In 1800 a rifle corps was raised by the British government from the old 95th Regiment. As the result of competitive trials the rifle made by Ezekiel Baker, a gunmaker of Whitechapel, was adopted: taking spherical balls of twenty to the pound, and having a barrel 30 inches long, rifled with two grooves twisted one-quarter of a turn. This degree of twist was certainly much less than that used in French, German and American rifles, which as a rule had three-quarters or a whole turn in them; but Baker found that so great a twist caused stripping of the balls; so, as the accuracy of the lower twist was as great as that of the higher up to a range of 300 yards, and as it required a relatively smaller charge, gave smaller chamber pressures and caused less fouling of the barrel than its competitors, it was accepted. There was a strong opinion at the time in favour of the larger twist as universally used by the more expert foreign marksmen; and this opinion was justified by experience.[118] The quarter-turn twist might give sufficient accuracy at low ranges, but as the skill of the riflemen increased longer ranges were attempted; and then it was found that sufficient accuracy was unattainable with the approved weapon. Rifles having a larger twist were therefore made by rival gunmakers and, the results of shooting matches giving incontestable evidence of their superiority, a demand arose for their supply to the army riflemen. Accordingly in 1839 the Brunswick rifle was adopted for the British army. The new weapon had two deep grooves twisted a whole turn in the length of the barrel, in which grooves studs, cast on the ball and designed to prevent stripping, were made to engage.
This was the last stage of the evolution of the rifle firing a spherical ball. So long as the spherical ball was retained, spiral grooving offered relatively small advantages over straight grooving; straight grooving offered small advantages over the best smooth-bore muskets. The tedious loading of these rifles and the inefficiency of the system by which windage was eliminated by the force of ramming, are sufficiently set forth by the various writers on early fire arms; and there is small wonder that the value of rifles as military weapons was seriously questioned by the highest professional opinion of the time. The charge of powder had to be carefully varied according to the state of the weather and the foulness of the piece. Care had to be taken that all the grains of the charge poured into it went to the breech end and did not stick to the sides of the barrel. Patches of leather or fustian were carried, in which the ball was wrapped on loading, to absorb windage, lubricate the rifling, and prevent the “leading” of the barrel and the wear which would ensue if a naked ball were used. “Place the ball,” says Ezekiel Baker, “upon the greased patch with the neck or castable, where it is cut off from the moulds, downwards, as generally there is a small hole or cavity in it, which would gather the air in its flight.” The ball, a good tight fit, had to be rammed, in its surrounding patch, right down to the powder: for, if not rammed properly home, an air-space would be left and the barrel would perhaps burst on discharge; at the least, would give an inaccurate flight to the ball. If the barrel were at all worn, double or treble patches were necessary. To loosen the filth which collected in the barrel, and which sometimes prevented the ball from being either rammed or withdrawn, water had to be poured down; not infrequently urine was used.
All sizes and shapes of groove were given to the early rifle, and their number depended largely upon caprice or superstition. Seven, for instance, was a number frequently chosen on account of its mystic properties; in Scloppetaria an attempt is made to prove that an odd number has an advantage over an even. So, also, various degrees of twist were used. But in respect of this the evolution followed a definite course. The pitch of the twist necessarily bore a certain relationship to muzzle velocity. With the earliest rifles a fairly rapid twist was given, being rendered possible by the small muzzle velocities employed, and indeed being rendered necessary to ensure stability to the flight of the ball. Then, with the endeavours made, at the end of the eighteenth century, to use higher charges and thereby to extend their range, higher muzzle velocities came into use, and the danger of stripping was then only prevented by the use of low twists. Special devices enabled a return to be made, in the Brunswick and other patterns, to the more rapid twists originally used.
Whatever devices were adopted to prevent stripping, however perfect the design and material of the equipment employed, two factors stood in the way of any further advance in the evolution of the rifle firing the spherical ball. First, the unsuitability of the sphere itself for projection through a resisting medium, by reason of the large surface which it offered to the air’s resistance and the relatively small mass by means of which it could maintain its flight. Second, the gyroscopic action of the spinning sphere, which limited its effective range in a manner which was probably unrealized until after it had been completely superseded. The sphere, unlike the elongated bullet, which always keeps its axis approximately tangential to its trajectory, maintained throughout flight its spin on its original axis. This did not matter much when ranges were short and trajectories flat; but as greater ranges and loftier trajectories came into use the effect on accuracy of aim became very important. During its descent through the latter part of the trajectory the rifle ball rotated in a plane no longer normal to its direction of flight; “it tended more and more to roll upon the air, and deviated considerably.”[119]
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The old Brown Bess, the ¾-inch smooth-bore musket which our armies carried at Waterloo, in the Peninsula, and even at the Crimea, differed in no great respect from the muskets borne by British troops at Ramillies, whose inefficiency was such that it was seriously questioned whether, without the invention of the bayonet, they would have permanently superseded the crossbow of the Middle Ages. The inefficiency of Brown Bess was indeed remarkable. Its standard of accuracy was so low that a trained marksman could only depend on putting one shot in twenty into an eighteen-foot square target at two hundred yards, at which range it was supposed to be effective. Its windage was so great that bullets flew wild from the muzzle; and it is not very surprising that, armed with such a weapon, our infantry should often have been impelled “to resort to the strong and certain thrust of the bayonet, rather than rely for their safety on the chance performances of the clumsy and capricious Brown Bess.” Writers on fire-arms are able to give dozens of tragic and laughable instances of its erratic shooting. In the Kaffir war, for example, our troops had to expend no fewer than eighty thousand rounds to kill or cripple some twenty-five naked savages. After Waterloo a musket was sent down to Woolwich, to ascertain whether its ball would penetrate a French cuirass at two hundred yards’ range. The cuirass was mounted on a pole, the musket aligned and held firmly in a vice; but it was found impossible to secure a hit until, at last, a random shot fired by one of the officers present did take effect! Nevertheless, Brown Bess remained in favour for a number of years after Waterloo. It had a flat and raking trajectory, owing to the very high muzzle velocity imparted to it by the large charge of powder used; from its great windage it loaded easily; and, although rather too heavy for long marches, it was strong enough to bear any amount of hard usage.[120]
So long as the rifle used a spherical ball it could not claim to rival Brown Bess for general service. As soon as the elongated projectile was developed the supersession of the smooth-bore was a matter of time alone. It is strange, however, in view of the enthusiasm of the Victorian rifleman and the ease with which the fire-arm lent itself to novel experiments, that the evolution of the elongated projectile covered so long a period as it did.
Apart from the fact that cylindrical bars and shot had often been fired from ordnance, it was known that Benjamin Robins himself had tried the experiment of firing egg-shaped projectiles from a rifle with a certain amount of success. The inefficiency of the loose sphere, in the case of the smooth-bore, and of the tightly rammed sphere, in the case of the rifle, were both recognized in the early days of the century. And, while no solution could be found, the problem was generally agreed to be: how to drop the projectile loosely down the barrel, and tighten it so as to absorb the windage when already there.
Two or three English inventors made proposals. In 1823 a Captain Norton, of the 34th Regiment, submitted an elongated projectile with a base hollowed out in such a way as to expand automatically when the pressure of the powder-gas came on it, and thus seal the bore. The idea came to him from an examination of the arrow used by the natives of Southern India with their blow-tube: an examination which revealed that the base of the arrow was formed of elastic lotus-pith, which by its expansion against the cylindrical surface of the tube prevented the escape of air past it. In 1836 Mr. Greener submitted a pointed bullet having a cylindrical cavity in its base in which a conical plug was fixed, expanding the base by a wedging action when under the pressure of the powder gases.[121] Had either of these ideas been considered with the attention which it deserved, the development of the rifle in this country might have been more rapid than it was. “By blindly rejecting both of these inventions the authorities deprived England of the honour of having initiated the greatest improvement in small arms.”
It was in France that the elongated projectile waged an eventually successful struggle against the spherical ball, its ancient rival. The French, troubled by the superiority of their Arab enemies in shooting at long range, founded a School of Musketry at Vincennes. In 1828 Captain Delvigne, a distinguished staff officer of that school, established the two main principles on which all succeeding inventors were obliged to rely: one, that in muzzle-loading rifles the projectile must slip down the barrel with a certain windage, so as to admit of easy loading; two, that only elongated projectiles were suited to modern rifles.