American Rifle - Alexander Rose [58]
The origins of the modern bullet. Captain Delvigne’s design improved accuracy but was ultimately superseded by that of his French compatriot, Captain Minié.
Minié placed an iron plug at the hollowed bottom of the cylindrical bullet so that the combusting powder’s gas forcefully thrust it forward. As the plug expanded, the bullet’s sides were pushed outward; it gripped the rifling and began spinning. The beauty of Minié’s design was its ease of loading: a bullet went in one size and emerged miraculously larger.
The minié was by no means perfect. It tended to foul the guns, and if it was poorly manufactured, the thin iron plugs were liable to over-expand and shatter the bullet in the barrel. Still, in the late 1840s the minié was an instant success, and no wonder, given its unbelievable accuracy rates. In a competition between minié rifles and smoothbore muskets, twenty men fired ten shots with each weapon, or 200 rounds per gun, at a target six feet high and twenty feet across. The results were striking. At 100 yards, three-quarters of musket shots hit compared to 95 percent of minié shots, though that was only to be expected given the musket’s traditional scatter-shotting. But at 400 yards, just nine (or 4.5 percent) of the musket shots found their mark, while more than half of the minié’s did.23
Ordnance experts around the world delighted in the minié’s technical aspects. The French armories, as well as their Russian, Austrian, Saxon, Belgian, Portuguese, and British counterparts, were besotted with the new technology. The British finally got around to thinking about a replacement for the venerable, if unvenerated, Brown Bess musket and began making the .577-caliber, minié-enabled Enfield rifle-musket in the mid-1850s.24
In the United States, the Ordnance Department was at first cautious about the rifle-musket hybrid and instead focused on integrating the percussion mechanism into its next-generation, interchangeable Model 1841 rifle and Model 1842 musket. Here, then, the two types of weapons continued to be regarded as distinct. Over the course of the decade Ordnance sat on the sidelines, watched European developments, and slowly modernized its stockpiles of old flintlock muskets by converting them to percussion. It was a simple if time-consuming task: in 1850, 56,134 flintlocks were converted, followed by 30,431 more (of Model 1822s) in 1851, and another 26,841 Model 1840s a year later. By the mid-1850s, after the experimental minié bullet had proven itself, many of these percussioned muskets were subsequently rifled and given long-range sights.25 These firearms worked satisfactorily, but by that time the United States had clearly fallen behind Europe.
Consequently Secretary of War Jefferson Davis authorized the Ordnance Department to design a weapon from scratch that properly exploited the minié’s advantages. The Model 1855 was the result.26
Its caliber was .58—a huge decrease from the .69 of the previous generation of muskets and slightly more than the rifle’s typical .54. The Model 1855 was also designed to take advantage of America’s productive prowess. Soldiers were finding that the minié’s ease of loading enabled them to fire more often, with a consequent rise in ammunition expenditure (in terms of cost as well as of frequency). At Pennsylvania’s Frankford Arsenal, in an ominous hint of the coming era of mass firepower, a single workman could oversee two machines churning out one hundred percussion caps a minute. During a regular day some 60,000 by his hand alone would roll off the line, with a labor cost of just $1.20. In two years Frankford made 16,842,250 caps, with officials predicting that annual output would more than double when additional machines were installed.27 Clearly the good old days of soldiers using fewer than a score of bullets during an entire campaign were gone forever.
The Model 1855’s appearance also marked two major milestones: henceforth the U.S. government produced no more smoothbores, and after nearly 150 years the accurate rifle and the fast-loading musket