Artillery
The word artillery (probably from Old Fr.: atelier, to load or charge) can refer to a type of weapon; to an arm of service, alongside infantry, cavalry, and engineers; or to the art and science of utilizing these weapons. The artillery arm has produced many great generals, most notably "Napoleon. As a weapon, artillery is the most lethal form of land-based armament. It now includes guns, "howitzers, 'mortars, and "rockets, primarily designed for "indirect fire, and also anti-aircraft guns, surface-to-air, and surface-to-surface missiles [Holmes, 92].
Artillery, in military science, crew-served big guns, howitzers, or mortars having a caliber more excellent than that of small arms or infantry weapons. Rocket launchers are also commonly categorized as artillery since rockets perform much the same function as artillery projectiles. Still, the term artillery is more appropriately limited to large gun-type weapons using an exploding propellant charge to shoot a projectile along an unpowered trajectory. For three centuries after the perfection of the cast-bronze cannon in the 16th century, few improvements were made in artillery pieces or their projectiles. Then, in the second half of the 19th century, there occurred a series of advances so brilliant as to render the artillery in use when the century closed probably 10 times as efficient as that which marked its opening. These remarkable developments took place in every aspect of gunnery: in pieces, with the successful rifling of cannon bores; in the projectiles, with the adoption of more stable elongated shapes; and in the propellants, with the invention of more powerful and manageable gunpowders. These advances wrought a further transformation in the ever-changing nomenclature and classification of artillery pieces. Until the adoption of elongated projectiles, ordnance was classified according to the weight of the solid cast-iron ball a piece was bored to fire. But, because cylindrical projectiles weighed more than spheres of the same diameter, designation in pounds was abandoned, and the calibre of artillery came to be measured by the diameter of the bore in inches or millimeters. Cannon became the general term for large ordnance. A gun was a cannon designed to fire in a flat trajectory, a howitzer was a shorter piece designed to throw exploding shells in an arcing trajectory, and a mortar was a concise piece for firing at elevations of more than 45° [Encyclopedia Britannica].
Holmes, R. (2001). The Oxford Companion to Military History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Artillery. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from: https://www.britannica.com/technology/artillery