Canons

[adrian]

With the description 'cast steel' do you actually mean 'cast iron' ?

[corrado26]

Originally Posted by adrian

With the description 'cast steel' do you actually mean 'cast iron' ?

i mean cast steel, but perhaps I am wrong. A friend of mine, owner of a very famous artillery-museum and a real specialist told me that this canons are probably made of cast steel The production methods of making cast steel had been invented in the 1740s in England but came into use in central Europe not before the 1840s.

[adrian]

The common use of cast iron versus the rare use of cast steel in this period aside the two metals display markedly different corrosion characteristics and these guns have every appearance of being made of cast iron. I would be astounded if they were anything else.
Cast steel was a technology that was neither very practical nor affordable until after the introduction of the Bessemer process in the mid 1850s.

[Richard G]

I think it is quite possible that these are signal cannon. They would not be solely for saluting or ceremony but more or less in everyday use when some kind of warning, synchronisation or attention seeking was necessary. Thus cannons were fired by light house keepers as fog warnings in certain situations. Guns were fired at noon or a specified time so that time-keeping or certain activities could be co-ordinated. British admirals and naval bases were known to fire a cannon when they were about to hoist a signal by flag.
Today, the breaking of the ramadan fast is often announced by a signal cannon.
The more one thinks about it the more one can imagine their use in a time before electronic communication and when not everyone had a watch.
Regards
Richard

[df1967]

I believe they are swivel guns, either from a ship or maybe also from a castle. See: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drehbasse

[df1967]

This one is from demensions, weight and marks identical….

[Richard G]

So now we have three of them?