American Rifle - Alexander Rose [8]
At the time some experimenters were carving several straight, parallel grooves inside a few musket barrels. They wanted to see whether they could reduce fouling, the sludgelike gunpowder residue blown down the barrel after a bullet was fired. Contemporary powder did not efficiently self-destruct, so whatever was left quickly built up and posed an explosive danger to the shooter if a stray spark ignited it. Frequent cleaning of the barrel, perhaps even every couple of shots, was required. The narrow grooves acted as canals, draining off residue from the bore’s surface, which meant the cleaning had to be done less often. Then some bright (and as so often in the early history of firearms, anonymous) German gunsmith around 1450 wondered, why not cut spiraled grooves instead of straight ones? A helical pattern would not only present a greater surface area to trap residue, it might also impart spin to the ball so that it flew like an arrow.
Guns with these types of helical slots were soon dubbed riffeln (from the German verb for “to cut or groove”) to distinguish them from ordinary smoothbores, whose bullet would erratically bounce and scrape along the inside of the barrel and assume whatever angle of flight its last contact with the muzzle imparted. The difference in bullets fired from the two was initially almost imperceptible, but velocity, weather conditions, and distance to the target amplified the smoothbore bullet’s drift by as much as several feet. Still, long experimentation and competition among rival gunsmiths showed that a rifle bullet had to grip the inside of the barrel very tightly to pick up spin from the grooves. Whereas smoothbore shooters merely dropped a ball down the barrel, riflemen used bullets cast slightly larger than their weapon’s bore and hammered them down the barrel as far as possible using a wooden mallet and a six-inch metal spike before shoving them into the chamber at the bottom with a strengthened ramrod. That took work—and precious time, though by 1600 they found that wrapping the bullet in a thin greased patch of leather eased entry.52
These changes improved weapons performance by a significant degree, but they remained hardly known outside their German homeland. Armies stuck with smoothbore arms for regular issue, partly because between 1470 and 1650 Europe experienced a dramatic rise in prices and the cost of living.53 Rifle-boring was a skilled-labor– intensive, expensive process: carving the spiraled groove required a specialized machine. Ensuring that the barrel was absolutely straight needed a highly experienced craftsman who commanded among the highest wages then available. Because plain muskets could be produced without anywhere near as much care, they were simply much cheaper than rifles.
Hunters, however, found rifling a boon, for in the rugged and echoey Alps they could use rifles to stalk bears, stags, and chamois from as far as two hundred yards away—a range at which a musket was virtually ineffective. While amid the chasms and atop the peaks, swirling wind eddies wreaked havoc with a regular bullet’s trajectory and velocity, with a rifle an experienced hunter could achieve a one-shot kill by compensating for the wind. As early as 1487 shooters were competing in target competitions.54 By the 1580s the rifle was a relatively common sight in these circles, but it remained a niche product with a reputation as being for experts only. By 1650 its butt had been redesigned to fit sturdily against one’s shoulder for greater stability, and it sported the most modern flintlock ignition system available.55 This was the gun that the Germans took to America.56
These recently arrived gunsmiths