october 2019 G&A 69FOR THE LAST 150 YEARS OR SO, soldiers have
been routinely armed with rifled arms. Today, it’s hard
to imagine a time when this wasn’t so. Up until the
middle of the 19th century, the rifle was primarily a
specialist’s tool carried by elite units. The men who
composed these outfits were chosen not only for their
superior marksmanship, but for their higher intelli-
gence, their ability to improvise and superior physical
condition. They were a cut above the average infantry-
man who was armed with the simpler, less demanding
musket. Militaries, always mindful of the bottom line,
were not about to trust expensive rifles with anyone
but the best, nor were they willing to assume the cost
of the more extensive training required to produce any
more top-notch riflemen than were absolutely needed.
Generally speaking, in the formative days of
military riflery the main method of engaging rifling
was to use a patched ball, though there were early
efforts with the British Baker rifle to actually hammer
a naked bullet down the bore. This technique was
discarded as being too time consuming and detrimen-
tal to good accuracy, as the user’s arm could become
shaky after going through the laborious process.
Loading a patched ball took considerably longer
time than charging a smoothbore with a paper car-
tridge. A trained infantryman could get off about three
shots per minute, whereas a rifleman would be lucky
to load and fire one round in that period of time.
British riflemen were issued with unpatched bullets so
that in a pinch they could get operational if necessary.
The goal then was to figure out some way to allow
a soldier to load and fire a rifle as fast as he could
a musket and still maintain superior accuracy. The
obvious solution would be to load a bullet that had
enough windage to allow it to be rammed down easily
and somehow engage the rifling when seated or fired.
The initial entry into the expanding-bullet sweep-
stakes was provided in 1832 by Captain John Norton
of the British 34th Regiment of Foot who began his
experiments in England after serving in India. Suppos-
edly, based on the projectiles he had seen used by Indi-
ans in blowguns, Norton came up with a cylindrical
bullet with a hollow cavity that ran almost the entire
length of the bullet, and which contained a powder
charge. Captain Norton submitted his invention to the
British Select Committee on Firearms who rejected it
out of hand, commenting, “A spherical ball was the
only shape of projectile adopted for military purposes.”
In the meantime, French designers were coming up
with their own schemes. One, contrived by Captain
Henri-Gustave Delvigne, involved a round bullet
that could be expanded on a ledge above the powder
chamber in the breech by several thrusts of a heavy
ramrod. It worked fine and was further improved
upon by Lieutenant Colonel Pontcharra who added
a patched, wooden sabot beneath the ball to reduce
deformation. The system, called the armes à chambre
rétrécie, was adopted by the French military for use
in several arms including a hefty 20mm rampart gun.
The author experimented with this arrangement and
found it to work quite well, though loading was still
not as fast as with a smoothbore.
We now return to England where, in 1837, the
Board of Ordnance had decided to retire the venerable
British Baker service rifle in favor of another muz-
zle-loader: the Brunswick. Besides being Britain’s first
percussion service arm, the Brunswick fired a patched
round ball girdled by a belt that mechanically fit into a
pair of rifling grooves within the barrel. Like the Baker,
it was a short arm intended primarily to be issued
to the 95th and 60th Rifle regiments, but some also
found their way into militia, and even the Royal Navy.RIFLE
FUTURE
THE BRITISH PATTERN 1851 MINIƒ WAS THE FIRST
GENERAL-ISSUE RIFLE TO SEE WIDESPREAD USE IN BATTLE.THOUGH ITS SERVICE LIFE WAS SHORT, IT PROVED TO BE
ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ARMS IN HISTORY.WORDS BY GARRY JAMES | PHOTOS BY JILL MARLOW