Scott D. Anthony

Now, inside the city, people probably felt okay because they had these walls, these Theodosian walls.

There's a moat that goes around the walls.

The walls have two sets to them.

They're each 15 feet thick.

There's 96 towers that buttress them.

They had stood for more than a thousand years.

until gunpowder.

There was this cannon that a mysterious gunner named Orban cast that could fling a half-ton cannonball over a distance of a mile.

Imagine that.

The world had never seen anything like this before, and suddenly, cannonballs are flying out of the sky.

The walls were smashed.

The city fell in 47 days.

This reminds us that disruption changes everything.

The defenses that were built for yesterday are not fit for the disruptions of today.

That's lesson number one.

Lesson number two, the path to get there is not a straight line.

142, that is the first reference that I could find to gunpowder.

And of course, then it wasn't gunpowder.

It's just people messing around with stuff.

It was alchemists that were working on it, magicians who were working on it, philosophers who were working on it for about the first thousand years until people say, hey, you mix saltpeter and sulfur and charcoal together in the right way.