From Roman catapult to battleship gun, artillery's energy grew 20,000-fold
A Roman catapult of the 1st century BC hurled a 6.55-kilogram stone with about 16 kilojoules of energy. A mid-19th-century 12-pounder cannon delivered around 240. The main guns of a 20th-century American battleship flung 1,225-kilogram projectiles with over 350 megajoules, a leap that shows what gunpowder and industry did to warfare.
Artillery means ranged weapons that throw munitions much farther and harder than infantry arms can. Before anyone used the word, siege engines filled the role; the first known catapult was built in Syracuse in 399 BC. Relying on muscle and mechanics limited their punch and forced builders to make enormous machines to store enough energy. Gunpowder changed that, and the word artillery, which once meant any soldiers with manufactured weapons, came to mean cannon.
Early guns were built to smash walls and were heavy and nearly immobile. Lighter field guns followed for open battle, pulled on carriages by horse teams for many centuries after medieval times, and later by wheeled and tracked vehicles. Today's self-propelled guns usually supply the largest share of an army's firepower. At the extreme sat railway guns, and one planned supergun, Project Babylon, was in theory powerful enough to put a satellite into orbit.
Twentieth-century artillery increasingly fired at targets the crews could not see. This indirect fire demanded survey data and weather information, and prompted new ways to find enemy guns, such as radar, sound ranging and spotting muzzle flashes. Artillery caused the majority of combat deaths in the Napoleonic Wars and both world wars, and in 1944 Joseph Stalin called it the god of war. At sea, missiles have largely taken over from guns.
The vocabulary has its own logic. Solid projectiles are shot, hollow ones shells. Crews, called detachments, number each role, with 1 as the commander and the highest number, the Coverer, as second-in-command. Several detachments form a battery, roughly an infantry company, and in some armies junior non-commissioned officers are called bombardiers.
Source: Artillery
