Strains on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence 167appeared on the battlefield. Their main use was to defend and attack
fortresses, and on shipboard.
This situation was transformed by a Swiss engineer and gunfounder
named Jean Maritz (1680–1743), who entered French employ at
Lyons in 1734. He saw that it might be possible to achieve far more
accurate and uniform results by casting cannon as a solid piece of
metal and then boring the barrel out afterwards. It took Maritz time to
develop a boring machine larger, more stable, and much more pow
erful than any previously known; and efforts to keep the new method
secret, though not effective for long, did suffice to obscure the record
of exactly when and how well he succeeded. By the 1750s, however,
his son and successor, also named Jean Maritz (1711–90), had per
fected the necessary machinery. In 1755 he became inspector general
of gunfoundries and forges with the mission of installing his cannon-
boring machines in all the royal arsenals of France.^29 Other European
states soon became interested, and by the 1760s the new technique
had been introduced as far afield as Russia.^30 A similar machine was
set up in Great Britain by John Wilkinson in 1774.^31
The advantages of a straight and uniform bore were enormous.
Consistently true bores meant that gunners did not have to learn the
vagaries of each individual weapon, and could expect to hit their target
time and again. Accurately centered bores also made for safer guns
since the gunmetal was of the same strength and thickness on every
side of the explosion. Most important of all, guns could be made
lighter and more maneuverable without losing power. These advan
tages arose mainly from the fact that a bored-out barrel allowed a far
closer fit between cannonball and gun tube than had been considered
safe hitherto, when minor irregularities in the interior walls of indi
vidual cannon, arising from variation in each mold, had required a
generous space (“windage”) between shot and barrel to avoid disas
trous jamming. By reducing windage, a smaller powder charge could
be made to accelerate a shot more rapidly than when more of the
expanding gases had been free to escape around the projectile.
- Grande Encyclopédie, s.v. Maritz, Jean; P. M. J. Conturie, Histoire de la fonderie
nationale de Ruelle, 17.50—1940, et des anciennes fonderies de canons de fer de la Marine
(Paris, 1951), pp. 128–35. - In 1763 the Prussians imported a Dutch artificer to set up cannon-boring ma
chines at the armaments works in Spandau. He was captured by the Russians when they
occupied Berlin in 1760 and persuaded to perform the same service for them at Tula.
Cf. Rehfeld, “Die preussische Rüstungsindustrie unter Friedrich dem Grossen,” p. 11. - Clive Trebilcock, “Spin-off in British Economic History: Armaments and In
dustry, 1760–1914,” Economic History Review 22 (1969): 477.