Noon Gun

History

The settlement at the Cape of Good Hope was founded by the Dutch in 1652 and the signal guns were originally part of the regular artillery at the Imhoff Battery at the Castle in Cape Town. In 1795, Britain took the Cape Colony from the Dutch East India Company, also known as (De) Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), as a tactic in the Napoleonic Wars. The VOC transferred its territories and claims to the Batavian Republic in 1798 and ceased to exist in 1799. The British handed the Cape Colony back to the Batavian Republic in 1803. However, in 1806 the Cape was occupied again by the British after the Battle of Blaauwberg, as a strategy against Napoleon. Thereafter the British controlled the Cape continuously until it became a part of the independent Union of South Africa in 1910. Shortly after the English took over, the two Dutch guns were removed from the Imoff Battery and placed in town as signal guns. The Castle received the latest English 18 pounders. Because the very loud report of the cannons upset people nearby, the guns were eventually moved from the environs of the city itself to the somewhat more remote Lion Battery on Signal Hill at 33°54′54.6″S 18°24′41.85″E / -33.915167, 18.411625Coordinates: 33°54′54.6″S 18°24′41.85″E / -33.915167, 18.411625. The first signal fired from there was on the 4 August 1902.

The guns were originally used to announce to the interior the arrival of a ship¹, perhaps requiring provisions for a trip onward to India. Sailing ships were slow by modern standards and could not store fresh food for long periods, so the provisioning of vessels was one of the major commercial functions at Cape Town in those olden days. Indeed, the city was widely renowned as "The Tavern of the Seas".^{citation needed} There were no telephones or telegraphs before the latter half of the 19th Century and the sound of the guns travelled much faster than a dispatch rider on a horse. The use of the guns to indicate that a ship was in port was discontinued when more modern means of communication were developed somewhat more than a hundred years ago.

Time signalling

In addition to the aforementioned signalling duties, the guns have had the task of firing a time signal since 1806. At first the primary purpose was to allow ships at sea or in port to check the accuracy of their marine chronometers,^{citation needed} an instrument necessary for the accurate calculation of Longitude. Observers on the ships would watch for the smoke from the muzzle, rather than listen for the sound of the cannon.^{citation needed} This tactic increased precision, because light travels much faster than sound.

A time ball on Signal Hill was used to relay time from the Cape Town Observatory, whose time ball was not visible from the harbour, to ships in the bay. At precisely 1pm Cape Mean Time², the ball would be dropped at the Observatory - an observer on Signal Hill would then drop that more prominent ball too. Mariners adjusted their observation of the time ball on Signal Hill by a second to allow for the relay from the observatory.³

After the advent of the galvanic telegraph, it became possible to trigger a gun remotely and since 1864 the Noon Gun has been accurately fired from the master clock of the oldest timekeeper in the country, the South African Astronomical Observatory.⁴

The original guns - 18-pounder, smoothbore muzzle-loaders - are still in use today. The ritual represents one of Cape Town's oldest living traditions. These are the oldest guns in daily use in the world. They fire every day at 12 noon sharp, except Sundays and public holidays⁴, and are maintained by the South African Navy. There have been few remarkable incidents involving the guns over the centuries. Perhaps the most notable one occurred many decades ago, in the days when horse-drawn traffic was commonplace. The rammer used to tamp the charge into the muzzle was inadvertently left in the bore of the cannon and when the gun fired the rammer flew down into the city and killed a horse. On Friday January 7, 2005, both the main gun and backup gun failed to fire owing to a technical difficulty. This was the first time in 200 years that the noon gun had not fired as scheduled.⁵

Other guns

See also

References

^ Percy Ward Laidler (1926). A Tavern of the Ocean By Percy Ward Laidler. M. Miller, limited, p71. Retrieved on 2008-10-04.
^ As with the Greenwich Observatory, the ball was dropped at 1pm to allow the observatory staff to make observations at 12pm to determine local time.
^ William Henry Rosser, James Frederick Imray (1867). The Seaman's Guide to the Navigation of the Indian Ocean and China Sea. J. Imray & Son, p275-276. Retrieved on 2008-10-04.
^ ^a ^b "A visit to the Noon Gun is a blast", The Cape Times & Independent Online, 7 December 2005. Retrieved on 8 December 2005.
^ "Noonday Gun fails for first time in 200 years", iol.co.za (January 9, 2005).