to a Doughboy in No Man's Land.
CHAPTER 2 Black Powder to Breechloaders And the Transition to Smokeless
The origins of black powder are somewhat hazy. We know the Chinese had black powder or similar compounds, but used them only for fireworks, firecrackers and noise-makers. Using the force of the powder to propel a projectile just didn't occur to the Imperial Chinese military establishment. Either that, or having the many thousands of trained warriors and potentially millions of peasant conscripts already on hand, who needs noisemakers to scare the enemy? It took the dedication to war of the Europeans to develop this new technology.
Faced by a charge from these fellows, what infantry commander wouldn't want more firepower? Repeating firearms irrevocably altered the balance between mounted and foot soldiers.
In the centuries from the first use of black powder to the middle of the 19th century, experimenters had tried to come up with some sort of repeating mechanism. After all, in the military context, if some is good, more is better. If you could rain bullets down on your enemy, they couldn't cross the battlefield to meet you. (It can be positively depressing how many technical advances came from the need to gain an advantage in battle.) The problem wasn't the black powder, but the manufacturing methods. Getting a portable cartridge, and even a mechanism to feed it wasn't the problem. The problem was keeping the combustion process sealed away from the shooter. Doing so took two things, each precisely manufactured. First was the barrel, and second the repeating mechanism.
For a century now, barrels have been made from solid bars, bored and reamed, like this Browning barrel.
Many barrels, high-quality ones, were made by the Damascus method. Hand-forging a section of steel around a mandrel in a spiral pattern produced a good (for the time) barrel, but not one that could be mass-produced or produced to exacting, repeatable tolerances. The later method, employed by larger makers, of forging a barrel from a flat section of steel, punching it into a “U” shaped channel and then forging the seam produced more uniform barrels, but they were not much stronger. Without uniform barrels, you could not depend on the cartridges to seal the chamber on firing. Some early breechloaders, such as the Ferguson rifle, had a good seal. Developed just before the Revolutionary War, it used a spiral screw at the rear of the barrel. Turning the trigger guard rotated the screw down to expose the breech. It was accurate, reliable, sealed the breech well and too advanced for the British military. A later American attempt was the Hall. The Hall used a hinged and removable lock and breech assembly. By dropping each pre-loaded block into the rifle, a trooper could fire until his supply of pre-loaded breeches was used up. In a pinch, the removable block could even be used as a pistol of sorts. The problems with the Hall were fragility, poor gas seal, and the heavy weight of a supply of blocks.
Even from the earliest times, gunsmiths and inventors worked on breech-loading firearms. This is a breech-loading flintlock that uses iron or steel cartridges each with an integral frizzen.
The pinfire cartridge was an early attempt to perfect the enclosed cartridge. Each round has its own firing pin, which sticks up through a slot cut in the edge of the breech. The hammer strikes the pin, firing the cartridge.
Precision manufacturing allowed the use of cartridges made of brass instead of steel. Precision manufacturing also made the brass cartridges a tight seal against the combustion of the powder, increasing safety to the shooter. The impetus for the precision manufacturing was the American Civil War. The need for weapons, and ammunition to feed them, was greater than hand-production could supply. Machine-made firearms had the advantage of dimensional stability. That is, in order for all ammunition to work in all rifles of a given caliber, both the bullets and the bores had to be made to precise, and limited, dimensions. When a gunsmith was making his muzzle-loading shotguns one at a time a “12-Gauge” could mean his barrels were 12-gauge plus or minus .050” and no one would know. When reliable cartridges were designed and manufactured, a shotgun could not have a chamber smaller than the largest cartridge. If the chamber were too much larger than the cartridge, there would not be a proper gas seal. The advantage that troops using cartridge-firing firearms had over their muzzle-loading opponents was significant. A rifled musket could be loaded and fired four times a minute by a skilled soldier. He also had to stand up to reload. A soldier using a cartridge-firing rifle could fire at least twice as fast, and could do so, including reloading while prone. The Federal Army had to have cartridge firearms, and was willing to spend money to make the arsenals that could produce them. If cartridge repeaters had so much going for them, why was so much of the Civil War fought with muzzle-loading rifled muskets? Production, or rather, the lack of it. It does little good to equip an army with breech-loading rifles if you cannot provide them with ammunition. With arsenals set up to produce muskets and ammunition, the Federal Army would have been negligent not to use them. Because proven breech-loading weapons were available with ammunition to feed them, they were used. Some units even bought new designs out of their own pockets in order to gain an advantage.
Balancing the need for production against tactical advantage is not new. In 1543 English armories developed a method of making cannon barrels from cast iron instead of bronze. Cast iron is heavier, weaker and more brittle than bronze. And it rusts. When the tubes burst they shattered, creating casualties of the gun crew and adjacent soldiers. However, a cast-iron barrel can be made for a fraction of the cost of a bronze tube. Faced with the option of going to war with one company of artillery or four, for the same cost, what would you do?
After the Civil War the advantages of self-contained cartridges were so great that Colt did a brisk business converting cap-and-ball revolvers to fire cartridges. The same advantages applied to shotguns, and gunsmiths were quick to design breech-loading shotguns.
One design requirement of black powder flintlocks and percussion firearms was the need to keep the shooters face away from the breech. Unlike today, a shooter in the era before cartridge shotguns kept his head up, and away from the breech. To get the barrels up to his line of sight, the stock had to have an appreciable angle down, called drop. The drop in the stock created a lever to direct the force of recoil into the shooters face. Ever since cartridges have become common, stocks have gotten straighter.
Getting to today's plastic shotshells took quite a bit of work. Early shotgunners had a choice that many shooters today would think odd: The pin fire. In the early days of shotshell design, primers were not an easy thing to manage. Making the mixture (even coming up with an appropriate compound) was not easy. Getting enough into a shell to create complete combustion of black powder took more space than modern primers have. To maximize the use of the priming mixture, each shell had its own firing pin, resting directly on or in the priming pellet. The Lefaucheux system had many merits, primarily that it worked. Since shotgun makers were applying for design patents for breech-loading shotguns in the 1850s, the pinfire system came into common use and hung on for a long time. Remember, the shift to any new technology takes time, and in the pre-computer age it sometimes took a generation or two. As precise as manufacturing had become by the 1880s, primers were still expensive. If the priming compound was not evenly distributed in the cup, misfires and hangfires could result. I think pinfires also had a following (and for quite some time in Europe) for gunsmithing ease and shooter comfort.
And even after the pinfire was gone, the hammers would stay. Imagine yourself a gunsmith used to making a shotgun with external hammers (as black powder percussion and pinfire shotguns still would have been for decades by 1880).
