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“Human cannonballs have been around since the late 19th century. The first spring device was patented by an Englishman named George Farini in 1871, and it spawned three of the famous early cannon acts, all of which appeared in England before they debuted in America: ‘Lulu,’ who was in reality a man disguised as a woman, was shot 25 feeet up into the air to a trapeze by a powerful spring built into the floor at New York’s Niblo’s Garden in 1873. George Loyal was the first to be shot from a cannon apparatus in America, probably with Yankee Robinson in 1875. And ‘Zazel,’ a real woman this time, was first shot from a cannon to land in a net in 1877 and was with the Barnum show in 1880. Eventually she missed the net and broke her back, spending the rest of her life in a steel corset” (Hoh, 1990, p. 176-177).
http://iath.virginia.edu/cocoon/circus/xml
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