If I was ever notorious for anything, it was for building fire cannons that created enormous fireballs every New Year’s Eve. I started by making potato cannons, also known as spud guns, which propelled potatoes at very high velocities. It was a lot of fun, but the original design was very unreliable because it required a precise mixture of air and fuel to be sprayed into a chamber, and there was no way to do that repeatably without specialized equipment.
I was frustrated for a long time until my friend’s dad made one using compressed air. This was a game-changer. It was just as powerful as the combustion model and much more reliable and consistent. I made my own and began putting everything I could think of into the barrel and launching it at high velocity.
Then one day I filled the barrel with water, which sprayed out in a giant geyser when I pulled the trigger. Naturally, my next thought was “What if we used gasoline instead of water, and lit it on fire?” The rest is history.
The fire cannon became a New Year’s Eve tradition, and I built a new and different cannon every year, even using a set of Harley-Davidson exhaust pipes for the barrel in one of them. Somehow, every single year, the trees were soaked with rain from the previous day, preventing them from catching on fire when they were sprayed with burning gasoline from the fire cannon.
Our neighbor hated that we did this, so he started calling the police in later years. We would fire it a few times, then pack everything up and hide it. The final year we did it, the police came to the door and said “I’m not exactly sure what shooting a fire cannon is classified as, but I’m pretty sure it’s a felony. So… I could go back to my car and check whether it’s a felony, or I could NEVER HEAR ABOUT THIS AGAIN.”
This will be fondly remembered as a true expression of my creativity. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
