To take on infantry, canister of grape shot is more ideal and practical.
The down side of grape / canister shot is that the firing pattern is a circle. That means when shooting at a line of enemy soldiers a lot of the stuff is going to miss high or miss low.
The idea behind this invention was good – basically turn a field gun into something that fired a line of death rather than a single point or a circle. If it had worked, it could have been much more devastating than a solid ball or a bunch of smaller balls with a circular firing pattern. But, I don’t think 1800s tech was up to building a device that could reliably do what they wanted.