We started by entering "human cannonball" into the search bar. Although Yahoo! does not have a category for this oddity, the search did return several web pages containing the phrase. It took a few clicks, but eventually we discovered, like many things at the circus, not everything is as it seems.
About halfway down our search results we found a web page entitled, "The Straight Dope: How do "human cannonballs" survive?" Apparently someone else had wondered how the "live ammunition" emerges relatively unscathed. The Straight Dope offered the answer:
Human cannonballs aren't blasted from the cannon with gunpowder. They're propelled by a catapult. The flash, loud noise and smoke are supplied by firecrackers and such.
Mind you, being "shot" out of a cannon, flying 100 feet in the air, and attempting to land in a small area isn't exactly a walk in the park. It's not the blast or flight that injures or kills the human cannonball -- the landing is the hard part.
For some video clips of a human cannonball in action, head over to ABC News' "Life on the Road With the Human Cannonball." Jon Weiss, from Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, explains what it's like to be shot out of a cannon night after night.
Well, here it is, my first html document. This document is the result my spending a Saturday morning in 1993 digitizing a couple of pictures, and then looking at the source of the Amiga Mosaic Home Page (yes, I know that link no longer valid, but it's there for posterity's sake) and popping this together (manuals? We don't need no steenkeen' manuals). This was more an exercise in html for me than anything else, but here goes... Of course there's more to it now then there first was. After it had been up a couple of months, I changed the pictures from video grabs to cleaner illustrations. I've tried to keep the look as faithful to the original as possible, as I like the nostalgic feel. As someone who makes his living in part by web design It's nice to see this page and look back at my "roots".
This web page was the first on the topic of air cannons. It was originally written in Final Copy II on an Amiga 4000, and tested off-line in Amiga Mosaic. This was before I had ppp up and running on the Amiga, so I sent the files by zmodem to their original location at warpig.cati.csufresno.edu (Steve Mitchell's Mac II ci that is no longer online). I'd go to Steve's office to actually see it online.
This page has been stolen and illegally run on someone else's server in an attempt to have a commercial site to sell advertising (that was taken care of by legal action - this is copyrighted material). For those budding webmasters out there who want to copy content to build their site, remember without the permission of the person who created the content, you're violating a federal law by republishing it on your web site. There is no need to copy anyway, you can add a link which will take people to the information. Instead of copying the work of others, put your own material on the web, then exchange links with other pages, and that way we're all working together to share information on the web.
