that at first the grooves were made straight, with the object of admitting a tight-fitting bullet and relieving the effects of fouling, and that the virtue of spiral grooving was subsequently discovered by accident. But this theory is unsupported. The earliest known rifle barrels have spiral grooving. The amount of turn varied in old rifles from a half or three-quarters turn to one turn in two to three feet. The form and depth of the grooving and the number of grooves also greatly varied.
Historical Development of Military Rifles.—For the chief infantry firearms that preceded the modern military ride, see Gun, Arms and Armour (firearms), Arquebus, &c. Rifles were at first used for amusement. There are, however, instances of their occasional employment in war in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1631 the landgrave of Hesse had a troop of riflemen. Ten years later Maximilian of Bavaria had several troops armed with rifled arquebuses. Louis XIII. armed his bodyguard with rifles. Napoleon withdrew the ride from those of his troops to whom it had been issued during the wars of the Republic, nor did the French make any considerable use of it again until 1830, when the Chasseurs d’Orléans were armed with it for the invasion of Algeria. The British learnt the value of rifles during the American War of Independence, when the government subsidized continental Jägers armed with rifles to oppose the American riflemen. After the war these corps disappeared, and though they are now represented by the 60th (King’s Royal) Rifles, the senior rifle corps in the British Army is the Ride Brigade, raised in 1800 as the 95th Regiment and armed with a flint-lock weapon known as “Baker’s Rifle,” which weighed 912 ℔. The barrel was 212 ft. long, its calibre 20-bore, with seven grooves making a quarter-turn in its length. A small wooden mallet was at first supplied with this rifle to make the ball enter the barrel, and it was loaded with great difficulty. In 1826 Delvigne, a French infantry officer, invented a breech with abrupt shoulders on which the spherical bullet was rammed down until it expanded and filled the grooves. The objection was that the deformed bullet had an erratic flight. Delvigne’s system was subsequently improved upon by Thouvenin, who introduced into the breech an iron stem, upon which the bullet, now of conical form, rested, and was expanded by a sharp blow with the iron ramrod when loading. In William IV.’s reign the Brunswick percussion rifle[1] was introduced into the British rifle regiments. Its weight with bayonet was 11 ℔ 512 oz.; length of barrel, 2 ft. 6 in., with two grooves making one turn in the length of the barrel; weight of spherical belted bullet, 557 grs.; diameter, ·704 in.; charge of powder, 212 drs. This rifle was not easily loaded, soon fouled, and shot wild beyond 400 yds.
In 1835 W. Greener produced a new expansive bullet, an oval ball, a diameter and a half in length, with a flat end, perforated, in which a cast metallic taper plug was inserted. The explosion of the charge drove the plug home, expanded the bullet, filled the grooves and prevented windage. A trial of the Greener bullet in August 1835 proved successful. The range and accuracy of the rifle were retained, while the loading was made as easy as with a smooth-bore musket. The invention was, however, rejected by the military authorities on the ground that the bullet was a compound one. In 1852 the Government awarded Minié, a Frenchman, £20,000 for a bullet of the same principle adopted into the British service. In 1857 Greener received a belated reward of £1000 for “the first public suggestion of the principle of expansion.” The Minié bullet contained an iron cup in a cavity at the base of the bullet. In 1851 a rifled musket of the Minié pattern was introduced into the British army, and, though not generally issued, was used in the Kaffir War of 1851, and in the Crimea. Its weight with bayonet was 10 ℔ 834 oz., length of barrel 3 ft. 3 in., with four grooves making one turn in 72 in.; diameter of bore ·702 inch; charge of powder 212 drs., and sighted from 100 to 1000 yds. The form of its bullet was at first conoidal, afterwards changed to cylindro-conoidal, with a hemispherical iron cup. In 1855 the Enfield rifle, having in a series of trials competed favourably with the Minié and Lancaster rifles, was introduced into the British army; it was used during the latter part of the Crimean war, having there replaced the Minié rifle and the percussion musket, and remained the general weapon of the entire infantry until the introduction of the breech-loader in the year 1867. This rifle weighed, with bayonet, 9 ℔ 3 oz., barrel 39 in.; diameter of bore ·577 in.; three-grooved, with one turn in 78 in. It fired a bullet of cylindro-conoidal form with hollow base, weighing 530 grains, made up into cartridges and lubricated as for the Minié rifle, adapted to this rifle by Pritchett, who was awarded £1000 by the Government. This bullet was wrapped in greased paper round the cylindrical part half-way up its length. Short rifles of the same pattern, with five-grooved barrels 2 ft. 9 in. long and a sword bayonet, were supplied to the 60th Rifles and to the Rifle Brigade. Two small carbines of the same principle were at this time introduced for the cavalry and artillery, also a rifled pistol.
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| Fig. 1.—Snider Rifle. (Text Book of Small Arms, by permission of the Controller, H.M. Stationery Office.) |
In 1854, on the suggestion of General Lord Hardinge, Sir Joseph Whitworth, the first mechanician of the day, began to consider the subject of rifling, and after a long series of experiments the Whitworth rifle was produced with hexagonal bore, ·45-in. calibre, and with one turn in 20 in. It was tried at Hythe in 1857, and completely defeated the Enfield rifle up to 1800 yds. upon a fixed rest. This trial and Whitworth’s experiments proved the advantages of a sharp twist, a smaller bore, and elongated projectile; but Whitworth’s rifle was never adopted into the Government service, probably because the hexagonal rifling wore badly, and owing to the difficulty of equal mechanical perfection in all similar rifles and ammunition. Several improvements were subsequently made in the sighting, grooving and some other details of the Enfield rifle. In 1855 a boxwood plug to the bullet was used.
Between 1857 and 1861 four breech-loading carbines were experimentally introduced in the cavalry—viz. Sharp’s, Terry’s, Green’s, and Westley-Richards’. Sharp’s and other breech loading carbines and also Spencer repeating carbines were used by the Federal cavalry in the American Civil War. The general adoption of the breech-loading principle may be said to date from 1867. The Prussians were the first to see its great advantages and about 1841 had adopted the celebrated needle-gun (q.v.), a bolt-action weapon. In 1864 and 1866 committees were appointed by the British War Office to report on breech-loading arms, and after protracted experiments, Jacob Snider’s method of conversion of the muzzle-loading Enfield to a breech loader (fig. 1) was adopted, with the metallic cartridge-case improved in 1867 by Colonel Boxer, R.A. All available Enfield rifles were thus converted, and new arms made with steel barrels instead of iron. Great Britain was the first to adopt for her army a breech-loading
- ↑ The percussion principle, invented by the Rev. Alexander John Forsyth (1768–1843) in 1805, was not accepted for military arms until the introduction of this rifle. A small and belated money grant was made to Forsyth in 1843. See Major-General A. J. F. Reid’s memoir of Forsyth (1910).
