how do guns/cannons/mortars work? How were they invented?
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At a basic level, a gun is a tube with one end sealed. An explosive is placed in the sealed end, and then a projectile is placed into the tube “in front of” the explosive. (In modern guns, the explosive is contained within the back part of the bullet, but the idea is the same.)
Detonating the explosive creates a rapidly expanding cloud of gas that, because it’s sealed inside one end of the tube, puts enormous pressure on the projectile. That makes it go really fast and fly out of the tube at high speed. And because the projectile is moving very fast, it will hit other things very hard, potentially doing a lot of damage to them.
Guns were invented shortly after the discovery of gunpowder, the first known explosive. (Gunpowder itself is believed to have been discovered by accident by alchemists doing something unrelated.) It didn’t take long for people to figure out that you could use an explosion to launch something really fast.
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