While the evolution of smooth-bore ordnance owed little if anything to the prior development of small arms, the evolution of rifled ordnance which took place in the middle of the nineteenth century followed closely on that of rifling as applied to the musket. Experience with the rifled musket supplied the information necessary for the application of rifling on the larger scale. In tracing the development of rifled ordnance, therefore, the development of the rifled musket must first be considered: the two evolutions are historically linked together. In this chapter an endeavour is made to trace these two evolutions in their natural sequence, and to describe the circumstances in which each took place, the objects aimed at, the difficulties encountered and the results achieved. We shall see how the smooth-bore musket was replaced by the rifle firing a spherical ball; how the spherical ball gave place, in the course of time, to an elongated bullet; and how, when the elongated bullet had been evolved, the principle of the rifle was extended to field and to heavy ordnance. A complete survey of the whole process can be obtained only by stepping back, past the days of the primitive rifled fire-arm, to the age when the longbow was still “the surety, safeguard, and continual defence of this realm of England and an inestimable dread and terror to the enemies of the same.”

§

The might of England, avouches the historian, stood upon archers. The prowess of the archer, the dreadful precision of the longbow, and the athletic arm by which it was strung, form the constant and animated theme of ancient British story. In battle and the chase, we are told, the power of the archers always prevailed, and the attainment of that power was an object of incessant anxiety, in all ranks of people, from their earliest infancy. The longbow was thus, as described in the above-quoted act of Henry VIII, a continual defence of the realm. Over all other countries England had this advantage, that against the exigencies of war she had, not only her race of splendid seamen, but armies of the most skilful archers in the world. In peace she was thus well prepared. Good use was made by legislation to maintain the skill and stimulate the ardour of the bowmen, and the statute book bears witness, reign after reign, to the importance attached to archery from its military aspect. At one time every man between the ages of fifteen and sixty had to possess a bow equal in length to his own height. Every township had to maintain its butts, each saint’s day had its shooting competition. The churchyard yew gave its wood for staves, the geese on the green their best wing feathers; and a goose’s head was the orthodox and inconspicuous target. No man under the age of twenty-four was allowed to shoot at any standing mark, and none over that age at any mark of eleven score yards or under. Restraint was laid on the exercise of sports which might interfere with archery, and when the mechanically strung crossbow was introduced its use was forbidden except under special conditions.111 Honours and prizes were awarded the best marksmen. The range and accuracy achieved by them was without doubt prodigious. Much of their power lay in their strength of arm; but one of the chief secrets of their craft lay in the way in which they set their arrow-feathers at the requisite angle to give the arrows a spin which would ensure a long, a true and a steady flight.

With the advent of gunpowder the shooting competitions declined. An embargo was put on fire-arms; instead of being pressed to possess them the people were forbidden their use except under conditions. The military character became a separate order in society. Encouragement was no longer given to the individual to own and master the unwieldy fire-arm. The English peasant, enthusiasm evaporating as his skill declined, no longer gave the State the military value which his forefathers possessed. The clumsy mechanism of the English musket, the uncertainty of its action (especially in wet weather), its slow rate of fire, its gross inaccuracy, and its inability to penetrate armour under all conditions, were factors which kept fire-arms for long years in disfavour in this country.

Abroad, on the other hand, the development of fire-arms was actually encouraged and skill in their use patronised. The rivalry which already existed with bow and arrow was extended to the new medium, and in Sweden and Switzerland, Germany and France, shooting competitions continued in vogue and proficiency with musket and arquebus was honoured and substantially rewarded. In Switzerland and Southern Germany especially, shooting was very popular. The character of the people, their skill in making delicate mechanisms, the nature of the country, all tended to promote an interest in musketry which did not exist among our own people. As a result England has little to claim in the early stages of the development of portable fire-arms.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries smooth-bore weapons firing spherical lead balls were the only kind known and used. But in the early part of the sixteenth century a development took place which was to prove of the first importance to fire-arms; which was to make the primitive weapon in the course of time “the most beautiful, and at the same time the most deadly instrument of warfare ever devised by the ingenuity of man.” The value of rifling was discovered.

How, when, or where this discovery was first made, appears to have defied the researches of investigators. As to the manner in which the development took place and the effects which it was intended to produce by its means there is an assortment of evidence; and this is so various and so interesting as bearing on the action of the rifle and its evolution, that we reproduce it in some detail. On one point there appears to be small doubt: The earliest rifling had no twist in it.

“It seems to have been generally accepted by writers on the subject,” says the author of The Book of the Rifle, “that the earliest barrels had straight grooves, the object of which was to give a space into which the fouling of previous shots might stow itself without obstructing the process of loading with a well-fitting ball, and that spiral grooving was merely an accidental variation of this, afterwards found to possess special advantages.” Nevertheless, he himself inclines to the opinion that the straight groove was not necessarily a prior form of the spiral. The collections in museums contain examples of spiral grooving older than the oldest straight-grooved barrels. In any case, it is antecedently more probable, he considers, that the spiral grooving was not a variation of the straight groove, but that it was “a deliberate attempt to find a means of giving to the bullet the spiral spin which was well known as having a steadying effect on the javelin, or on the arrow or bolt discharged from the bow.”112

But in this view he is in a minority. Whereas the invention of helical grooving is generally attributed to Augustin Kutter, a gunmaker of Nuremburg who died in A.D. 1630, straight grooving had been known since 1480, and is ascribed to one Gaspard ZÖllner, a gunmaker of Vienna. “Smooth-bore guns,” says Schmidt,113 “had the disadvantage of fouling, and with the poor powder could only be recharged by leaving a comparatively large space between the ball and the barrel. This windage prejudiced straight shooting. To overcome this deficiency the practice was adopted of cutting grooves, more or less numerous, in the barrel, and in wrapping the ball in a rag greased with suet. In this way the windage was reduced, and as the greased rag cleaned the barrel, the weapon could be recharged for a large number of rounds. At first these grooves were made straight.”

A theory propounded in a well-known treatise published in the year 1808, entitled Scloppetaria, was to the effect that grooving had its origin in the habit which the early huntsman had of gnawing or biting the balls before putting them into the piece, with a view to causing the wound inflicted by them to be rendered more severe. This habit gave rise to the idea that the barrel itself might be made to do the work of jagging or indenting the bullet. “These grooved or sulcated barrels appear to be of great antiquity, and are said to have existed in Russia long before their introduction among the civilized nations of the south.”

According to Hans Busk, straight grooving was adopted for the reason given by Schmidt: i.e., purely for the purpose of facilitating loading, and for assisting to dislodge the products of combustion left in the bore. “No doubt the adoption of this plan was calculated to increase the efficiency and accuracy of the arm from the steadiness it imparted to the bullet in its passage through the barrel.” And that is a view which, it is suggested, might be expanded to give a motive or combination of motives which may well have operated to induce the early gunmakers to cut grooves in their musket-barrels. Thus: the variations in the flight of spherical lead balls fired from smooth-bore guns were chiefly due (though these causes were not clearly appreciated till a much later date) to the incalculable effect of windage and to the varying axis about which spin took place. If by any means windage could be reduced, and if the ball could be made to assume a central position in the bore and spin about a definite axis in its flight, a large increase in accuracy would be attained. Suppose, for instance, a single groove or gutter were filed along the barrel parallel with its axis. The effect surely would be, by creating a rush of powder-gases along this groove, to cause the ball, under the tangential impulse of the gases, to rotate always in the same plane as it passed through the bore. And thus by the cutting of this single groove a uniformity of flight of the ball would be attained which was unattainable without the groove. The same effect, in fact, was produced by Robins when he bent the musket barrel. He demonstrated that the result was to make the ball roll on a definite part of the barrel and thus to deviate during flight in a definite direction. He might have shewn, as another result of his experiment, that by giving the ball a uniform spin he had endowed it with a regularity of flight, or accuracy, many times greater than it before possessed.

Or suppose that, instead of one groove, two or more grooves were filed in the same way. While the above advantage derived from the single groove would be less fully obtained, another would result. By providing a space on each side into which fouling might spread, and into which the plastic metal of the ball might be intruded by the pressure of the ramrod, their presence would certainly allow of a tight-fitting ball being used. The loss in efficiency of discharge due to friction between ball and barrel would be more than compensated for by the annihilation of windage.114 Suppose, however, that the grooves were augmented in number until they became a series of triangular serrations all round the interior of the barrel. The value of this formation might lie, not so much in the grooves, as in the ends or points of the serrations which supported the ball and held it in a central position on the true axis of the gun. In short, the prime idea of the gunmaker may have been, not so much the provision of grooves, as the provision of internal ribs for holding the ball truly in the musket.

Whatever the cause or motive which led to its adoption, the rifling of musket barrels became a common practice in the sixteenth century. Two significant quotations will suffice to show the period of the invention. The first is an edict issued by the Swiss Government in 1563:

“For the last few years the art of cutting grooves in the chambers of the guns has been introduced with the object of increasing the accuracy of fire; the disadvantage resulting therefrom to the common marksmen has sown discord among them. In ordinary shooting matches marksmen are therefore forbidden under a penalty of £10 to provide themselves with rifled arms. Everyone is nevertheless permitted to rifle his military weapon and to compete with marksmen armed with similar weapons for special prizes.”115

The second is a recipe from a book by Sir Hugh Plat, written in 1594.

“How to make a pistol whose barrel is two feet in length to deliver a bullet point blank at eight score. A pistol of the aforesaid length and being of petronel bore, or a bore higher, having eight gutters somewhat deep in the inside of the barrel, and the bullet a thought bigger than the bore, and is rammed in at the first three or four inches at the least, and after driven down with the skowring-stick, will deliver his bullet at such distance.”

So at some date not long after that at which straight grooving was put into common practice, the evolution of the rifle made a further advance by the introduction of spiral grooving. This gave all the advantages of the straight grooving, and in addition, spin in a definite plane to a definite degree; so that it entirely superseded straight grooving in all countries where fire-arms were in common use. Experience amply confirmed the superiority of the twisted rifling. With the accession of accuracy the skill of the marksman naturally increased, enthusiasm grew, and the shooting competitions gained in popularity and importance. “Le goÛt de tir des armes rayÉes de prÉcision est poussÉ jusqu’À la passion: passion qui excite l’amour-propre en ne laissant pas À la maladresse l’excuse si facile de l’imperfection inÉvitable de l’arme À canon lisse.”116

Yet in spite of improvements the rifled musket remained unrecognized as a military weapon for another two hundred years. Its use was confined to sporting purposes; though far less in common use than the smooth-bore it became, for its increased accuracy, the favourite weapon of the deer-stalker and the chamois hunter. In England it was little known before the nineteenth century; and when, in 1746, Robins made his famous prophecy, the possibilities inherent in rifled fire-arms, even such as were then in existence, were unrealized by the people of this country.

It is to be noted that it was only in increased accuracy of flight that the rifled gun had a superiority over the smooth-bore; no increase in ranging power was possessed by it. And yet this claim is constantly made by old writers, that, probably (as they say) owing to the fact that increased resistance of the ball to initial motion gave time for all the charge to be thoroughly ignited, the rifled gun carried further than the smooth-bore. As a fact, the contrary was true; other things being equal, the range of the rifle was actually less than that of the smooth-bore. The explanation of the paradox was given by Robins. “It is not surprising,” he said, “that those habituated to the use of rifled pieces gave way to prepossessions like these; for they found that with them they could fire at a mark with tolerable success, though it were placed at three or four times the distance to which the ordinary pieces were supposed to reach: and therefore as they were ignorant of the true cause of this variation ... it was not unnatural for them to imagine, that the superiority in the effect of rifled pieces was owing either to a more violent impulse at first, or to a more easy passage through the air.” The true value of the spiral grooving resided, of course, in the spinning motion which it gave the ball. By making this spin uniform two variable factors determining the trajectory were thereby transformed into constants: first, the effect just mentioned, the influence of the varying resistance of the air on the parts of the ball which met it at different speeds, some parts moving forward relatively to its centre and some parts retreating; secondly, the effect of eccentricity of mass and irregularity of exterior surface, which were both almost nullified by the rotation. The importance of this second effect may not at first sight be apparent. It must be remembered, however, that the balls used in those days were of the roughest description; cast in hand moulds, “drawn” in cooling to such an extent that in a large proportion an actual cavity was left in their interior, which could be revealed only by cutting them open; their burrs removed with pincers, their surface rough and broken, their shape distorted by the ramrod’s blows.

The superiority of the rifle in accuracy was generally admitted; and this advantage not only counterbalanced such deficiency in ranging power as may have accrued from the use of grooving, but actually led to a general but mistaken belief that the rifle carried farther than the smooth-bore. The reverse was the case. Moreover, it was not safe to use with a rifle the very large charges of powder which could be used with safety with a smooth-bore musket. On account of the resistance to motion of the ball which had been forced by ramrod, sometimes even by mallet, down the grooved barrel of the rifle, high chamber pressures resulted, and not infrequently the barrels burst. Hence in spite of the thicker metal of which they were generally made, rifles could only be used with moderate charges, and so could not compete on equal terms, in this respect, with the smooth-bores for superiority of range. Toward the end of the eighteenth century events occurred which drew attention to the utility of the rifle for military purposes. In spite of its slow rate of fire—to load it carefully took from one and a half to two minutes—it showed itself to be a very effective weapon in the hands of French tirailleurs, Swiss, Austrian, and Tyrolese JÄgers, Hottentots and American Indians. In the War of Independence the superior accuracy of their rifles, and their capacity for hitting at ranges beyond the 200 yards which were about the limit of the smooth-bore musket, placed the American backwoodsmen at such an advantage over the British troops that riflemen were recruited on the Continent and sent across the Atlantic to counter them. New military tactics came into vogue at this time, their inception influenced by the gradual improvement in fire-arms and artillery. Bodies of riflemen, “a light erratic force concealing itself with facility and forming an ambuscade at will,” were formed in the continental armies to act in concert with the masses of infantry as skirmishers or sharp-shooters, their object being to surprise and demoralize the enemy by the accuracy of their long-range shooting. Rifles were now looked on, too, as the natural counterpart of the now flying or horse artillery, “which, from the rapidity of its motions, the execution of cannon-shot in all situations, appears to be the effects of little less than magic.”117

In 1800 a rifle corps was raised by the British government from the old 95th Regiment. As the result of competitive trials the rifle made by Ezekiel Baker, a gunmaker of Whitechapel, was adopted: taking spherical balls of twenty to the pound, and having a barrel 30 inches long, rifled with two grooves twisted one-quarter of a turn. This degree of twist was certainly much less than that used in French, German and American rifles, which as a rule had three-quarters or a whole turn in them; but Baker found that so great a twist caused stripping of the balls; so, as the accuracy of the lower twist was as great as that of the higher up to a range of 300 yards, and as it required a relatively smaller charge, gave smaller chamber pressures and caused less fouling of the barrel than its competitors, it was accepted. There was a strong opinion at the time in favour of the larger twist as universally used by the more expert foreign marksmen; and this opinion was justified by experience.118 The quarter-turn twist might give sufficient accuracy at low ranges, but as the skill of the riflemen increased longer ranges were attempted; and then it was found that sufficient accuracy was unattainable with the approved weapon. Rifles having a larger twist were therefore made by rival gunmakers and, the results of shooting matches giving incontestable evidence of their superiority, a demand arose for their supply to the army riflemen. Accordingly in 1839 the Brunswick rifle was adopted for the British army. The new weapon had two deep grooves twisted a whole turn in the length of the barrel, in which grooves studs, cast on the ball and designed to prevent stripping, were made to engage.

This was the last stage of the evolution of the rifle firing a spherical ball. So long as the spherical ball was retained, spiral grooving offered relatively small advantages over straight grooving; straight grooving offered small advantages over the best smooth-bore muskets. The tedious loading of these rifles and the inefficiency of the system by which windage was eliminated by the force of ramming, are sufficiently set forth by the various writers on early fire arms; and there is small wonder that the value of rifles as military weapons was seriously questioned by the highest professional opinion of the time. The charge of powder had to be carefully varied according to the state of the weather and the foulness of the piece. Care had to be taken that all the grains of the charge poured into it went to the breech end and did not stick to the sides of the barrel. Patches of leather or fustian were carried, in which the ball was wrapped on loading, to absorb windage, lubricate the rifling, and prevent the “leading” of the barrel and the wear which would ensue if a naked ball were used. “Place the ball,” says Ezekiel Baker, “upon the greased patch with the neck or castable, where it is cut off from the moulds, downwards, as generally there is a small hole or cavity in it, which would gather the air in its flight.” The ball, a good tight fit, had to be rammed, in its surrounding patch, right down to the powder: for, if not rammed properly home, an air-space would be left and the barrel would perhaps burst on discharge; at the least, would give an inaccurate flight to the ball. If the barrel were at all worn, double or treble patches were necessary. To loosen the filth which collected in the barrel, and which sometimes prevented the ball from being either rammed or withdrawn, water had to be poured down; not infrequently urine was used.

All sizes and shapes of groove were given to the early rifle, and their number depended largely upon caprice or superstition. Seven, for instance, was a number frequently chosen on account of its mystic properties; in Scloppetaria an attempt is made to prove that an odd number has an advantage over an even. So, also, various degrees of twist were used. But in respect of this the evolution followed a definite course. The pitch of the twist necessarily bore a certain relationship to muzzle velocity. With the earliest rifles a fairly rapid twist was given, being rendered possible by the small muzzle velocities employed, and indeed being rendered necessary to ensure stability to the flight of the ball. Then, with the endeavours made, at the end of the eighteenth century, to use higher charges and thereby to extend their range, higher muzzle velocities came into use, and the danger of stripping was then only prevented by the use of low twists. Special devices enabled a return to be made, in the Brunswick and other patterns, to the more rapid twists originally used.

Whatever devices were adopted to prevent stripping, however perfect the design and material of the equipment employed, two factors stood in the way of any further advance in the evolution of the rifle firing the spherical ball. First, the unsuitability of the sphere itself for projection through a resisting medium, by reason of the large surface which it offered to the air’s resistance and the relatively small mass by means of which it could maintain its flight. Second, the gyroscopic action of the spinning sphere, which limited its effective range in a manner which was probably unrealized until after it had been completely superseded. The sphere, unlike the elongated bullet, which always keeps its axis approximately tangential to its trajectory, maintained throughout flight its spin on its original axis. This did not matter much when ranges were short and trajectories flat; but as greater ranges and loftier trajectories came into use the effect on accuracy of aim became very important. During its descent through the latter part of the trajectory the rifle ball rotated in a plane no longer normal to its direction of flight; “it tended more and more to roll upon the air, and deviated considerably.”119

§

The old Brown Bess, the ¾-inch smooth-bore musket which our armies carried at Waterloo, in the Peninsula, and even at the Crimea, differed in no great respect from the muskets borne by British troops at Ramillies, whose inefficiency was such that it was seriously questioned whether, without the invention of the bayonet, they would have permanently superseded the crossbow of the Middle Ages. The inefficiency of Brown Bess was indeed remarkable. Its standard of accuracy was so low that a trained marksman could only depend on putting one shot in twenty into an eighteen-foot square target at two hundred yards, at which range it was supposed to be effective. Its windage was so great that bullets flew wild from the muzzle; and it is not very surprising that, armed with such a weapon, our infantry should often have been impelled “to resort to the strong and certain thrust of the bayonet, rather than rely for their safety on the chance performances of the clumsy and capricious Brown Bess.” Writers on fire-arms are able to give dozens of tragic and laughable instances of its erratic shooting. In the Kaffir war, for example, our troops had to expend no fewer than eighty thousand rounds to kill or cripple some twenty-five naked savages. After Waterloo a musket was sent down to Woolwich, to ascertain whether its ball would penetrate a French cuirass at two hundred yards’ range. The cuirass was mounted on a pole, the musket aligned and held firmly in a vice; but it was found impossible to secure a hit until, at last, a random shot fired by one of the officers present did take effect! Nevertheless, Brown Bess remained in favour for a number of years after Waterloo. It had a flat and raking trajectory, owing to the very high muzzle velocity imparted to it by the large charge of powder used; from its great windage it loaded easily; and, although rather too heavy for long marches, it was strong enough to bear any amount of hard usage.120

So long as the rifle used a spherical ball it could not claim to rival Brown Bess for general service. As soon as the elongated projectile was developed the supersession of the smooth-bore was a matter of time alone. It is strange, however, in view of the enthusiasm of the Victorian rifleman and the ease with which the fire-arm lent itself to novel experiments, that the evolution of the elongated projectile covered so long a period as it did.

Apart from the fact that cylindrical bars and shot had often been fired from ordnance, it was known that Benjamin Robins himself had tried the experiment of firing egg-shaped projectiles from a rifle with a certain amount of success. The inefficiency of the loose sphere, in the case of the smooth-bore, and of the tightly rammed sphere, in the case of the rifle, were both recognized in the early days of the century. And, while no solution could be found, the problem was generally agreed to be: how to drop the projectile loosely down the barrel, and tighten it so as to absorb the windage when already there.

Two or three English inventors made proposals. In 1823 a Captain Norton, of the 34th Regiment, submitted an elongated projectile with a base hollowed out in such a way as to expand automatically when the pressure of the powder-gas came on it, and thus seal the bore. The idea came to him from an examination of the arrow used by the natives of Southern India with their blow-tube: an examination which revealed that the base of the arrow was formed of elastic lotus-pith, which by its expansion against the cylindrical surface of the tube prevented the escape of air past it. In 1836 Mr. Greener submitted a pointed bullet having a cylindrical cavity in its base in which a conical plug was fixed, expanding the base by a wedging action when under the pressure of the powder gases.121 Had either of these ideas been considered with the attention which it deserved, the development of the rifle in this country might have been more rapid than it was. “By blindly rejecting both of these inventions the authorities deprived England of the honour of having initiated the greatest improvement in small arms.”

It was in France that the elongated projectile waged an eventually successful struggle against the spherical ball, its ancient rival. The French, troubled by the superiority of their Arab enemies in shooting at long range, founded a School of Musketry at Vincennes. In 1828 Captain Delvigne, a distinguished staff officer of that school, established the two main principles on which all succeeding inventors were obliged to rely: one, that in muzzle-loading rifles the projectile must slip down the barrel with a certain windage, so as to admit of easy loading; two, that only elongated projectiles were suited to modern rifles.

Before coming to these two conclusions Delvigne had made important efforts to render the spherical ball as efficient as possible. He had, in particular, proposed to make that part of the barrel near the breech which formed the powder-chamber of slightly smaller diameter than the rest of the barrel; so that a spherical ball, rammed down on it, became indented against its ledge and flattened sufficiently to fill the rifling grooves. By this device quick loading was obtained and the accuracy of aim, it was found, was doubled. Certain practical disadvantages, however, were associated with it: the chamber fouled rapidly, and the ball was frequently distorted and jagged by over-ramming. So in ’33 the Delvigne system, as it was called, was modified by the wrapping of the ball in a greased patch and the attaching of the patch to a “sabot” or wad of wood which was interposed between the ball and the shoulders of the powder-chamber. Rifles thus loaded did good work in Algeria in ’38.

In the meantime Delvigne, admittedly inspired by the writings of Robins, was urging on the authorities the superiority of the elongated ball. He was insistent on the advantages which would accrue from augmenting the mass of the projectile while at the same time making it present to the air during flight its smallest surface. The shape he proposed was that of the present-day rifle bullet, considerably shortened: a bullet with a flat base, cylindrical sides and ogival head, somewhat resembling the form which had been proposed by Sir Isaac Newton as a “solid of least resistance.” After a succession of disappointments and refusals, the inventor had the satisfaction of seeing his bullet accepted. Its advantages over the spherical ball had been made manifest on the proving-ground. It was accepted in combination with the carabine À tige, a rifle invented by a Colonel Thouvenin, in which the Delvigne shouldered chamber was replaced by a small central pillar or anvil, projecting from the breech-end of the bore, against which the bullet was rammed. The powder, when poured into the barrel, collected in the annular space around the pillar. By this arrangement the necessity for the sabot was obviated and the charge of powder, protected by the pillar, was not in danger of being crushed or mealed. In ’46 the new bullet proved its high accuracy and ranging power on active service in Algeria. But the pillar was found liable to bend and distort; and the difficulty in keeping the space round it free from fouling proved to be another of its inherent disadvantages.

And then, in 49 the MiniÉ compound bullet, self-expanding, of the same shape as the Delvigne and utilizing the same principle of an expansive bore as that embodied in Greener’s bullet, was produced. The full value of the rifle was at last obtained. By virtue of the elongated bullet the mass of the projectile could be increased to a large extent without any increase in the cross-sectional area exposed to air resistance. With such a projectile, impelled by a charge whose combustive effect could be accurately gauged owing to the absence of all windage losses, great speed and accuracy were possible. As to power, the only limit imposed was the strength of the barrel and the capacity of the marksman to withstand the reactionary blow due to the projectile’s momentum. But now, not only was rifling advantageous: with the elongated bullet rifling was an absolute necessity. “Rotation,” it was said, “is the soul of the bullet.” Rotation was necessary to impart stability, and to keep the projectile, by virtue of the initial spin acquired, true in its flight throughout the whole trajectory.

In England, where the two-grooved Brunswick still marked the limit of development, the discovery of the MiniÉ weapon and its powers occasioned misgiving and surprise.122 In ’51 some MiniÉ rifles were purchased and issued, as a temporary expedient, to our army. And, interest in the question now becoming general,123 it was resolved to take under government control the future manufacture of military small arms. A commission of officers visited America for the purpose of inspecting the ingenious tools and appliances known to be employed there in the manufacture of rifles; and the features of the various European and American weapons were seriously studied. A government factory was established at Enfield, and with the products of this factory certain of our regiments were armed for service when the Crimean War broke out. The Enfield rifle, as it was called, combined the best features of the MiniÉ with those of other types. It had a three-grooved barrel with a half-turn twist in its length of 39 inches. It was .577 inch in the bore, and fired a bullet whose recessed base was filled with a boxwood instead of an iron cup or plug.

The nation soon obtained value from the new development. The efficiency of the Enfield rifle at the Alma and at Inkerman was attested by the correspondent of The Times, who reported that “it smote the enemy like a destroying angel.” Three years later the Indian Mutiny afforded a still more conclusive proof of the value of this weapon. Though, from the greased cartridges which were used, it served as one of the pretexts for the mutiny, it proved in the sequel a powerful military instrument, and demonstrated both to friend and foe its superiority over the smooth-bore musket with which the rebels were armed. In fact, with the adoption of the Enfield rifle, England found herself in advance even of France; the French, partly perhaps from motives of economy, partly from a desire for symmetry, had retained in their MiniÉ rifle the same calibre as that of their old smooth-bore: indeed, the greater part of the French army rifles were merely converted smooth-bores. In the Enfield a wise reduction of calibre had been made; whereby, while the weight of the rifle was reduced, its strength and the size of the permissible charges, and therefore the range and penetrating power of the projectile were all considerably augmented.

Having once gained the lead, England now took another rapid move forward in the development of the rifle. Though the new standards set by the Enfield were high, expert opinion aimed at something still higher; the Enfield gave variations in range and direction which could not be accounted for by errors in manufacture, nor did the range and penetrative power of the bullet come up to expectations. In these circumstances the government sought the advice of a man whose name was destined to loom large in the story of the subsequent development of ordnance: Mr. Whitworth. Mr. Whitworth was described as the greatest mechanical genius in Europe at that time. Certain it is that, although in the realm of ordnance his name may have been overshadowed to a certain extent by that of his great rival, yet on the broad ground of the influence his inventions exerted on the progress of mechanical science generally, his fame now grows with time. He it was who first swept away the medieval conception of measurement which hitherto had obtained in factories and workshops, and introduced a scientific precision into the manufacture of machines and mechanisms. The true plane surface, as we know it to-day, was unattained before his time; and his contemporaries marvelled at plates of metal prepared by him of so true a surface that, by their mere adhesion, one could be lifted by means of the other. The micrometer was a similar revelation. Men whose minimum of size had hitherto been the thickness of a chalk-line or a simple fraction of an inch, were taught by him to measure the inch to its ten-thousandth part, and even to gauge the expansion of a rod caused by the warmth imparted by the contact of a finger.

Such was the man who made modern artillery possible. To Mr. Whitworth, who knew nothing himself of guns or of gun-making, the government went for advice on the shortcomings of the Enfield rifle. At their request he promptly began an analytical inquiry into the principles underlying the action of rifles and the flight of their projectiles, resolved and urged to discover the secret of the very partial success so far attained. The results of this inquiry, published in ’57, had a great influence on the future of rifled fire-arms and ordnance. Briefly, he discovered that the amount of twist hitherto given to the rifling of gun-barrels had been wholly insufficient to maintain the projectile in its true direction during flight; the weight of the projectile, relatively to its diameter, had been insufficient to give it the necessary momentum to sustain its velocity against the resistance of the air; lastly, the accuracy of manufacture of rifles had been inadequate to the ensuring of a good fit of the bullet in the bore. To prove the truth of these assertions a Whitworth rifle was produced by him which gave better results than any other hitherto made. The form of rifling which the inventor adopted was considered objectionable, and the rifle itself, with its polygonal barrel, was not approved by the authorities; but, instead, the valuable results of Whitworth’s experiments were embodied in the Enfield, to its obvious improvement.

The muzzle-loading rifle had now reached the limit of its development. The rifle was the accepted arm of all the great military powers. But in the case of one of them, Prussia, the principle of breech-loading was already in favour, and it was not long before the progress in mechanical science enabled this principle to prove its superiority over the ancient principle of muzzle-loading. Although in the Prussian needle-gun great difficulties were encountered; although in service its reputation suffered from such defects as the rusting of the needles which pierced the percussion cartridges, the failure of springs, the escape of gases at the breech; yet it was recognized that none of these defects was necessarily inherent in the breech-loading system, and its merits were admitted. With the breech-loader a greater rapidity of fire was always attainable, there was less difficulty in preventing fouling, and, above all, there was the certainty that the powder-charge would be fired to its last effective grain.

In 1864 breech-loading rifles were recommended for the British army, and shortly afterwards they were introduced in the form of converted Enfields.

§

We have seen how the development of field ordnance stimulated the development of the rifle. In turn the attainment of superior range and accuracy by rifled small arms led directly to a corresponding development of field ordnance, designed to recover the loss of its ascendancy. In France, where the logical consequences of the progress in small arms were officially noted on several occasions, Napoleon III, himself an authority on artillery, took the initiative to restore field ordnance to its former relative position. It was in the Crimean War that the enhanced effects of rifle regiments were first seriously felt. Convinced by the protraction of the operations before Sebastopol of the inadequacy of smooth-bore guns, the Emperor caused bronze pieces to be rifled, and these, being sent to Algeria on active service, gave conclusive proof of their increased efficiency. On report of which, all the bronze field pieces in the French army were rifled in accordance with the plans which a M. Treuille de Beaulieu had submitted in 1842, viz. with six shallow rounded grooves in which engaged zinc studs carried on two bands formed on the cylindrical projectile. The gain in power obtained by rifling ordnance was greater even than that obtained from rifling as applied to small arms. For not only did rifling confer the advantages of a more massive projectile more suitably shaped for flight through a resisting medium, but it allowed a large increase in the number of balls which could be discharged in the form of case or shrapnel, and a large increase in the powder-charge which could be carried inside a common shell. An advantage was also gained in respect of that important detail, the fusee or fuze; the rotation of the projectile about a definite axis made it possible to use fuses whose action depended on one definite part of the projectile coming first in contact with the ground or target.124 All these advantages were found to be present in the French field pieces when rifled on the above plan. “And thus,” said an English writer, “at slight expense but too late for use in the Crimean War, France was put in possession of an artillery which, consuming its usual powder and using either round ball or elongated projectiles, proved of immense value in the war against Austria in 1856, when, at Magenta and at Solferino, the case shot from their rifled field-pieces ploughed through the distant masses of opposing infantry and decimated the cavalry as they formed for the attack.”125

In England an almost simultaneous development took place, but on entirely different lines. Let us tell it in the words of Sir Emerson Tennant:

“The fate of the battle of Inkerman in November, 1854, was decided by two eighteen-pounder guns which by almost superhuman efforts were got up late into the field, and these, by their superior range, were effectual in silencing the Russian fire. Mr. William Armstrong was amongst those who perceived that another such emergency could only be met by imparting to field-guns the accuracy and range of the rifle; and that the impediment of weight must be removed by substituting forged instead of cast-iron guns. With his earliest design for the realization of this conception, he waited on the Secretary for War in December, 1854, to propose the enlargement of the rifle musket to the standard of a field gun, and to substitute elongated projectiles of lead instead of balls of cast iron. Encouraged by the Duke of Newcastle, he put together his first wrought-iron gun in the spring of 1855.”126

The manufacture of this gun marked a new era in ordnance. Repeated trials followed its completion; with the result that in 1858 the Armstrong gun was officially adopted for service in the field,—the epoch-making Armstrong gun: a tube made of wrought-iron bar coiled in a closed helix and welded at a white heat into a solid mass; turned to a true cylinder and reinforced by outer tubes shrunk on to it; rifled with a large number of grooves; breech-loading, a powerful screw holding a sliding vent-piece tightly against the face of the breech; firing a lead-coated projectile in whose plastic covering the rifling engaged as soon as it started its passage through the bore; and mounted on a field-carriage in such a way that the gun could recoil up an inclined slide and return by gravity, and in such a way that its motion both for elevating and for traversing was under the accurate control given by screw gearing.

The coming of the Armstrong gun at once revolutionized artillery practice and material in this country. The sum of all the improvements embodied in it was so great that existing material scarcely bore comparison with it. Its accuracy as compared with that of the smooth-bore field piece which it displaced was stated in parliament to be in the ratio of fifty-seven to one. And the effect of its inventor’s achievement was, “that from being the rudest of weapons, artillery has been advanced to be nearly on a par mechanically with the steam engine or the power-loom; and it differs as essentially from the old cast-iron tube dignified with the name of a gun, as the railway train of the present day differs from the stagecoach of our forefathers.”127 A revolutionary invention it certainly was. Yet, like most revolutionary inventions, it relied for its grand effect more on the aggregate effect of the small improvements in its various elements than on the materialization of some new-born idea. The building up of guns in coils was not a new discovery, polygroove rifling was already in use abroad, breech-loading, lead-coated projectiles, elevating screws—all had been known for years. Nor does this fact detract in the least from the fame of Mr. Armstrong in this connection. His greatness lay, surely, in the insight and initiative with which he made use of known forms and combinations, summoning to his aid the new powers placed at his disposal by Whitworth, Nasmyth, Bessemer and their contemporaries in order to evolve a system incomparably superior to anything hitherto achieved.

In England, too, an independent development was at the same time taking place in yet another direction. Mr. Whitworth, having satisfactorily established the principles governing the design of rifles, felt confident of extending them to field and heavy ordnance. Adhering to the muzzle-loading principle and to his hexagonal form of rifling he manufactured, between the years 1854 and 1857, several guns which fired projectiles of from six to twenty-four pounds’ weight with great accuracy and to ranges greater than any yet attained. Events occurred which caused him to be given every encouragement by the government. The attitude of the French in these years was suspicious and unfriendly. Schemes of invasion were openly discussed in their press, and war vessels of various types equipped with armour plate were designed and actually built. Reports of their plans, following closely on the exposures of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, rendered the country increasingly restless and apprehensive as to the value of our offensive and defensive armaments. And then, although the new Armstrong gun was acclaimed as eminently suited for service in the field, doubts had been cast as to whether the principles of its design could be applied satisfactorily to the heaviest ordnance. Other rifled artillery had certainly failed to give the results expected from it. The Lancaster rifled gun, a muzzle-loading gun with a twisted bore of a slightly oval section, had failed lamentably at the Crimea owing to the tendency, according to one account, of the oval projectile to wedge itself against the slightly larger oval of the bore; according to another account, owing to the flames from the powder gases penetrating the interior of the welded shells which had been supplied for it. The breech-loading ordnance of Cavalli had failed the Italians. In Sweden several accidents had occurred with Wahrendorf’s breech-loading pieces. The French system, which had been copied by the majority of the powers, was that which appeared to be giving the least unsatisfactory results.

In these circumstances every encouragement was given Mr. Whitworth to develop ordnance on his own lines. In ’58 a committee on rifled guns was appointed by parliament to examine and report on the relative merits of the various systems in use. The committee quickly set to work. No difficulty was found in eliminating all but two, on which attention was soon concentrated: the Armstrong and the Whitworth. The result of the final investigation was a report in favour of the Armstrong gun, which, as we have already seen, was adopted in the same year for field service. Mr. Armstrong, who had handed over his rights in the gun for the benefit of the nation, was knighted and his services were subsidized for the improvement of rifled ordnance generally. The title of “Engineer to the War Department” was conferred on him, and later he received the further appointment of “Superintendent of the Royal Gun Factory” at Woolwich.

§

The revolution in field guns was closely followed by a corresponding revolution in heavy ordnance. The experience of the Crimean War proved two things: that the development of the shell gun necessitated the provision of armour to protect the flanks of warships; and that the development of armour necessitated a heavy ordnance of a greater power than existing smooth-bore cannon. The shell gun, in fact, induced a rifled ordnance.

The French, who had already found a cheap and sufficiently effective rifled field artillery in the conversion of their smooth-bores on the de Beaulieu principle, merely had to extend this conversion to their heavier pieces. By 1860 they had converted their 30- and 50-pounder cannon in this way, thus enabling them to be used for the discharge of either spherical or elongated projectiles.

Britain, on the other hand, found herself committed to an entirely new and experimental system which could not be applied to existing ordnance; a large outlay of money was thereby involved for new plant and guns; our vast establishment of smooth-bore cast-iron cannon was in danger of being reduced to scrap material. At the same time doubts were expressed whether this new system, whose success as applied to medium pieces was generally admitted, would be found satisfactory when applied to the largest size of ordnance. It was natural, then, that great interest should be centred in what was regarded as a less experimental alternative to the Armstrong system, in case the latter failed. The results obtained by Mr. Whitworth in the manufacture of solid cannon, rifled hexagonally, muzzle-loading and capable of firing hexagonal bolts or, in emergency, spherical balls, were such as to give promise of competing successfully with those obtained from the ordnance officially patronized. To the public the simplicity of his system strongly appealed. Mr. Whitworth himself, far from being deterred by the decision given in favour of his rival, was now an enthusiastic exponent of the constructive principles which he had made his own. Trial succeeded trial, piece after piece was made and tested to destruction. By 1860 a very successful ordnance was evolved at Manchester by him: guns made of homogeneous iron, forged in large masses, and formed of cylindrical tubes forced one over another by means of a known hydraulic pressure—not, as in the Armstrong system, by heating and shrinking. And on the sands at Southport a series of public trials were carried out with these guns, the results of which proved a great advertisement for the Whitworth system. The accuracy of flight of the projectiles was unprecedented, and all records in ranging power were broken by one of the pieces, a 3-pounder, which threw a shot to a distance of 9,688 yards!128

Even if the new Whitworth system were adopted, the utilization of the old smooth-bore cannon which formed the existing national armament of ships and fortresses was not secured. Neither the Armstrong nor the Whitworth system provided an expedient for converting to rifled ordnance the thousands of cast-iron guns in which the defence of the country was invested. Efforts were therefore made to reinforce the old pieces so that, when rifled, they would be sufficiently strong to withstand the greater stresses entailed. Greater stresses in the metal, due to higher chamber pressures of the powder gases, were almost a necessary concomitant of rifling. For, apart from the increase in the size and mass of the projectile and its greater initial resistance to motion, pressures tended to increase in a greater ratio than the size of the pieces themselves; the mass of the projectile increased as the cube, the propulsive force of the gases as the square, of the diameter of the bore; hence to attain a given velocity, the larger the bore the higher the pressure required to propel it with a given type of powder,—other things being equal. No limit, therefore, could be assigned to the strength and power required of heavy ordnance. Moreover a struggle had begun in ’59, with the building of the Gloire and Warrior, which was already foreshadowing tremendous developments both of guns and of armour.

The experiences of America in this connection were not encouraging. The civil war served as an incentive to the Americans to rifle all their large calibre guns as quickly as possible. In ’62 large numbers of cast-iron cannon were rifled and reinforced by external hoops of iron. The results were deplorable. A great number of pieces burst; and experience made it clear that “a gun made up of a single homogeneous casting soon reaches a limit of resistance to internal pressure beyond which the addition of extra metal has little or no effect.” Two improvements must be mentioned as having more than a passing effect on the progress of ordnance in America: first, the adoption of compressed and perforated powder which, by prolonging the combustion period, caused a more even distribution of stresses over all sections of the barrel; second, the casting of guns hollow and the chilling of their interiors, so as to form on the inside of the piece a hardened stratum on which the outer parts of the casting contracted as they slowly cooled, thus giving it support. But in spite of these inventions it became apparent that cast iron was in its nature unsuited as a material for rifled ordnance.

In England a safer method of conversion was followed. Guns were bored out, on a scheme proposed in ’63 by Major Palliser, and accurately turned tubes of coiled wrought iron were fitted in them, which were afterwards rifled. The resulting pieces consisted, then, of a wrought-iron inner tube, supported by a surrounding cast-iron jacket against which, on firing, the inner tube expanded. Thus converted, the old smooth-bores were enabled to develop an energy far in excess of their original limit, and so to prolong for some years their period of usefulness.

The conversion of the cast-iron guns was seen to be only a temporary expedient. Just as the smooth-bore cannon, after a last effort to overcome iron plates with spherical solid shot of the largest calibre, withdrew from the competition; so, as the thickness of armour increased, the converted cast-iron cannon, with its special armour-piercing shot of chilled iron, soon reached the limit of its power and gave place to the rifled artillery of wrought iron or steel.

And now, rifled ordnance having definitely supplanted the smooth-bore, a new struggle arose between the various systems of gunmaking, and more especially between the two rival methods of loading: by the breech and by the muzzle. The prognostications of those who had doubted whether the latter method was suitable for large ordnance were seen to be partially justified. Other nations had already relapsed into muzzle-loading, impressed by the complexity and weakness of the breech-loading systems of Cavalli, Wahrendorf and other inventors. Besides ourselves only the Prussians, the originators of the breech-loading rifled musket in its modern form, continued to trust in breech-loading ordnance. The Italians, following the example of the French and Americans, abandoned the system. “Thus,” said an English authority in ’62, “while, after more than four centuries of trial, other nations were giving up the moveable breech, ... we are still going from plan to plan in the hope of effecting what will, even if successful in closing the breech, be scarcely safe with the heavy charges necessary for smashing armour plates.”129

In the following year, ’63, the committee appointed to carry out the competitive trials between Whitworth and Armstrong guns, reported that the many-grooved system of rifling, with its lead-coated projectiles and complicated breech-loading arrangements, entailing the use of tin caps for obturation and lubricators for the rifling grooves, was far inferior for the general purposes of war to both of the muzzle-loading systems tried. This view received early and practical confirmation from a report sent to the Admiralty by Vice-Admiral Sir Augustus Kuper, after the bombardment of Kagosima. In that action several accidents occurred owing to the Armstrong guns being fired with their breech-blocks not properly screwed up. The guns were accordingly withdrawn from service and replaced by muzzle-loaders. In 1864 England reverted definitely to muzzle-loading ordnance, which, in the face of violent controversy and in spite of the gradual reconversion of her rivals to the breech-loading principle, she maintained for the next fifteen years. Whitworth’s system was adopted in the main, but the hexagonal form of bore and projectile was avoided. Studded projectiles were approved, the pieces being rifled with a few broad shallow grooves not unlike those used by the French. England at last possessed a muzzle-loading sea ordnance, characterized by ease and rapidity of loading, accuracy, cheapness, and capacity for firing, in emergency, spherical shot as well as rifled projectiles.

What was the effect of this retrogression upon the status of our naval armaments?

It seems frequently to have been held that, in view of the eventual victory of the breech-loading gun, the policy of reverting to muzzle-loading was wrong, and that this country was thereby placed at a serious disadvantage to her rivals. Several good reasons existed, however, for the preference given to muzzle-loading ordnance at that time. The accidents with removable breeches had been numerous and demoralizing. Muzzle-loading guns, besides the advantages which they possessed of strength, solidity and simplicity of construction, offered important advantages in ease and rapidity of loading—particularly in the case of turret or barbette guns, where “outside loading” was a great convenience. On the other hand the principal deficiency of the muzzle-loader, namely, the large windage required with studded projectiles, was now eliminated by the invention of the cupped “gas check,” a copper disc attached to the rear of the projectile which, on discharge, expanded automatically and sealed the bore.

Expert opinion confirmed the wisdom of the government policy. Experience, in the Franco-Prussian war and elsewhere, confirmed the views of the experts. “Reviewing the action of the artillerists who decided to adopt muzzle-loaders, with the greater experience we now possess it seems that they were right in their decision at the time it was first made; but there was too much hesitation in coming back to breech-loaders when new discoveries and great progress in powder quite altered conditions.”130 In fact, once having abandoned the disparaged system, the country was with difficulty persuaded by the professionals to retrace its steps. In the end, ordnance followed small arms; the researches of Captain Noble at Elswick proved conclusively to the world at large the necessity for a reversion to breech-loading; and in 1880 the muzzle-loading gun was finally superseded by a greatly improved form of breech-loader.

In 1880 the state of knowledge and the conditions under which ordnance was manufactured were certainly altered from those of ’64. The struggle between guns and armour begun with the Gloire and Warrior had continued. In the presence of the new powers of mechanical science, artillerists and shipbuilders had sought to plumb the possibilities of offensive and defensive elements in warship design. Guns influenced armour, armour reacted on guns; both revolutionized contemporary naval architecture. It was in the effort to aggrandize the power of guns that Noble discovered that, with the existing powders and with the short muzzle-loading gun, a natural limit of power was soon reached. Better results could only be obtained, he showed, by the adoption of slow-burning powder and a longer gun; by the avoidance of the sudden high chamber pressure which resulted from the small-grained powder, and the substitution for it of a chamber pressure which would rise gradually to a safe maximum and then suffer only a gradual reduction as the gases expanded behind the moving projectile. The work done by the gases on the projectile could by this means be enormously increased. But, for this result, larger powder-charges were required; and these larger charges of slow-burning powder were found to require much larger chambers than those embodied in existing guns; in short, the new conditions called for a new shape of gun. Long guns, having powder chambers of larger diameter than that of the bore, were necessary, and these could not conveniently be made muzzle-loading.

So a return to the breech-loading ordnance became inevitable, and the change was made. The old Armstrong moveable vent-piece was avoided, however, in the new designs; of the two alternative breech-closing systems in use, viz. the wedge system of Krupp and the “interrupted screw” system of the French, the latter was adopted. A steel tube, rifled on the polygroove system, formed the body of the piece, and this was strengthened by hoops of iron or steel shrunk on its exterior. The new gun yielded a very great increase of power. Muzzle-loading guns were at once displaced, in the projected programme of new battleships, for the new type of ordnance, and a further series of revolutionary changes in ship armament at once took place. Other nations had already augmented the length and power of their guns. By the adoption of the improved breech-loading ordnance, Great Britain, who for the last few years had been falling behind her rivals, not only drew level with them but definitely took the lead in the power of her heavy ordnance: a lead which from that time to this she has successfully maintained.