want to get credit, or prevail in the patent lawsuit, take good notes.) Reading about the first uses of gunpowder, and the “gonnes” it was used in, is enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck. The barrels were just that, barrels, made of wooden staves strapped into a tube. The “powder” was simply a mixture of the three ingredients of black powder, charcoal, sulphur and salt petre (potassium nitrate). After shoveling in an “appropriate” amount of their favorite mixture, the gunners would load the projectile, point the gonne in the direction of the enemy, and apply a torch or smoldering ember to the touch-hole.
The barrels split often enough that both sides of the fray kept a safe distance. Rifling, what rifling? After all, how can you rifle a wooden tube, what good would it do when the “bullet” is a stone? You really had to dislike someone to go to all that effort for not much gain. Despite all the shortcomings, the advantages were great. In 140 years, the use of “gonnes” had advanced to the point that the Ottoman Turks were using them to batter down the walls of Constantinople.
There were a whole lot of technical difficulties that had to be attended to before rifling and rifles would have any utility except in a siege. Among them were uniformity of powder, precision measuring systems and mass-production methods. While improvements in firearms technology increased the usefulness of rifles, and insured that rifles would replace shotguns (or “smoothbores” as many prefer) in many applications, improving firearms technology also improved shotguns. In order for rifles to work, the rifling must uniformly engage the bullet the length of the barrel. A rifle barrel must be reamed and polished smooth, straight and even before it can be rifled, or the result will be an inaccurate barrel. The same methods applied to a shotgun barrel produce a more-uniform barrel that delivers consistent groups.
This is a shotgun. Albeit a large shotgun, but a smoothbore none the less. Even when bronze gun tubes had been perfected, being on an artillery crew was dangerous. Early weapons using early gunpowder were not always safe.
The first transition was easy: Going from wooden to metal barrels. Not only did this change the early “bombards” from unwieldy, stationary artillery pieces to marginally mobile ones, metal tubes led to hand-held individual firearms. Well, marginally hand-held, using a monopod with a fork at the top to hold the musket in place. But the race was on.
The powder changes were quick in coming. Early powder was a mixture of the three components, and would settle out during shipping. The gunners would have to re-mix the powder when they got to the battle. “Corned” powder was powder that had been wetted, mixed, dried and re-ground. As you can imagine, grinding black powder into the right consistency is a hazardous profession, but the result was a product that didn't change with storage or shipping, and was much safer and uniform to use.
In the production of gunpowder, quality matters. This is a test gun. A measured charge will propel the spring-marker a known distance if the powder is correctly made.
As late as the Crimean War (1851, The Black Sea, Britain vs. Russia, and the famous poem “Charge of the Light Brigade”) armies still used smoothbore muskets as the general-issue weapon. It was not until a French ordnance officer by the name of Minié developed a hollow-base bullet that expanded on firing that development diverged. Before that brainstorm, the development of firearms was the development of smoothbores, i.e. shotguns. The British Empire was secured, held and lasted long enough to start crumbling during the time of a single model firearm. The “Brown Bess” was a smoothbore flintlock musket whose design was finalized in 1710. The heart of the Brown Bess was the perfected flintlock, a significant advance over competitive systems. The earliest individual smoothbores used the matchlock system. Developed in 1460 in Germany, the matchlock was simple: a pivoted serpentine lever held a clamp at the chamber end. The shooter carried a length of cord that had been soaked in a flammable mixture and then dried. Once ignited, it burned slowly. To fire the loaded smoothbore the shooter would insert one end of the cord (both ends were kept burning, just in case) in the clamp, puffed on it to get it hot, opened the touch-hole cover, and then pointed the “firelock” at the enemy and squeezed the back end of the serpentine. After the matchlock, came the wheellock, snaphaunce and miquelet. The wheellock is the same kind of mechanism as a cigarette lighter. Expensive, fragile and needing a lever to wind it just prior to shooting, the wheellock was not an ideal military weapon. The snaphaunce and miquelet were clumsy precursors to the flintlock, requiring extra parts and fitting.
Early firearms were the weapons and toys of the wealthy. Not only is this snaphaunce elaborately decorated, it is a double-shot single barrel. It was expensive and high-tech for its time.
Despite all the effort that went into developing firearms, the archer was a dominant force on some time. The greatly outnumbered British under Henry V defeated the French at Agincourt in 1415 with accurate longbow shooting. The French knights couldn't advance uphill through the mud faster than the British archers could shoot them down. (One can hardly avoid comparisons 500 years later.) The archer was considered so valuable to national defense that a hundred years later Henry VIII attempted to ban bowling and other sports because they “diverted English men from archery practice.” In rapid fire a skilled archer could launch 10 arrows a minute and place every one of them into a man-sized group more than 100 yards away. At close range an English cloth-yard shaft would go through all but the most heavy and expensive armor. At the same time a matchlock might be fired twice a minute, and guarantee hits only inside 40 yards.
The wheel-lock operates like a spring-driven cigarette lighter. This one is elaborate, expensive, and again, highly decorated.
The Brown Bess could be loaded prior to a battle, and depended upon to fire when needed. It could be quickly (compared to the other style locks) reloaded, and was durable enough to stand up to hard service. With changes in length, and converted to percussion, the same musket was still in use during the Crimean War. Now, 140 years is a long time for any design to hold on, especially a military one. The record may never be broken. After all, do you seriously expect the U.S. armed services to still be issuing M-16s in the year 2105? Even highly-modified ones? (However, I fully expect 1911 pistols to still be in common use, assuming we can still own them, in the year 2051.) Despite the advances in equipment by 1776, Benjamin Franklin still suggested arming revolutionaries with longbows. The drawback was training time. It takes years to train an archer to effectiveness. Granted, a musket was less effective, but the training period was a few weeks.
Until machine production in the 19th century, all firearms parts were made by hand. This early flintlock was made with hand forges and files.
When the musket was used as a military arm, the design had to conform to military needs. The musket was first a “firelock” but primarily a bayonet platform. After the volley, the troops would close the gap with the enemy and fight with bayonets. What they really needed at that point as an instructor was a senior NCO from the Roman Legions, because once the volley was gone, warfare tumbled back 2,000 years. During the Revolutionary War, colonial militias could inflict casualties on the British regulars with accurate rifle and musket fire, but could not keep those regulars from going anywhere they wanted. Even when they loaded their muskets with “buck and ball” (buckshot and a large lead ball) they couldn't keep the British from advancing by gunfire alone.
