History
The first human cannonball, in 1877 at the Royal Aquarium in London, was a 14 year-old girl called "Zazel", whose real name was Rossa Matilda Richter. She was launched by a spring-style cannon invented by Canadian William Leonard Hunt ("The Great Farini"). She later toured with the P.T. Barnum Circus. Farini's cannon used rubber springs to launch a person from the cannon; limiting the distance they could be launched.
In the 1920s, Ildebrando Zacchini invented a canon that used compressed air to launch a human cannonball. Zacchini shot his son Hugo out of the compressed air cannon. Members of the Zacchini family were later inducted into the Ringling Brothers Circus Hall of Fame.
Read more about this topic: Human Cannonball
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)