CHAPTER IX.
THE RIFLE.
The Rifle has at length taken its place among scientifically improved weapons. Mathematicians laboured long and earnestly to develope the important principles involved in it, and which lay hidden like latent heat, only waiting for the moment when they were to be extracted, as they were at length by experiment, the result of necessity: indeed necessity has done more for the improvement of gunnery than all the mental toil and labour bestowed on the science itself. The philosopher has sought in vain for that which mechanical skill unpatronised and unheeded forced upon the world, and that, too, in spite of prejudice and contempt; and the present generation see improvements brought out which were predicted generations before—as the following quotation from Robins clearly shows:—“Whatever state shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages of rifle pieces, and having facilitated and completed their construction, shall introduce into their armies their general use, with a dexterity in the management of them, they will by this means acquire a superiority which will almost equal anything that has been done at any time by the particular excellence of any one kind of arms, and will perhaps fall but little short of the wonderful effects which histories relate to have been formerly produced by the first inventors of fire-arms.”
That the result here predicted has now been obtained no one can doubt. Greater extension of range is yet attainable; but accuracy of range amounts already to almost mathematical precision. All that is now required is, that the same principle should be applied to the heaviest projectiles; and when these are projected under precisely the same laws, experience will further establish this principle, that “the heavier the body in equal velocities the less the deflection from atmospheric resistance.” When this is demonstrated the present order of things will be reversed; heavy ordnance will exceed the shoulder rifle in extension and accuracy of range, whilst the shoulder rifle will again fall back to its former state of comparative inferiority.
Barrels were first grooved or rifled at Vienna, about the year 1498. The original object of grooving or rifling the barrels was to find space for the reception of the foul residue produced by discharging the rifle, and thus to diminish the friction of the bullet as it was forced down by the ramrod. During the next twenty years a spiral turn was given to the groove, and bullets were used with projections to fit the grooves, the degree of twist or spiral varying as the skill of the gun-maker thought best.
The difficulty of loading rifles has at all times been a drawback to their universal adoption as warlike weapons, and it has been reserved for a humble individual to achieve that which all the talent devoted to it for three centuries had hitherto failed to accomplish.
A multitude of claimants have “put in their plea” for a share in some part of the invention; and it may benefit not only the present but also the future generation, if we give a succinct account of the approaches made by different men towards the present established principle, and show the bearing each had in bringing about the revolution that has taken place in the science of gunnery.
The earliest notice of an elongated bullet is Robins’s “egg-shaped,” which gives to the hemispherical end the centre of gravity, thus establishing the first essential principle; but theory and practice were here sadly discordant, for its wild uncertain flight, caused by the small end acting as a rudder, rendered his theory useless, and it soon died of a natural death.
The next innovation on the spherical principle of bullets was the attempt made by the late Sir Home Popham to introduce elongated sphero-cylindrical bullets into cannon, with grooves and projections on the exterior to impart a spinning motion, which should be sustained by the action of the atmosphere; but this, like Robins’s idea, survived only a very short time. The next in rotation is a description given by Captain Beaufoy, in his work on the rifle called Scloppetaria, and published, we believe, in 1808. Captain Beaufoy gives a drawing of an elongated bullet one and a quarter diameters in length, having a hemispherical cavity accurately corresponding in shape to its counterpart at the opposite end. “This,” he states, “he had heard was beneficial from the fact of the rush of atmospheric air into the vacuum created, thus inducing a forward motion by the kick à posteriori.” This apparently was but a surmise, an idea never carried out, for in the same work a degree of spiral grooving is advocated with which the action of this bullet, had it ever been intended to be expansive in principle, would be quite incompatible.