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Legal Disclaimer Stuff - Don't even ~think~ about trying to make nitroglycerin or any other explosives. Many, many people have died that way. Besides, the descriptions below are incomplete and/or partially wrong. So just don't, okay? Or if you do, please notify the "Darwin Awards" folks so they can record your death for our later amusement.


The Cannon Story, and I'm Not Making This Up.


Did I ever tell you the cannon story? Well, at about age 13 or 14 I was very keenly interested in - okay, "obsessed by" - things that go BOOM!! The more exclamation marks, the better. Guns go BOOM! and that's good. I liked guns. Firecrackers go BOOM!! I liked those, too. Cherry bombs!!!!, Whoo-Hoo!

There was a Friday-Night-Late-Show-With-Old-Movies-And-A-Zany-Host program on Cleveland TV back then. "Ghoulardi" was his name. Every show was live and started with some slight variation of the same intro: close-up of a hand lighting a match or cigarette lighter; camera follows hand with lit match/lighter as it moves toward a small metal toy cannon with a firecracker sticking out of its barrel; flame ignites firecracker fuse; as fuse burns, camera pans back to reveal a picture of Dorothy (DOOR-a-thee) Fuldheim, a local TV news person, a few inches in front of the muzzle; ka-BOOM! (only one exclamation mark because the puny TV speakers never did it justice); there is a blinding flash, the cannon recoils out of the shot to the left, the photo is blown to bits and vanishes off-screen to the right, then a Bella Lugosi voice (with a Cleveland accent) says "Hey DOOR-a-thee, Turn Blue!"

Being an impressionable youth, I was duly impressed. Not only by the irreverent dispatching of a much-despised Old Person who editorialized regularly on the deplorable state of youth culture in the very early '60s, but also by the beautiful synthesis of two of my favorite art-forms: the gun and the firecracker.

I don't remember the day, exactly, but it was a summer afternoon, fairly hot, a newish house with no large shade trees, and the only place to stay cool was in the basement. I'd just had a peanut butter and banana sandwich with Nestle's Quick in milk for lunch. I headed downstairs to my father's workshop. (Okay, so I remember the day fairly well. So sue me.)

The idea occurred to me that BB-gun fights were cool, and everything, but there was something missing. There was no BOOM!! Not even a little boom. You know, I reasoned, a small cannon with just a little powder and a couple dozen BBs would add the satisfaction of a BOOM!! and almost guarantee that some of the BBs would find their target. In theory, at least, no one would get hurt. (Here might be a good place to insert this small bit of Zen wisdom: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.)

Meanwhile back at the workshop, a length of 3/4-inch steel rod caught my eye. A quick calculation (i.e. it looked about right) told me that a 3/8-inch hole would provide the optimum barrel wall thickness. Another quick calculation dictated the length: three inches. Two hours of saw-saw-sawing and drill-drill-drilling later, the world had yet another weapon of mass destruction in its arsenal.

It was time for a field test. Granted, not many 14-year-olds have easy access to gunpowder, But then, they are not my father's son. I was (my father's son) so I helped myself to his homemade gunpowder stash.

He had made this when he was a kid and the fact that he had kept it into middle age was both a testament to his fondness for it and a clue that this was a really good batch.

My father made a lot of gunpowder. He made some that went BOOM!! He made some that he mixed with various chemicals to produce colored fireworks. When he was 15 he ignited one such "set piece" on the roof of his front porch and the neighbors called the fire department. (It was a ~slate~ roof people, so like, chill.) It was an American flag and he'd worked very hard to get the red, white and blue just right. And then he got in trouble for his efforts. Hmph!

My father also made nitroglycerin. When he was twelve. You see, he really loved cherry bombs. He liked firecrackers and stuff, but he really loved cherry bombs. When he was nine he blew most of the skin off of his left hand with a cherry bomb. It was pretty gross and bloody, but they were able to sew him back up good as new. You'd think that he would have held a grudge seeing as how he was left-handed and all, but he didn't. He really, truly loved cherry bombs.

Back in the day of my father's youth, cherry bombs were not made like they are today, with a hard outer shell and powder inside - they were dynamite. Literally. A cherry bomb was a golf-ball sized piece of dynamite with a little detonator cap in the middle and a fuse sticking out of it. They were painted red because - duh! - they were dangerous, and so they looked like a big cherry with a stem.

For those who don't know this - it was common knowledge back in the day - dynamite is nothing but sawdust soaked with nitroglycerin. If you were a kid during the Great Depression you had very little money. You wanted cherry bombs. But ... follow the thought process with me (and my 12-year-old father) ... cherry bombs cost money. Cherry bombs were dynamite. Dynamite was sawdust and nitroglycerin. Sawdust was cheap, free even, which is an extreme form of cheap. Nitroglycerin was unavailable, however, due to its tendency to blow up things, including stores that sold it.

But... here's the cool part... nitro was easy to make! At home! In your own kitchen sink! And.. this is the best part of all... the ingredients were cheap and readily available!

OK, there is a down-side. Nitro is very dangerous to make. No, even more dangerous than that. How dangerous? Take bungee jumping, remove the rope and multiply the remaining danger factor by ten.

More dangerous than jumping head-first to your certain death? How can anything be more dangerous than that, you ask?

Well, in bungee-without-a-rope, you don't have to jump. No. You don't. You can stand up on that bridge, look down and say, "Whoa! What was I thinking?" You can just climb back down and walk away. Not so with making nitro.

From the moment you climb up onto that metaphorical bridge, you're committed. Once you pour that first drop of glycerin into the acid, it owns you. There is no chance for sanity to win back your soul. If you don't have enough ice on hand, the reaction will go exothermic, generating heat at an accelerating rate until... ka-BOOM!!!! From the time it starts heating up until the ka-BOOM!!!! is about five seconds. No one is fast enough to be far enough away in five seconds, especially when you consider that you can't just drop it and run.

Even if you've got the ice angle covered, you can still die quite well with just a twitch of a muscle. A tiny quiver of a finger and glass stirring rod clanks against glass beaker - ka-BOOM!!!! Or maybe you spill a drop as you're pouring the oily nitro layer off the top of the acid - ka-BOOM!!!!

Ka-BOOM!!!! Ka-BOOM!!!! Ka-BOOM!!!! So many ways to die. And all of them quite lethal. Here's one more: liquid nitro is unstable. The older it gets the less stable it gets. It can be sitting peacefully in a jar on your shelf when someone slams your bedroom door - ka-BOOM!!!! When it gets really old it doesn't even need an excuse. It can just sort of decide, "It's ti-i-ime..." Ka-BOOM!!!!

But I digress.

So you're my 12-year-old father during the Depression and you want to make cherry bombs so you make up some nitro, you get some sawdust, but where do you get the little blasting caps to put in the middle? Oops!

Nobody's going to sell a kid blasting caps, not even during the Depression. Especially a kid with no money. And there's no way you can make them yourself.

Fortunately there's another use for the nitro: you can soak a piece of Kleenex in it and then tear off little bits and roll them into balls about the size of BBs. They make excellent caps for your cap-gun. The difference between a cap-gun with regular caps and the same cap-gun with nitro caps is about like comparing a little .25 caliber pistol with a .44 magnum. Ka-BOOM!!

(As a side note, don't ever use more than one nitro cap in your cap-gun. Two are borderline and three will definitely blow the metal hammer off your cap-gun and possibly imbed it in your cheek. You've been warned.)

So now all the neighborhood kids are green with envy because you have nitro caps and of course you won't share your nitro because you've developed such a strong bond with it, seeing as how it didn't kill you and all. But you can be persuaded to tell the other kids how to make their own. Heck! you'll even ~show~ them how. And so you do and you explain about the ice and about all the different ways you can die and then you wait to see which ones are brave and which ones are wimps.

It turns out that the little 9-year-old across the street is braver that you thought. He sets about brewing up a batch of nitro in his basement. He reasons (incorrectly, I might add) that if it starts to heat up, he's only a short flight of steps away from the side door and the foundation will shield him from the blast. The other reason for making it in the basement is that if his mother found him cooking up a batch of nitro in her kitchen, she'd kill him on the spot.

So he's got ~lots~ of ice. His little heart is racing, but he's got a steady hand and nerves of steel. He pours the glycerin down the side of the beaker, avoiding any splashes. He stirs gently. Very gently. He keeps everything cool. He pours off the nitro into a little half-ounce vial. He puts in the cork stopper. He's done it! And he's not dead!

Elation! Although the adrenalin is still pumping wildly, his terror turns to joy as he realizes that it's over. He's not dead and he has NITRO! He's got to show someone! At nine years old, he's going to be the neighborhood god-for-a-day! Whom should he tell first? Why, you, of course! You're his hero!

He bounds up the basement steps, out the door and down the walk alongside the house. He trips on an uneven slab of concrete. Thinking quickly - things are always in slow-motion when you're high on adrenalin - he tosses the little vial of nitro way out in front of him.

OK, let's pause this scene right here and move around to the front of the house. Did I mention that this is during the height of the Great Depression? Yes, I did. Like many bread-winners, our 9-year-old's father is out of work. Today he has decided to focus his non-bread-winning efforts in taking an afternoon nap and he has chosen his front porch swing as a likely venue. So far it seems to be working: no bread is being won. Not even a small dinner roll.

Now back to the side of the house. We have a 9-year-old in mid-fall and a vial of freshly-made nitro flying through the air toward the front corner of the house. Action! The kid hits the ground. The vial lands on the concrete and blows the front corner of the foundation into the basement. The napping father is thrown several feet away by the blast. Bruised but basically unhurt, he goes looking for the cause of his near-death experience. Finding it, he proceeds to teach his son that there is another, more painful and protracted way to die as a result of making nitroglycerin. One that you had somehow forgotten to warn him about. It involves being beaten to where it doesn't matter anymore, then being revived.

Beat, revive, repeat.

Where were we, now? The cannon story.. yes.. let's see..

We have a cannon, small but functional. We have some black gunpowder. We have some BBs. Lead BBs, actually, because the copper-covered-steel BBs were way too expensive at the rate I went through them. My father bought me a 25-lb sack of lead BB-shot used for reloading shotgun shells. The BBs were not perfectly round like the Daisy BBs - they had a few dents here and there - but they worked in my BB gun. They also worked in the cannon.

I might mention at this point that merely drilling a hole in a piece of steel rod does not a cannon make. Oh no! To be a real cannon, it must look like a cannon. I chose the ship's cannon style so popular in pirate movies for my creation. Two nicely curved pieces of plywood were the sides. A wooden base-plate and four plywood wheels completed the look. A hardened steel collar with hardened steel studs sticking out were the pivots and a vertical screw through the aft end provided an elevation control. Sweet!

Now for a test firing! A little bit of powder. A little ball of Kleenex for the wadding. A half-dozen lead BBs. And a little more Kleenex to keep the BBs from falling out. Jeez! Two inches of bore gets filled up really fast! That last bit of Kleenex is right at the end of the muzzle.

Oh well, no time to worry about aesthetics - it's Ka-BOOM!! time! I set the cannon up in the garage, pour a little powder into the primer hole, drape a piece of string across the powder, light the string and duck around the corner. I hear a "PFFFFT!...KA-BOOM!!!!" (The two extra exclamation marks were from the echo inside the garage.)

It was at this moment that I learned two of those important lessons they don't teach you in school (there are some things you just have to learn by doing). The first is that a cannon base made of plywood is not a ~real~ cannon base and not really suitable for a "real cannon". By "real cannon" I mean one that actually shoots things. Like BBs. The other thing is that you should never aim a "real cannon" at a garage wall. Especially if it is technically not ~your~ garage wall. The technical owners of the garage wall - your parents - will not be pleased.

Okay, technically there was a third thing: the original premise for building the cannon in the first place was slightly flawed. Remember this quote?

"... a small cannon with just a little powder and a couple dozen BBs would add the satisfaction of a BOOM!! and almost guarantee that some of the BBs would find their target. In theory, at least, no one would get hurt."

Yeah, that was the premise, all right. Judging from the garage wall, that last bit about no one getting hurt was going to need a little R&D.

The BBs had fanned out by the time they hit the wall. They made six little BB-sized holes in the drywall. Some spackling patched things up nicely. The BBs hadn't penetrated the outside siding, so when the parents arrived home all was well.

The following day was spent doing some R&D in the workshop. The pretty plywood base had not fared well. By that, I mean it had splintered into small pieces when the recoil smashed it into the cement block foundation. Maybe less powder would do the trick. Clamping the cannon in a vise, I reloaded with only half the powder charge. The results were dismal. Instead of a "PFFFT.. KA-BOOM!!" there was only a "PFFFFffffffffff..." All of the pressure from the charge was vented through the primer hole. Obviously, getting the charge just right was not the proper direction for this effort. A small mistake during a BB gun battle and someone could die. Also, there was room for only six BBs in the barrel. I wanted to use two dozen. What I needed was a longer cannon with a smaller primer hole.

After several more hours of saw-saw-sawing and drill-drill-drilling, the Big Cannon was born. It was six inches long with five inches of 3/8-inch bore and a really tiny primer hole for the fuse. It was mounted in a thick "U" bracket fashioned from 1/8-in steel. It didn't look pretty, but it sure did look functional. And strong. And menacing. "Menacing" is good in a cannon.

I loaded it up and placed it in the driveway aiming into the woods. I poured some powder into the primer hole and lit it.

Nothing.

The powder started to burn in the little primer cup, then went out. Hmmm...

The hole was so small that there was too little powder and too much cold steel. The steel was apparently absorbing the heat of the powder ignition and it would not burn down through the hole. Hmmmm...

What ignites with very little heat? Hmmmm... "Um.. the light blue tips of strike-anywhere wooden kitchen matches?" I hear you suggesting.

Bingo!! I carefully sliced the tips off of several kitchen matches and even more carefully ground them up into a fine powder.

PFFT... KA-BOOM!!!!

(As a side note, why wasn't anyone there to suggest the kitchen match idea back then when I needed it? I actually spent several weeks trying different things: cotton thread soaked in potassium nitrate, cotton thread impregnated with black powder, all kinds of things before I hit on the kitchen match idea.)

There ~was~ a slight problem developing. After several test shots, the jar of Dad's cherished black powder was getting noticeably less.. um.. ~full~, shall we say? Time to start making my own.

The local drug store carried small jars of potassium nitrate. There was some sulphur in my chemistry set. Some old campfires in the woods yielded lots of charcoal. Turns out there's more to it than just mixing them together (like Capt. Kirk did on a Star Trek episode once). You have to add water which dissolves the potassium nitrate so it can coat the sulphur and charcoal. Then you have to dry it out. You can spread it on a cookie sheet and put it out in the sun, but if it gets too hot you might come back later to find quite a mess. The other option is to stick it in a warm (not hot) oven.

Of course when your mother comes home and starts cooking dinner, she's going to wonder why there's a cookie sheet full of black dirt in her oven. Here's some ~really~ good advice: LIE TO HER! Tell her it's for a science project involving soils and you were baking it to make sure there were no live bugs or viable seeds in it. My mother was scared to death of bugs, live or dead. Letting her believe there were some possibly-live bugs in her oven was far, far better than telling her the truth.

Here's another tip: don't leave gunpowder lying around the house. I left some in a little paper cup as part of my cotton thread impregnation attempts. Fortunately it was still damp. I came home from school and found our sitter, a lady about 55 years of age, talking idly on the phone and smoking a cigarette and using my paper cup as an ashtray! When I told her it wasn't dirt, it was gunpowder, she almost had the Big Coronary right then and there.

This is why I say again: Lie to your mother. It may save her life.

Well, it seems that making your own black powder is more art than science. After several disappointing batches, it's time to ask Dad for some fatherly advice. Yes, he confides, it's tricky. The easiest solution is to buy some at the shooters' supply store.

If you're starting to suspect that my father was perhaps re-living his youthful infatuation with explosives through his son, you might be onto something. What parent in your acquaintance would offer to buy a 14-year-old gunpowder for a homemade cannon? I wasn't complaining, mind you, but still...

So he comes home from work the next evening with - what's this? - smokeless powder? Yep. Instead of going to the shooters' supply, he just stopped at the hardware store and that's all they had. Sorry.

Sorry? SORRY?? Hoo-damn-RAY!! This is the real McCoy! Forget that primitive black powder stuff, man, we're in the Big-Time now!

There is one problem with smokeless powder (or "cordite" as we teenaged explosives experts preferred to call it). It's a lot more powerful so you should use a lot less. The first trial with cordite sent the Big Cannon recoiling over 20 feet and resulted in a totally destroyed frame. Sadly, it went from "menacing" to "mangled" in less that a second.

What happened in front of the muzzle was even more amazing. The target was a 2-foot length of 2x4 pine standing on end about three feet away. It didn't go flying off as I had expected. It just stood there, wobbled slightly and fell over, apparently from the muzzle blast. I was asking myself the obvious question, "How could I have missed?!"

After checking out the wreckage of the Big Cannon's frame, I picked up the 2x4. It was actually in two pieces, split cleanly lengthwise. When I put the two pieces back together there was a hole about an inch and a half in diameter where there was no wood. The dozen lead BBs had removed the wood cleanly without hardly disturbing the 2x4! Holy cow!! I think this was the point where I realized that Big Cannon was no toy. People could get hurt.

So it was back to the workshop to fix the frame. The solution was a combination of wood and steel. The steel kept the wood from breaking and the wood kept the steel from bending. It was such a beautiful mutually-supportive relationship. (Awwww... ain't that sweet?)

After one or two more firings it was winter and not much happened, cannon-wise. It should be noted here that at some point I found an arrow tip from a target arrow lying on the ground. It was hardened stainless steel (you could tell because it wasn't all rusty) and it fit snugly in Big Cannon's barrel.

You see, there was this wooden utility pole at the end of the driveway that was maybe 16 inches in diameter. I was kinda wonderin' if maybe Big Cannon could shoot that arrow tip all the way through that utility pole. (If any Utility Industry Security Forces are reading this, it's all total fiction and in no way implies conspiracy to assault a utility pole.) Of course there was only one way to find out but it would have to wait for Spring. I tossed the arrow tip in my desk drawer and forgot about it.

[ ... ] (This is the literary device known as the-ellipsis-as-metaphor-for-the-passage-of-time.)

Finally it was Spring and young men's fancies were once again turning to things that go BOOM!!

School would be out in two weeks, but first there were final exams. And there was this term project for sophomore English that required pairs of students to do some research and present an oral report to the class. The English teacher had committed a terrible blunder. She had paired me with another boy who was as much of a procrastinator as I was. What could she have been thinking? The project was due on Monday. We'd had eight weeks to work on it. We figured we could get together and do the research on Saturday, write the report and practice on Sunday and do a passable job on Monday. Piece of cake.

So there was really nothing to do Friday afternoon after school.

Oooo ... wait! The cannon! The arrow tip! The (fictional) utility pole! I loaded up some cordite and tamped a Kleenex wad in behind it. Remember the first Big Cannon test with too much cordite? I really wanted that arrow tip to make it though that pole, so I used a lot of cordite - even more than that first test - an old .357 magnum casing full to the brim, plus a little more for good measure. I looked for the arrow tip in my desk drawer... but... what?? It was gone! Evaporated! Totally not there. After a bit of serious searching, the arrow tip was assumed lost (or to have migrated to a parallel universe or something), so I just loaded Big Cannon up with a dozen BBs again. Bummer. In retrospect, I would have been far better off to have just pulled the Kleenex wad out of the cannon and dumped the powder back in the jar and worked on the English project, but no, that timeline didn't happen.

Remember all that business about finding something that would burn down through the fuse hole of the Big Cannon? It was a really tiny hole. I used a really tiny jeweler's drill to make it. So when I ground up the light blue tips of the kitchen matches, I had to grind them up very finely so the powder would fit down that little tiny hole. I even had a little piece of straightened-out spring wire that I used to poke the powdered match tips all the way down into the hole. I only mention this because it was here that things went so terribly wrong. It turns out that one little bit of match tip was not quite so finely ground and it got stuck in the hole. As I pushed it down with the wire, it ignited.

Pfffft...

I hear you thinking, "Uh-oh. But what kind of idiot would have the cannon pointed at himself?"

Not me! I'm not ~that~ dumb. Well, OK, I always put the BBs in before I did the fuse and that was maybe not so bright, but I didn't have the cannon pointed at myself. At least not at first.

In that split second between the Pfffft... and the KA-BOOM!! there was an involuntary flinch. The cannon must have spun around as I jerked back.

KA-BOOM!!!!! (Oddly, I didn't actually hear the KA-BOOM!!!!! but I know there was a KA-BOOM!!!!!)

The next few minutes are seared into my memory forever.

Bright white light. Silence. Darkness. Now there's a strange sucking sound. The sound seems to be coming from me. It seems to be synchronized with my breathing. I feel my chest with my fingers. Bone. Sharp jagged bone. I look at my hand. Darkness. Damn! Not only do I have a hole in me the size of a broom handle, I'm also blind. Maybe this is it. Maybe I should just lie here and die. Why not? Why fight it? Why bother? Life so far has been nothing special. Not bad, exactly, but not great, either. Maybe I should just lie here and die. Somewhere a little voice says, "Life might get better..." Yeah? You think? Blindness and a collapsed lung - explain how things are getting better. "Well, if you give up now, you'll never know, will you?" The little voice does have a point, I guess. The hole doesn't really hurt - there's no feeling at all. Maybe I'm already dead. I feel my eyes with my finger tips. Oh. My eyelids are merely closed. That's weird. I open them. Hey, I'm not blind! I guess I'm not dead, either. Well, that's a relief! Life is getting better already! But that hole in my chest is still there. This is going to mean another emergency room visit. Definitely.

I stagger out to the dining room and try to call Mom at work. I can't remember the number and this phone receiver is getting awfully heavy. I go out to the back porch and yell for my sister. I pass out from the exertion. I wake up a few minutes later with the dog whining and licking my face.

I stagger back into the dining room. My little sister is already on the phone to Mom. "What happened?" she asks me.

"I shot myself."

"He shot himself." Click. She hangs up the phone with no further explanation.

Poor Mom. She raced home from work and arrived about five minutes after the ambulance left. She raced back into town to the hospital. Dad heard about it on the car radio, "Springfield township boy is in Children's Hospital after being shot by a homemade cannon." Although they didn't give any names or particulars, he just somehow knew it was me. He was there too when I got out of surgery. They had to cut the surgery short because I almost died on the operating table. The doctor told them, "One hour." Mom thought he meant they could visit me for an hour before they had to leave. Dad knew better. I would be the one leaving.

After an hour came and went, the doctor gave me another two hours. He was German and had been a surgeon in the German army during World War II (this was 1962, remember). He had seen hundreds of soldiers with gunshot wounds just like mine, he said. They were all dead. It was his professional opinion that I would not survive. He seemed very strict and he obviously took his professional opinion very seriously. Four hours later, he grudgingly allowed that if I made it through the night I'd have a 50-50 chance. But don't count on it. The next morning he seemed very irritated with me. I guess I made him and his professional opinion look bad. I was sorry. I really was. I was embarrassed to meet his eye. I felt I had let him down somehow.

I explained to one of the other doctors that they could keep me there Saturday, but I really needed to go home Sunday because I had this big English project due on Monday. He just laughed. "Sure, laugh," I thought. "You don't have to face my English teacher!"

There was a short article in the newspaper. I saved this article because instead of including a picture of me, they ran a picture of Big Cannon. That picture's all I have left of Big Cannon. The sheriff confiscated it. From the photo, it looked like the metal-and-wood frame held up well, so that was good. And the barrel didn't blow out from the extra heavy powder charge. Eyeball engineering at its finest!

After a week in the hospital I was starting to feel pretty chipper. Friends from school came to visit. David, my English project partner, got a bye on the presentation. Yay. I was excused from final exams. Yay. A week after that they released me, just in time for summer vacation. Yeah, life was getting better.

I have a scar. And no left-side pectoral muscle. And two ribs missing, although the ribs sort of grew back after several months. (That was weird - ribs are the only bones that regenerate, I was told.)

If you're into scars, it's quite an impressive scar - from the middle of my sternum to the rear of my left armpit. It still speaks to me once in a while. Sometimes when I look in the mirror it asks, "Did you learn anything from this?"

"Yes," I reply. "Yes I did ... Always put the BBs in last."


FIN.