(^236) Chapter Seven
1854 decided to rebore their existing stock of muskets to make them
rifles and invest in Minié bullets—a shift that required a mere two
years to complete!
Yet the Prussian king and his military advisers were sufficiently
convinced of the superiority of the breech-loading design to perse
vere. Efforts to hasten the rate of manufacture by converting three
state arsenals to the production of the new guns increased output to
about 22,000 per annum. As a result, in 1866, when Dreyse’s “needle
guns,” as they are often called, met their first and spectacular test in
battle against the Austrians, the new weapons had only just become
available to each and every unit of the Prussian army. It had taken a
total of twenty-six years to complete the change from muzzle-loaders.
No wonder, under such circumstances, that governments had left
handgun designs unchanged, save for trivial details, since the sev
enteenth century.^20 By comparison, in 1863, four years after it had
started production, the Enfield arsenal turned out 100,370 rifles at a
time when no special emergency required extra effort;^21 and when
France (1866) and Prussia (1869) decided to reequip their armies with
new rifles, it took each government a mere four years to complete the
process, despite the long months needed to design and install the
necessary new machines.^22
Mass production thus came to Europe’s small arms business be
- Dennis Showalter, Railroads and Rifles, pp. 81–82, 95–98; Curt Jany, Geschichte
der Königlich Preussischen Armee (Berlin, 1928–37) 4:199–202. - John D. Goodman, “The Birmingham Gun Trade,” in Samuel Timmins, ed.,
History of Birmingham and the Midland Hardware District (London, 1866), p. 415. In
that same year, the “trade” produced 460,140 gun barrels in Birmingham and 210,181
in London, of which most were sold overseas and only 19,263 were proved and ac
cepted for government use. - Napoleon III reacted to Prussia’s victory over Austria by ordering a new arsenal
built at Puteaux in August 1866, capable of making 360,000 new chassepôt rifles
annually. By 1870 over a million of the new rifles were in stock, according to Louis
César Alexandre Randon, Mémoires (Paris, 1877), 2:236–42. This extraordinary feat
was, however, only achieved by calling on gunmakers in Birmingham, Liège, and Bres
cia to supplement Puteaux’s output. Cf. François Crouzet, “Recherches sur la produc
tion d’armement en France, 1815–1913,” Révue historique 251 (1974): 54. Prussia fixed
on a new rifle model, the Mauser, in 1869– It could not be manufactured before the war
with France broke out. Nevertheless, the new weapon was ready for issue to the now
much enlarged German army in 1873. For the acceptance of American machines in
Germany after 1869 see Ernst Barth, Entwicklungslimen der deutschen Maschinenbauin-
dustrie von 1870 bis 1914 (Berlin, 1973), pp. 48–49. The Austrians went over to the
“American system” of automated manufacture of small arms after 1862, according to
Gunther Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette, Ind., 1976), p. 43.
For Russia see J. G. Purves, “Nineteenth-Century Russia and the Revolution in Military
Technology,” in J. G. Purves and D. A. West, eds., War and Society in the Nineteenth-
Century Russian Empire (Toronto, 1972), pp. 7–22.