Another mystery ball.

[Icewing]

I've been working with the local military park and the regional archeologists. We've been out all week detecting their hiking trails. I even got to dig my first big chunk of exploded cannonball. Fun stuff.

Anyway on to the topic at hand. At one of the places I've been detecting the property owner showed me this iron ball that he found somewhere there on the property. He also said they found a large cannon ball with a big hole (fuse hole). Here's where things get screwy and I even took it into the military park and showed it to them. All of them quickly said it's a canister shot until I handed it to them and said, Now hold it next to your ear and shake it. Then each and every one dud this

It's impossible to deny or easily explain away, it's hollow and sounds as if it's full of dry powder. As you can see in the pic it appears to even have a fill port.

It's the canister shot they all say doesn't exist, but here it is...

 

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[Jason in Enid]

What would be the purpose of powder inside an iron ball without a fuse?

 

[Engineer in MD]

Does the small ball have any visible fuse hole. Maybe a slow fuse that is ignited when it is shot out the cannon, reaches the target area, and then the slow fuse ignites the interior powder effectively becoming an anti-personnel device. Slow fuses were used very early on. Maybe it was used on a small scale as well.

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[smokeythecat]

It also can be a miscast. Don't know.

 

[Icewing]

Does the small ball have any visible fuse hole. Maybe a slow fuse that is ignited when it is shot out the cannon, reaches the target area, and then the slow fuse ignites the interior powder effectively becoming an anti-personnel device. Slow fuses were used very early on. Maybe it was used on a small scale as well.

The only thing resembling a fuse hole is the rust covered divot you see there in the picture.
Again, they all said canister shot without hesitation before I pointed out that it's hollow and is filled with something.
As far as I know, oxidation can't form inside a sealed ball.

 

[Engineer in MD]

The only way to tell is to open the ball (or drill into it) and analyze the contents. If it's an explosive, then the purpose and intent is clear.

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[Icewing]

The only way to tell is to open the ball (or drill into it) and analyze the contents. If it's an explosive, then the purpose and intent is clear.

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Except for the fact that you should NEVER drill into a suspected explosive unless you really want to die.
It's happened more than once.

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

I may very much be wrong but I don't believe canister/case/grapeshot was ever hollow. Too small to bother fusing.

 

[SkaBa]

I know nothing on this, but I am curious how thick the wall of the ball is in your estimation. Does is feel thick or thin when you shake it?

 

[Engineer in MD]

No I realize that. I didn't mean literally. I know they have appropriate tools and methods for sampling the contents of munitions. Very intriguing item though. Historians and "experts" often seem to underestimate people of the past, and yet we are also often reminded of how advanced and ingenious they could be. Take the Antikythera mechanism as an example. A 2100 year old analog computer. Your little ball may just be proof of a type of device that was not "supposed" to exist yet.

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[TheCannonballGuy]

Icewing asked for my analysis and opinion.

Charlie P. is correct. There's no pre-20th-Century records of such small balls being hollow for a powder-charge.There is no worthwhile purpose to manufacturing such small balls with a gunpowder charge inside them. You'd have to also manufacture a miniature fuze for each one. Put simply, it's "impractical." Even if you did all that work, the exploded fragments ("shrapnel") of such a small ball would be too small and lightweight to do much damage. You cause more impact damage from the SOLID small ball's weight, as happens with Canister-ammo or grapeshot.

In my 40+ years in the field of studying civil war (and earlier) artillery projectiles, I've come across a few small iron balls which contained a large casting-error bubble (air pocket) inside them. That might be what you've got. (Molten iron somtimes contains large bubbles when improperly poured into a casting-mold, which frequently happened in the civil war era.)

I suspect the "divot" you mentioned on your ball is the casting mold's filler-hole sprue. You can view a diagram showing how hollow (explosive) cannonballs were cast, in an educational article I co-wrote with David Poche. The diagram shows the casting-mold, with a sand-core at its center, and the mold's filler-hole. You can read the article for free online at:
SolidShotEssentialsMod

I must mention, since there's no record of a small hollow iron ball like yours being made during the civil war, I'm not sure your ball is from the civil war era. An identification test, which hasn't yet been done, is to clean enough of the rust-concretion off of your mystery ball to be able to get a super-accurate diameter measurement of it, using a Digital Caliper. The exact diameter of all the canister-ammo and grapeshot balls made by both sides in the civil war was recorded in the 1861/62 Ordnance Manual's "Shot Tables." You can view the very-precise size data for cannonballs, grapeshot balls, and canister-ammo balls here:
Cannon bore, shot, and shell diameters for smoothbore guns
If a ball's diameter does not match up exactly with one of the precise sizes listed in the Ordnance Manual, it is not an Artillery ball.