Human Cannon Balls

Submitted to me verbally, following a brief discussion of air cannons:

“How do those cannons they shoot people out of work?”

Searching for “circus” “cannons” returned the Cannon-Mania website, which holds that the “how” of human cannon balls is a circus trade secret. Nevertheless, a couple of other sites (found through switching to “human” “cannon”) have individuals holding forth their hypotheses, based on some outside knowledge of physics.

Physics Forums.com: How do you shoot a man out of a cannon?
– Posits include:

• Compressed air blasts with flash-pots for the explosive appearance
• Giant spring
• Bungee cord

Naked Science Forum: Shooting people from cannons
– Posits include:

• Careful calculations for how much powder will propel how much human, with some sort of seal (posited: a beard ) used to prevent expanding gasses from leaking prematurely
• The use of “wad” between the charge and projectile (human) to improve the seal and to protect the projectile (human) from the heat of the gas/blast
• Springs, again

Further prodding of the Intertubes (“human” “cannon” “how”) confirms some of this postulating, according to citations found on Wikipedia’s entry on Human cannonballs (the citiations comes from a question answered on Straight Dope.com and a BBC News story. How reputable this Cecil Adams (Straight Dope) guy is is up in the air (did you see the pun there? ha!) – he’s got a syndicated column in some newspapers, though his site link to the list is broken. It is at least carried by the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper as I found when searching for “straight dope” “column”. Other than that, hard to say.
Summary of the entry/article: Spring (for the first human cannonballs) or, more commonly, compressed air below a platform on which the human cannonballs stand.

Conclusion: It’s the >whoosh!< that does it.

Tags: cannons, human cannonballs