(^238) Chapter Seven
In 1850s and 1860s, imperfect knowledge of the molecular struc
tures of steel made it impossible to cast guns that were uniform and
unflawed. The German steelmaker, Alfred Krupp of Essen, the first to
make the attempt, met with many disappointments and obstacles
along the way before the quality of his guns achieved its decisive
vindication in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Before then, the
greatest private gunmaker of Europe was William Armstrong. He was
a Newcastle manufacturer of hydraulic machinery before the Crimean
War and got into the armaments business almost as casually as Bes
semer had discovered his process for making steel.
Reading in a London club about how British troops had saved the
day at the Battle of Inkerman by bringing two field artillery pieces to
bear on the enemy after overcoming enormous difficulties in getting
their ponderous pieces into firing position, Armstrong is said to have
remarked that it was “time military engineering was brought up to the
level of current engineering practice.”^26 He promptly sketched the
design of a breech-loading artillery piece and proceeded to manufac
ture a prototype.^27 Tests in 1857 showed its superior accuracy to
muzzle-loading smoothbores.
By this time the Crimean War was over, but the Mutiny in India
(1857–58) commanded so much public attention in Great Britain that
a sense of urgency about technological improvements in weaponry
continued to prevail. Armstrong’s gun was, accordingly, approved by
appropriate authorities. Through a deal arranged in 1859 he gave his
patents to the government and accepted appointment as “Engineer for
Rifled Ordnance,” with a salary of £2,000 per annum and a knight
vivid if perhaps incomplete and self-serving account of how he made his discovery.
Theodore A. Wertime, The Coming of Age of Steel (London, 1961) offers an excellent
account of metallurgical history, blessedly accessible to nontechnical readers. For resis
tance to the use of steel guns, the Prussian case is the most telling. Cf. W. A. Boelke,
Krupp und die Hohenzollern in Dokumenten (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), pp. 106, 123.
- J. D. Scott, Vickers: A History (London, 1962), p. 25.
- Instead of being cast in one piece, as big guns had been since the fifteenth
century, Armstrong’s gun was built around a core, either by winding iron strips (eventu
ally steel wire) around the barrel lining, usually of steel, or by “sweating” hoops of iron
around the core, to build the gun up in a series of layers. “Sweating” refers to the
practice of heating a hoop of metal to make it expand, and then slipping it over the
already assembled parts of the gun. The hot hoop shrank as it cooled, but not back to its
room temperature dimensions. Instead, a lasting internal tension squeezed the exterior
band tightly against the interior layers, thus creating a force to oppose the expansive
force of a powder explosion inside the gun. In this ingenious way a gun could be made
stronger for a given weight than anything that could be fashioned out of a homogene
ously cast block of metal. Armstrong’s method of gunmaking had the additional advan
tage of allowing a rapid increase in size, since it was feasible to manufacture and
assemble component parts of guns much too big to cast in a single piece.