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)

(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)

(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)

(cannon slowly fires)

(cannon slowly fires)

(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

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We are cooking more and we love it.