By the 1350s, weapons that had recently been "viewed with great astonishment and admiration" had become "as common and familiar as any other kind of arms." — Petrarch

Twenty-five years. That's how long it took to go from "what the hell is that thing" to "yeah, everybody has one now." We tend to think of adoption curves as a modern phenomenon — semi-autos replacing revolvers, striker-fired pistols taking over the carry market — but apparently humans have always moved fast when the technology actually works.

The knight in Milemete's illustration, holding a lit touche to a vase-shaped cannon pointed at a castle, was not in a safe profession.

Early cannon were killing operators as reliably as targets — air pockets in the casting, inconsistent powder charges, projectiles that didn't fit the bore. The article mentions King James II of Scotland got killed in 1460 standing too close to his own artillery. We complain about a squib load. These guys were pointing a pipe bomb at a wall and hoping for the best.

He drew a vase-shaped pot-de-fer scaled up to artillery size, sitting on a trestle that would never hold it, because the small hand-cannons he'd seen were bottle-shaped and mounted on poles. He did his best with incomplete information.

This is the part that stuck with me. The artist had probably only seen small hand-cannons — essentially a bottle-shaped bronze tube lashed to a wooden shaft — and when he needed to draw something bigger, he just scaled up what he knew. Wrong proportions, wrong mount, but the idea was right. It's the same thing that happens at the gun counter when somebody describes a firearm they've seen once and can't remember the name of. The sketch is always approximately correct and completely wrong at the same time.

What's the oldest firearm you've personally handled — whether at a match, an estate sale, a gun show, or somebody's safe — and did holding it change how you thought about the technology?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team