Short answers, pulled from the story.
In a 1944 speech, Joseph Stalin called artillery "the god of war." This reflected artillery's dominance as a cause of casualties: 51 percent of Soviet casualties in World War II were attributed to artillery, rising to 61 percent in 1945.
The first known catapult was developed in Syracuse in 399 BC. Before gunpowder, all artillery depended on mechanical energy, which severely limited the kinetic energy of projectiles compared to later gunpowder weapons.
The Ottoman army brought sixty-nine guns arranged in fifteen batteries and fired an estimated 19,320 times over forty days. The largest piece, known as the "Basilic," weighed around 19 tonnes and required two hundred men and sixty oxen to move at a pace of barely 3 km per day.
The Armstrong Gun, produced from 1855 at the Elswick Ordnance Company and the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, was the first artillery piece to combine rifling, breech-loading, and a built-up barrel construction in one weapon. Its formal adoption in 1858 is widely regarded as the birth of modern artillery.
The French 75, introduced in 1897, is generally considered the first cannon to contain all modern artillery features: breech-loading, cased ammunition, modern sights, a self-contained firing mechanism, and a hydro-pneumatic recoil mechanism. In typical use it could fire fifteen rounds per minute at ranges up to about 5 miles.
Artillery caused 45 percent of Russian casualties and 58 percent of British casualties on the Western Front in World War I. An estimated 75,000 French soldiers were casualties of friendly artillery fire alone across the four years of that war.