Muskets and More on PBS

If seeing a musket turn a nice, ripe honeydew into fruit salad at 60 yards is your idea of fun, “Revolutionary War Weapons” may not be the show for you: What accomplishes the melon assassination in this “NOVA” presentation is actually a colonial-era long rifle, the point being the variety of armaments available to our founders, how they differed and, not incidentally, how much damage they could do.

You wouldn’t want to be a melon—or a combatant—shot by a marble-size musket ball, and one needn’t be a gun enthusiast to get a charge out of this show, even if some information seems rudimentary: The differences in ammunition, muzzle velocity and accuracy between a firearm with a rifled barrel and, say, the smooth-bore “Brown Bess” flintlock used at Lexington and Concord seem like Gun 101. But the camera work and the tests run by Joel Bohy—munitions expert and, coincidentally, a gun appraiser on “Antiques Roadshow”—are the stuff of destructive fun. As I found out by asking (it isn’t explained in the show), the ultra-slow-motion shots were accomplished using a specialist Phantom high-speed camera, which is commonly employed in ballistics testing, material analysis and slow-motion effects in movies. According to the filmmakers, the Phantom can capture footage at rates exceeding 75,000 frames per second; for much of film history, the standard frame rate for motion pictures has been 24 FPS...

Read the full review by The Wall Street Journal here.