14. In Theory, This Weapon Should Have Been Devastating
Warfare was revolutionized by the combination of gunpowder and cannons. Heavy siege artillery rendered medieval castles obsolete, while lighter field pieces wreaked havoc upon infantry and cavalry. Before modern breech-loading artillery, muzzle-loaded field cannons used solid metal shots to reach out to distant targets. For closer targets, cannons were packed with smaller projectiles such as grapeshot, a bundle of small metal balls, or canister, even smaller metal balls. They transformed cannons into giant shotguns that mowed down all in front of their muzzles. In practice, just about any bits of small metal fired from a cannon could produce a similar shotgun effect, and one of the deadliest was heavy chain.
Chain would swirl around at incredible speeds when it exited a muzzle, and chop down people in its path like an electric saw through watermelons. Because mankind likes mayhem, 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 artillery that simultaneously fired from two side-by-side barrels a pair of iron balls, linked by a chain. 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.
