u uznapredovanom stupnju korozije te nisu izvađeni iz mora. Samo je moschetto 08/2009, izvađen tijekom istraživanja u 2009. godini, imao pričvršćen željezni zatvarač kao i vilicu pomoću koje je usađen u ogradu broda.