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
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
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With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)