>how did they get their shot to be round before that?<
Peter
There is no difficulty casting spheres (or any other shape - look at the
Greek bronzes) in clay, dry sand, or green sand moulds if that is what you
want to do. The problem is, of course, that these moulds are "disposable" to
use a modern adjective. Needing skilled labour, time and materials to
prepare they would be too expensive to cast cannon balls compared with
re-usable metal moulds.
Biringucchio in "The Pirotechnia" suggests that they used metal moulds to
cast cannon balls from the beginning (about 1495) and were using cast iron
before 1540. His text also suggests that cast iron moulds came in with what
might have been the first cheap (and nasty) mass-produced medium- sized iron
castings - cannon balls. Iron balls for muskets may have been cast in metal
moulds earlier than that but I have not found a reference for that. It just
seems unlikely that comparitively large cannon balls were the first.
Peter Hutchison
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