Cannon in Burk?

[threoh8]

You never know what you'll find laying around ... cans of gold coins, live cannonballs ...

http://www.newschannel6now.com/story/24 ... -discovery" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Not sure how a cannonball wound up around Burkburnett, but ...

[jmra]

I wonder how many of those have been picked up over the years and are sitting in an attic or garage.

[jimlongley]

I would love to know if they actually determined it was live, and how, or if they decided to detonate it just because of the hole. The actual detonation showed me nothing that suggested that anything more than the explosive used by EOD went off. Modern military explosives tend to have black smoke, and black powder smoke is light grey to white. I saw two different colors of smoke, but not light enough to be BP.

A shell like that (not actually a "cannon ball" in the strictest parlance) would have had a load of black powder and a cork or wood stopper that would be left in place until just before firing, when the stopper would be pulled and a fuse cut to a timed length would be inserted. If the hole was open as shown, then it is really unlikely that the black powder, which is hygroscopic, would have survived as a viable explosive for all this time. If the hole was closed, then it could, and someone took a pretty risky chance by pulling the plug, although it might have been EOD determining the state of the shell.

The next wonderment, because my buddies and I did something equally stupid when we were kids, is did someone, many years after obtaining the ball, decide to charge it with something and attempt to blow it up, and having failed, abandon it in place. By buddy Mike stole a shell from a stack in front of the VFW when we were kids, and we, all being sufficiently stupid, broke open firecrackers and poured the powder into a hole in the side and then tried to set it off. Instead of an explosion, all we got was a jet of purple and red flame out of the hole, and the next night Mike put it back on the stack in front of the VFW. According to my grandfather that particular experiment had been tried in the past by someone more resourceful than us, because the ball was solid shot, not shell, and whoever stole it the first time had drilled the hole.

My grandfather was also a little critical of the VFW for their display because the 3 inch balls stacked in front of the cannon quite obviously did not go with the French 35 mm field gun that had been "captured" in WWI, which was on display.