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 an182 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 wet183 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 spiral184 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 Z?llner, 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.”

185 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

186 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 definite187 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 go?t 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
BULLET MOULD

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 those188 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.

189 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 J?gers, 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

RIFLEMAN PRESENTING

(From Ezekiel Baker’s Rifled Guns, A.D. 1813.)

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 twist190 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 the191 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 unrealized192 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 ?-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 raking193 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 country194 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 of195 disappointments and refusals, the inventor had the satisfaction of seeing his bullet accepted. Its advantages over the spherical ball had been m............