Industrialization of War, 1840–84 231other hand, the three initial battles of Alma, Balaclava, and Inkerman,
which cooped the Russians up in Sevastopol, were rehearsals for the
Prussian victory over Austria at Kôniggràtz (1866) in the sense that
superior rifled handguns, newly issued to French and British infantry,
gave them a decisive edge over the Russians, who still carried old-
fashioned muskets. The difference boiled down to this: the new rifles
had an effective range of about 1,000 yards as against the 200 yards
within which smoothbore muskets could fire effectively.
The advantages of rifles had long been familiar to European gun
smiths, who discovered as early as the end of the fifteenth century that
a rifled gunbarrel, by imparting spin to the bullet, could assure a
smooth flight through the air. Smooth flight, in turn, gave superior
range and accuracy. But rifles cost more to make and were slow to fire,
since it was necessary to force the soft lead to shape itself tightly to the
rifling by hammering the bullet down through the barrel. This took
both time and care and was unsuited to the confusion of battle. A few
specialized sharpshooters, used mainly as skirmishers, had been
equipped with rifles in European armies since the sixteenth century.
But since victory and defeat depended on the rate of fire, the main
body of infantry could not take advantage of rifles’ superior range.
This long-standing technical situation was transformed in 1849
when a French army officer, Captain Claude Etienne Minié, patented
an elongated bullet with a hollowed-out base that could be dropped
through the bore (just as spherical musket balls had been dropped for
centuries) but which nevertheless expanded to take the rifling when
the force of gases from the exploding powder spread the flanged base
tightly against the inside of the gun barrel. The Minié bullet had to be
inserted into the rifle barrel with its nose pointing upward. But except
for this refinement, the procedure for loading and firing was the same
as for the old smoothbores. Minimal change in routine made the
improvement easy to adopt. Accordingly, the French experimented
with the captain’s invention at once, and made it standard in 1857 after
it had proved its value in the Crimea. The British, for their part,
bought patent rights in 1851 and equipped their Crimean regiments
with rifles, thereby assuring superiority even against the vaunted Rus
sian army.^11
The lesson was not lost on other European armies. The Prussians,
- Howard L. Blackmore, British Military Fire-arms, 1650–1850 (London, 1961),
pp. 229–33; O. F. G. Hogg, The Royal Arsenal: Its Background, Origin and Subsequent
History (London, 1963), 2:736–40; James E. Hicks, Notes on French Ordnance, 1717—
1936 (Mt. Vernon, N.Y., 1938), p. 24.