Fire Lance: The Gunpowder Weapon That Started Everything

Fire Lance: The Gunpowder Weapon That Started Everything

The fire lance (火槍, *huǒ qiāng*) is the earliest identifiable ancestor of every firearm in existence today. It started as an almost embarrassingly simple idea—a bamboo tube packed with gunpowder lashed to the head of a spear—and over roughly 150 year