Such was the man who made modern artillery possible. To Mr. Whitworth, who knew nothing himself of guns or of gun-making, the government went for advice on the shortcomings of the Enfield rifle. At their request he promptly began an analytical inquiry into the principles underlying the action of rifles and the flight of their projectiles, resolved and urged to discover the secret of the very partial success so far attained. The results of this inquiry, published in ’57, had a great influence on the future of rifled fire-arms and ordnance. Briefly, he discovered that the amount of twist hitherto given to the rifling of gun-barrels had been wholly insufficient to maintain the projectile in its true direction during flight; the weight of the projectile, relatively to its diameter, had been insufficient to give it the necessary momentum to sustain its velocity against the resistance of the air; lastly, the accuracy of manufacture of rifles had been inadequate to the ensuring of a good fit of the bullet in the bore. To prove the truth of these assertions a Whitworth rifle was produced by him which gave better results than any other hitherto made. The form of rifling which the inventor adopted was considered objectionable, and the rifle itself, with its polygonal barrel, was not approved by the authorities; but, instead, the valuable results of Whitworth’s experiments were embodied in the Enfield, to its obvious improvement.
WHITWORTH
RIFLE
BULLET
The muzzle-loading rifle had now reached the limit of its development. The rifle was the accepted arm of all the great military powers. But in the case of one of them, Prussia, the principle of breech-loading was already in favour, and it was not long before the progress in mechanical science enabled this principle to prove its superiority over the ancient principle of muzzle-loading. Although in the Prussian needle-gun great difficulties were encountered; although in service its reputation suffered from such defects as the rusting of the needles which pierced the percussion cartridges, the failure of springs, the escape of gases at the breech; yet it was recognized that none of these defects was necessarily inherent in the breech-loading system, and its merits were admitted. With the breech-loader a greater rapidity of fire was always attainable, there was less difficulty in preventing fouling, and, above all, there was the certainty that the powder-charge would be fired to its last effective grain.
In 1864 breech-loading rifles were recommended for the British army, and shortly afterwards they were introduced in the form of converted Enfields.
§
We have seen how the development of field ordnance stimulated the development of the rifle. In turn the attainment of superior range and accuracy by rifled small arms led directly to a corresponding development of field ordnance, designed to recover the loss of its ascendancy. In France, where the logical consequences of the progress in small arms were officially noted on several occasions, Napoleon III, himself an authority on artillery, took the initiative to restore field ordnance to its former relative position. It was in the Crimean War that the enhanced effects of rifle regiments were first seriously felt. Convinced by the protraction of the operations before Sebastopol of the inadequacy of smooth-bore guns, the Emperor caused bronze pieces to be rifled, and these, being sent to Algeria on active service, gave conclusive proof of their increased efficiency. On report of which, all the bronze field pieces in the French army were rifled in accordance with the plans which a M. Treuille de Beaulieu had submitted in 1842, viz. with six shallow rounded grooves in which engaged zinc studs carried on two bands formed on the cylindrical projectile. The gain in power obtained by rifling ordnance was greater even than that obtained from rifling as applied to small arms. For not only did rifling confer the advantages of a more massive projectile more suitably shaped for flight through a resisting medium, but it allowed a large increase in the number of balls which could be discharged in the form of case or shrapnel, and a large increase in the powder-charge which could be carried inside a common shell. An advantage was also gained in respect of that important detail, the fusee or fuze; the rotation of the projectile about a definite axis made it possible to use fuses whose action depended on one definite part of the projectile coming first in contact with the ground or target.[124] All these advantages were found to be present in the French field pieces when rifled on the above plan. “And thus,” said an English writer, “at slight expense but too late for use in the Crimean War, France was put in possession of an artillery which, consuming its usual powder and using either round ball or elongated projectiles, proved of immense value in the war against Austria in 1856, when, at Magenta and at Solferino, the case shot from their rifled field-pieces ploughed through the distant masses of opposing infantry and decimated the cavalry as they formed for the attack.”[125]
In England an almost simultaneous development took place, but on entirely different lines. Let us tell it in the words of Sir Emerson Tennant:
“The fate of the battle of Inkerman in November, 1854, was decided by two eighteen-pounder guns which by almost superhuman efforts were got up late into the field, and these, by their superior range, were effectual in silencing the Russian fire. Mr. William Armstrong was amongst those who perceived that another such emergency could only be met by imparting to field-guns the accuracy and range of the rifle; and that the impediment of weight must be removed by substituting forged instead of cast-iron guns. With his earliest design for the realization of this conception, he waited on the Secretary for War in December, 1854, to propose the enlargement of the rifle musket to the standard of a field gun, and to substitute elongated projectiles of lead instead of balls of cast iron. Encouraged by the Duke of Newcastle, he put together his first wrought-iron gun in the spring of 1855.”[126]
The manufacture of this gun marked a new era in ordnance. Repeated trials followed its completion; with the result that in 1858 the Armstrong gun was officially adopted for service in the field,—the epoch-making Armstrong gun: a tube made of wrought-iron bar coiled in a closed helix and welded at a white heat into a solid mass; turned to a true cylinder and reinforced by outer tubes shrunk on to it; rifled with a large number of grooves; breech-loading, a powerful screw holding a sliding vent-piece tightly against the face of the breech; firing a lead-coated projectile in whose plastic covering the rifling engaged as soon as it started its passage through the bore; and mounted on a field-carriage in such a way that the gun could recoil up an inclined slide and return by gravity, and in such a way that its motion both for elevating and for traversing was under the accurate control given by screw gearing.