American Rifle - Alexander Rose [57]
Captain Henri-Gustave Delvigne of the French royal guard grasped that reducing windage—the gap between the sides of the barrel and the ball—was key to raising the musket’s accuracy. The problem here was that muskets loaded faster than rifles because their bullets slid easily down their smooth, wide barrels. Reducing the windage would make loading only more difficult, thereby lowering the musket’s rate of fire to that of the rifle.
Delvigne’s novel solution was conceptually similar to a ship-in-a-bottle, in which the folded, flattened vessel is slipped through the narrow neck and unfurled inside. He placed a “rebated,” or slightly smaller, chamber at the bottom of a broad but rifled barrel. The soldier poured the powder down so that it settled into this cramped space and, after rolling down a spherical ball, used a heavy ramrod to stamp on the soft lead bullet so that it flattened and expanded its diameter. Upon firing, the bloated ball gripped the grooves, spun, and turned the musket into a rifle.
After its 1834 trials, Delvigne’s gun was sufficiently impressive to persuade the army to issue it to the reinforcements being sent to North Africa, where the French were confronted by Kabyles adept at seeking cover in the rocky desert sands, taking shots with their old, Kentucky-style long-barreled rifles, and vanishing. The troops already there had discovered that their smoothbore muskets lacked sufficient range and accuracy to cope with the “skulking” tactics of these marauders.
Despite its effective range of four hundred yards (roughly double that of their most modern muskets), troops soon found that under tropical conditions the Delvigne performed poorly. The barrel had to be kept well lubricated, but the sun’s heat melted the grease, and it dripped into the chamber, wetting the powder. Consequently, a portion of the charge didn’t burn, not only making the gun prone to fouling but reducing the ball’s velocity. More damningly still, in any kind of weather the act of bashing the ball deformed it and therefore made its course erratic, which led to inaccuracy. The Delvigne died a sudden death soon afterward.19
Around this time several British and French inventors, working independently, had grasped that since it was the human act of flattening the ball that made it irregularly shaped, what if the projectile self-expanded to fit the rifling? That is, the shooter would harness the physical and thermodynamic forces unleashed by the exploding powder to transform the bullet into a predictable shape, thereby eliminating the element of randomness. But what kind of bullet?
Relying on recent scientific investigations into the nature of projectile flight, gunsmiths, sporting shooters, and ballisticians were beginning to understand that an elongated bullet was subjected to weaker air resistance than a spherical one.20The former retained a greater proportion of its muzzle velocity, or the speed at which the projectile leaves the gun, for longer. It would also fly straighter—thereby improving accuracy—but only so long as the rifling in the barrel imparted a far higher rate of rotation than was customary with the older rifles. From the mid-1830s onward, as a result, arms-makers tightened the rifling’s “twist” to intensify the new type of bullet’s spin before it left the muzzle. The advent of these more modern-looking, if stubby, projectiles meant the end of the spherical ball was nigh—though soldiers, tipping their hats to the past, continue to fire “rounds” today.
The first popular “cylindro-conoidal” bullets had a broadly pointed nose that rather resembled a Romanesque arch atop a short, almost hollow cylinder. Fighting off the competition, it was Captain Claude-Étienne Minié of the French Army whose design became the standard.21 According to one historian, so remarkable was this cartridge that the entire history of infantry tactics can be divided into two eras: before