240 Chapter Sevenin a noisy crossfire of rival claims, the committee recommended that
the government terminate the contract with Elswick and again procure
artillery exclusively from the Woolwich arsenal, as had been the prac
tice before 1859. The arsenal staff was instructed to develop new gun
designs, using the best features of the dozen or so diverse types that
had been presented in the competition.^30
In the event, Woolwich experts opted for a French design that
sought to combine the advantages of rifling with those of muzzle-
loading by fitting lugs attached to the sides of the projectile into spiral
grooves cut into the gun barrel. As with the Minié rifles, this had the
great advantage of requiring minimal change in existing guns and drill.
A cannon needed only an inner lining, grooved to fit the lugs of the
new projectiles, to be converted from an old-fashioned smoothbore
into the new rifled artillery. The French and British armies accordingly
retained their muzzle-loaders for a full decade after the Prussian artil
lery began to use Krupp’s breech-loading steel guns. On the other
hand, the two western powers engaged in a strenuous effort to build
bigger and more powerful naval guns. State monopoly of manufacture
for the armed forces in France and Britain did not, therefore, lead to
stability in heavy weaponry. Their rivalry at sea and the restless seesaw
between gunfire and ships’ armor saw to that.
Moreover, though France prohibited private manufacture of artil
lery for export until 1885,^31 in Great Britain, after he resigned from
his official post in 1863, Armstrong, like his rival Whitworth, was
entirely at liberty to offer Elswick’s wares to anyone who could afford
to pay for them. Krupp, whose breech-loading steel artillery design
had been unveiled to an admiring world at the Great Exhibition in
London (1851), competed with the two English gunmakers. Krupp
sold his first guns to Egypt in 1855. An order from the Prussian War
Ministry for three hundred steel breech-loaders followed in 1858; but
he really began to cash in only after 1863, when large Russian orders
came his way. Armstrong and Whitworth, for their part, profited
handsomely by selling guns to the Americans during the Civil War.
fame was the invention of ways to shape metal far more accurately than had been
possible before. But his prototype guns achieved their high performance only by
straining the technical proficiency of his shop to the limit.- Cf. Peter Padfield, Guns at Sea (New York, 1973), pp. 174–76; Ian V. Hogg, A
History of Artillery (London, 1974), pp. 59–70; O. F. G. Hogg, Royal Arsenal 2:773–78,
812–14; Charles E. Caldwell and John Headlam, The History of the Royal Artillery from
the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, 2 vols. (Woolwich, n.d.), 1:151 ff. - Comité des Forges de France, La sidérurgie française, 1864–1914 (Paris, n.d.),
p. 310.