The human cannonball act involves launching a person from a cannon, with no gunpowder used. The Great Farini invented the device in the late 19th century, with the first human cannonball being Rosa Richter in 1877. The act remained popular for two decades before waning, but was revived in the 1920s with Ildebrando Zacchini’s new cannon using compressed air and firecrackers. The Zacchinis held the record for the longest distance thrown from a cannon until David Smith Sr. broke it in 1995. The act is dangerous, with an estimated 30 human cannonballs perishing out of approximately 50 who have engaged in the act.
A human cannonball is an act in which a person is launched into the air from a cannon. The person acts like a cannonball fired from the breech of a traditional cannon, but in the case of a human cannonball, no gunpowder is used.
A Canadian, the Great Farini, invented in the late 19th century a device for throwing human beings into the air. It was tried a few times in the 1910s, before the first person, George Loyal, cast it in 1870.
Two years later, in 1877, a 14-year-old acrobat, Rosa Richter, was thrown from one of Farini’s cannons. She was introduced as Zazel and was in effect the first human cannonball. Zazel toured with P.T. Barnum and the human cannonball act remained popular for the next two decades, until interest began to wane.
Farini’s early cannons used rubber springs to launch human cannonballs into the air, and the distances they could reach were quite limited. In the 1920s, however, a number of Europeans made substantial improvements to Farini’s earlier design. In particular, Ildebrando Zacchini invented a new cannon that used compressed air to launch a human cannonball. This new cannon also used firecrackers and smoke to make the cannon look more like its traditional namesake and add an extra layer of excitement to the act.
The Zacchinis joined the Ringling Brothers Circus and toured with them for a decade before striking out on their own. During this time they once again popularized the human cannonball, which became a staple stunt of many of the great circus shows. The Zacchinis held the record for longest distance thrown from a cannon for decades, until they were finally overshadowed by David Smith Sr. in 1995, thrown more than 180 feet (55 m) in New Jersey. In 1998 David Smith Sr. and his son David Smith Jr. both competed to break his father’s record. David Smith Sr. broke his previous record with a throw of nearly 186 feet (56.64 m), while his son threw more than 181 feet (55.19 m).
While the action of the human cannonball isn’t as dangerous as many people think, since people aren’t, of course, shot with gunpowder, it’s still incredibly dangerous. Launching a person from a real gunpowder cannon would have a fatality rate of about one hundred percent, but the air cannon comes close enough in the lifetime of most human cannonballs.
It is estimated that of the approximately fifty human cannonballs who have engaged extensively in the act since its conception, around thirty have perished. Nearly all were killed by the poorly aimed cannon or high winds, which caused them to land outside the safety net and were killed by impact.
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