- Hey, it's me Destin.
Welcome back to Smarter Everyday.
Today, we're in rural Tennessee
for an actual artillery competition.
And if you learn anything from this truck
that's coming up behind me.
This is pretty legit.
There's dudes from all over the country
that have actual cannons
and we're gonna learn about them today.
Pretty sure this guy's gonna hit me.
Anyway, I've got two high speed cameras.
We're gonna learn about cannons of all types.
Let's get smarter everyday.
(upbeat music)
Okay, this is Matt Brothers and this is your land, right?
- That's correct.
- [Destin] And so those are your chickens over there?
- It is.
- [Destin] What do they think about this?
- Well, they're...
Hopefully won't get too alarmed,
but they'll hopefully be alright.
- So the question is.
How does this happen?
You own this land. - Right
- And you just let people come from all over to shoot?
- Well, yes.
About 10 years ago a local roofer
who has a cannon that lives around here.
He came and roofed my mother's house.
Saw the farm.
Saw the potential for being a wonderful place
to cure, safe to have an activity like this.
So he asked if he could do it
and I reluctantly said yes, we'll give it a try.
I found out that they're very professional,
they did a wonderful job organizing it
keeping everything safe and just had a wonderful time
and we've done it ever since.
- That's awesome.
So have you ever been scared about anything happening
on your land or anything?
- No, I've been vary comfortable.
Again, the first year, I was a little skeptical.
Cause I had no clue what they were doing.
But once they showed me what they were capable of
and how they were able to manage it.
No problem. - That's awesome.
Well, thank you for doing this with your land,
I appreciate it.
- You bet, Des.
- The interesting thing about this shoot is
there's two high speed cameras.
The V2511, that I normally use, ultra high-speed
but there's also the new camera, the V2640
that I borrowed from Vision Research.
It has a higher resolution chip on it,
a sensor, so we're gonna get a good trade off
between ultra high-speed and beautiful imagery.
Another interesting thing is,
I get to explain those facts to people
that are dressed like they're in the civil war.
Yeah, guys, my name is Destin.
We have the newest high-speed camera
in the country here, actually, it's awesome.
It's literally the best footage you can get right now.
After a quick meeting about safety and a prayer,
it was time to roll out the thunder.
You know it's about to get real
when you're unloading the cannon.
(banjo music)
Okay, here we go, this is awesome.
Are you ready?
Three, two, one fire!
(cannon fires)
(man mumbles)
- This is nuts.
This is like stupid nuts.
- [Man] That's pretty close.
- Like all these, old gray-beard dudes,
you've got the young guys doing the work,
you've got some high speed,
it's pretty rad.
(banjo music)
- Whoa.
Look at all the unburnt powder!
(cannon slowly fires)
(cannon fires)
- [Man] Whooo!
- [Man] Fire!
(cannon fires)
(man talks)
(cannon fires)
(cannon slowly fires)
- Right there.
- Oh wow, it's neat - [Woman] Oh, look at that.
(cannon fires)
(people mumbling)
(cannon slowly fires)
(cannon fires)
(people cheer and clap)
(cannon slowly fires)
- Three second interval!
On my command!
Fire!
(cannon fires)
Two three fire!
(cannon fires)
One two three fire!
(cannon fires)
One two three fire!
- [Man] I shoulda got over there.
(cannon fires)
(cannons slowly fires)
(cannon fires)
- [Man] It hit the bottom left one again.
- [Man] Fire!
(cannon fires)
(cannon slowly fires)
- [Man] Gun number seven, prepare to fire!
Fire!
(cannon fires)
- [Man] Keep going.
- [Destin] Whoa!
(laughs)
Wow, I'm glad we were clear!
I'm really glad we were cleared back
cause that went a long ways!
That's like 20 feet!
(men grunt)
- [Man] Number 4, fire!
(cannon fires)
- These videos are amazing to me.
There's a lot of mechanics going on that my brain
really likes to hone in on.
There's two things in particular
I want to focus on with you.
Number one, the gun carriage itself.
That's the wooden structure,
the wheels and all that stuff around the gun.
These are reproductions made by the Amish.
But the people that originally designed these.
I have to believe that they would love to watch
slow motion of that gun carriage absorbing the recoil
of the cannon itself.
I mean, here we are in the modern world,
we get to watch it just for fun.
But back in the day, think about what the person
that designed that would be thinking about
as they watched this in slow motion.
(cannon slowly fires)
The second thing I want to look at,
specifically on this video,
are the shock waves.
Now a really easy way to see the shock wave
is just observing the grass out in front of the barrel.
If you look you can see there's this spherical
wave-front that propagates over the ground
and you can see how the grass behaves
out in front of the cannon.
(cannon slowly fires)
Another way to look at shock waves is something called
fast-frame differencing.
What you do is take one layer of video
and put another layer of video on top of it
and then offset it by a frame or two.
What you can do then,
is set up a blending mode called difference,
which basically only shows you the pixels that are different
from the one below it.
It's a pretty interesting technique that people use
all the time to detect motion for example
in like a webcam or something like that.
Anyway, if you use this fast-frame differencing
algorithm, technique, whatever you want to call it,
in this particular case,
you can see the reflected shock wave
bounce up off the ground and what's neat to me is that
that reflected shockwave doesn't exactly look spherical.
You have to look very close.
There's not a lot of pixels here showing you what's going on
but it almost looks like that reflected shockwave
is an ellipse because it's kinda being influenced
by all that expanding gas coming out of the cannon.
So I was trying to work up the nerve
to see if they would let me fire one myself,
and then I saw this one.
And I was like that's me.
I have to ask.
There it is.
(laughs)
Here we go, Stan.
Three, two, one,
(cannon fires)
That was awesome.
It's not as hard of a pull as I thought it would be.
- [Man] No.
That's why everybody does this,
and they usually end up popping it off.
- [Destin] So you just rotate?
- That's all you need to do.
- That's awesome!
Thank you for letting me do that.
(cannon slowly fires)
This stuff is interesting to observe and think about.
I mean, there's a lot of dynamic things going on here,
but at the end of the day, these were weapons of war
which is pretty intense to think about.
For example, listen to this gentlemen
explain canister round to me.
It's pretty sobering.
- The easiest way I can describe it for this gun here.
It'd look like a 24 oz beer can.
With a powder charged attached to the back of it
and you'd have to have about 30 iron balls in it.
And they were all about the size of a 20 mm projectile.
Now the reason they used iron and not lead
is because lead flattens out when it hits something solid
like a breast plate or a spine or a hip.
Iron goes right through you,
right through the man standing behind you in the rear rank.
Hits the ground 20 yards behind you
skips up and goes through the next wave.
- Gotcha. - From behind you.
It was not uncommon
- So it can go against formations.
- It was not uncommon that one round of canister
can take out 40 guys with one shot.
- So Hunter is about to shoot a canister round
which is what?
- It's got 58 caliber balls.
I don't know how many, exactly.
Packed in saw dust.
- [Destin] Gotcha.
So this is gonna make a mess.
And you're gonna make a mess out of that hill
right over there.
- It's what we're trying to.
- [Destin] Okay.
Awesome, sounds good.
- [Man] Fire!
(cannon fires)
(rounds slowly fire)
- Canister rounds are not a joke.
That is some serious stuff.
What is funny, though, is every time I caught
a civil war soldier using their cell phone.
Which I'll show you right after I eat.
(beep)
Yeah, that was as rad as it looks.
Okay, so that was the first video on civil war cannons.
I want to do one on how to ignite them.
That pull-string, how that thing works.
And also there's a special one called a whitworth.
I want to talk about that.
But, I want to say thanks to the sponsor of this video,
which is Hello Fresh.
Tonight is peppercorn steak night
which was my request.
Hello Fresh is a really cool service.
They will send food directly to your house
with a full-on recipe for how to make everything
and the perfect amount of ingredients that you need.
We are cooking more and we love it.
Tonight we have a meal for two.
That's kind of a nice thing, isn't it?
- [Woman] It is nice.
- [Destin] We don't get that very often, so
we're cooking and we're about to eat a meal together.
Which feels like date night.
I'm going to be honest here,
we don't get to do that very often.
What happened?
- [Woman] I started the potatoes.
- [Destin] Oh sweet,
that means we're doing the peppercorn thing.
- Yes.
- [Destin] Yes!
(knocking)
They send food directly to your house
with perfect, pre-measured ingredients.
Things you would never think to purchase
like truffle oil,
like special mushrooms and stuff, it's pretty cool.
You get to figure out how to cook this stuff by reading
this cool recipe card.
It's a step by step instruction.
It's almost like replicating somebody's experiment in a lab.
It's pretty simple stuff.
The sauces are what really amaze me
because I don't really know how to make 'em.
But if you followed the recipe,
you end up making a fancy sauce.
It's really good.
Anyway, to get a discount on Hello Fresh,
and help Smarter Everyday.
Go to hellofresh.com
use the promocode "smarter60"
That's 60 bucks off your first three meals
that's 20 bucks off the first three meals there
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You get tasty meals and you learn how to cook.
Have a good one, bye!
(beep)
I totally like catching these reenacters
with their cell phones
because they get really embarrassed
and they try to hide it and stuff.
So is this the kind of field comms that they had
in the civil war?
- Yeah, I was like whoops, let me hide this cell phone!
(laughs)
- Go ahead.
It's a little strange, seeing you in your garb
holding up a cell phone camera, sir.
- Yeah, well.
Can't help it.
That's the way it is.
(laughs)
- Get us while we're still alive, man.
- [Destin] I'm gonna be honest with you, sir.
You've got the period piece going on
and then you got this little lounge chair,
what's going on here?
- This is actually the 1862 model.
(laughs)
- [Man] Tell me when we get to the right spot.
- [Destin] What'd you say?
- Assisted living bus dropped us off
and didn't tell us what to do!
(laughs)
- [Destin] It looks like you're on a cannon crew, today.
If this video earned your subscription
that's really cool!
If not, that's also cool.
I'm Destin,
I hope you enjoyed this.
Getting smarter everyday.
Have a good one.
Bye.