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Atrocious Historic Weapon Designs That Left a Lot to be Desired

Khalid Elhassan February 6, 2025 16 min

Weapon - An American general with a captured Krummlauf — An American general with a captured Krummlauf. Sandboxx

15. Casting Double-Barreled Cannons to Fire Chains

Weapon - Double-barreled cannon concept — Double-barreled cannon concept. Today in History

When it exited a cannon’s muzzle, chain would swirl around at incredible speeds, and chop down people in its path like an electric saw going through watermelons. That got some people to think: what if instead of one cannon that fired chain, we had twin cannons that fired a chain stretched between them? The idea was to have an artillery piece that simultaneously fired from two side-by-side barrels a pair of iron balls, with a chain between them. As the balls whirled around each other, the chain between them would scythe down enemy soldiers in its path like wheat. So in 1642, a Florentine gun maker named Antonio Petrini cast a double-barreled cannon to test out the concept.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.