Human cannonball
Ejection of a human being from a specially designed cannon
The human cannonball act is a performance in which a person who acts as the "cannonball" is ejected from a cylinder that has been specially designed to resemble a cannon. The human cannonball lands on a horizontal net or inflated bag placed at the predicted landing point. Outdoor performances may aim at a body of water.
History
William Leonard Hunt, known in the circus world as "The Great Farini", conceived and designed the basic act in the early 1870s, filing a patent for launching a human projectile in 1871. Hunt's cannon used rubber springs to launch a person from the cannon, limiting the distance they could be launched. His adopted son, Samuel Wasgate, was the first to perform as the human projectile, dressed in female clothing and billed as "Lulu" in an 1873 act referred to as the "Lulu Leap".
The first act billed as a "human cannonball", launched in 1877 at the Royal Aquarium in London using the same contraption used for the "Lulu Leap", was the 17-year-old Rossa Matilda Richter, going by the stage name "Zazel". Richter is often erroneously credited with being the first performer of the act. She later toured with the P.T. Barnum Circus. Richter's career as a human cannonball ended when she broke her back during an unrelated tightrope act.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1920860. The first chronological checks are 1871, 1873 and 1877.
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This entry incorporates text from “Human cannonball” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.