Guns, one of the most revolutionary advances in small arms, a spiritual successor to long bows and crossbows, guns are a staple weapon used by armies, law enforcement, hunters, and recreational shooters alike. But how? How has this wild concept replaced the simple but effective bow and arrow? How did it change the art of warfare for centuries? In this post, we’ll be learning about the science and history of firearms.

But first, we should learn how gunpowder works on the chemical scale.

Gunpowder is comprised of 75% Potassium Nitrate, 15% Charcoal, and 15% Sulfur. The Potassium Nitrate provides oxygen for the reaction, while the Sulfur and Charcoal act as a fuel. When ignited, the gunpowder reacts and burns rapidly, producing a lot of gas, in an enclosed space like the barrel of a gun, it will try to escape through any openings, and in a gun’s case it would be the muzzle, but if it was ignited on an open space like a table, the gas can easily disperse without issue.

At it’s simplest, the concept of a firearm is a projectile, inside a vessel, or barrel, and propellant to launch it. The earliest use of a true firearm was somewhere around the 1300’s-1400’s, with the Arquebus, a long gun that was designed to be used by infantry soldiers. There are three different actions that were used by old Muskets. The earliest action used by guns in the past was the matchlock.

 

Matchlock guns mainly comprise of a hammer with a piece of match cord, a pan to place the gunpowder into and a cover to prevent any accidental misfires. The reloading process starts off like this:

1. Withdraw a paper cartridge filled with gunpowder and bite the end off
2. Put a small amount into the pan, and the rest into the end of the barrel
3. Close the Pan cover
4. Insert musket ball into the barrel
5. Ram the ball down the barrel using a ramrod
6. Place burning match cord into the serpentine
7. Aim the match towards the pan
8. Remove the Pan cover
9. Take aim
10. Fire

These Muzzle-Loaders, as you can tell, take a long and painstaking process, usually one to two balls fired per minute, there are even problems with the match since it could sometimes not even hit the pan and ignite the gunpowder at all, the process could also vary from person to person since some people carried paper cartridges whilst others had canisters filled with gunpowder. The matchlock was eventually succeeded by the Flintlock.

 

 

The flintlock, as the name suggests, replaces the match cord with a piece of flint clamped down in the hammer, the difference between the matchlock and the flintlock is that the flint strikes against the Frizzen (a steel plate,which also acts as the pan cover) causing sparks to ignite the gunpowder and fire the weapon,using flint-and-steel. This action too, however, had issues, due to the reliance on the spark created from the flint, you could have issues firing the weapon in rainy conditions. This lead to the further rise of the percussion lock, or cap-lock action.

The percussion lock used a percussion cap, which was a small copper cylinder filled with a sensitive material like Mercury Fulminate, to ignite the gunpowder. Despite percussion lock being the fastest action to rearm, it still required the 10-step reloading process from earlier, despite the advancements in technology, but unlike the Flintlock and Matchlock actions however, the percussion cap went on to be a critical component for the next step in firearm development.

The Metal Cartridge

Metal cartridges are essentially the predecessor to modern day bullets, they are made of four components, a shell or cartridge to hold everything together, gunpowder for the fuel, a primer to ignite said gunpowder, and a projectile to be fired. All of this was made to fix the main problem with muzzle-loading guns, the lengthy loading time, now that all the necessary parts needed to fire a gun are inside a convenient package, guns became more ergonomic and reliable with the advent of breech-loading guns.

Now we’re getting into more recent topics, in the late 1800’s breech loaders became prevalent in the world of firearms, with weapons like the rifle and the shotgun taking place.

Rifles are the same as muskets, except they have a new feature called barrel rifling, rifling is a circular groove that extends from the chamber to the muzzle, and it’s purpose is to spin the bullet in order to create a straight trajectory, a trait absent in early muskets.

Shotguns however, are a different story, they use what’s called smooth-bore barrels, these barrels are what muskets were using, which caused the inaccurate fire, but the purpose of a shotgun is to have a more spread out trajectory, which makes them suitable for firing multiple projectiles at once. Some early muskets called “Fowlers” used this concept earlier.

Since this is a brand new innovative concept at the time, soldiers were still being issued smoothbore muzzle-loaded muskets, newer rifles were usually breech-loaded,  meaning that the chamber had to be opened in order to reload. But even now, we were looking for ways to increase ready firepower.

 

 

Enter, The Lebel 1886

This French rifle was a revolutionary weapon that put us one step further to modern day weapons, because it introduced a new propellant load called smokeless powder, it was called this because it no longer produced a massive cloud of smoke when fired unlike normal gunpowder, and could send lead faster and harder than normal gunpowder. This was so important, it ended up in an arms race in order to compete with the French, it was considered the best rifle in the world for two years until rival guns managed to outperform the weapon.

This also caused gunpowder to be relabeled as “Black Powder” for the sake of distinction.

 

With smokeless powder, fully automatic weapons were now feasible since black powder could make a barrel dirty too quickly with automatic fire, and here we have the arguable first ever “Assault Rifle” that would evolve to be a standard infantry weapon today.

 

The Sturmgewehr-44 (StG-44)

German for “Storm rifle 44”, this automatic weapon uses the most modern features of any weapon I have discussed so far. This weapon was gas operated, meaning that when the weapon is fired, any residual gas from the bullet is sent back to the bolt, pushing it backwards and preparing another round. This all happens so quickly that it allows for fully automatic fire, and by today’s criteria counts as an assault rifle since it’s :

• Capable of fully-automatic or semi-automatic fire (one pew vs. pew pew pew)
• Has an intermediate cartridge (is in between a pistol bullet and a machine gun bullet)
• Is select fire (can choose whether its pew or pew pew pew)

This gun led to the creation of the iconic AK-47, one of the most prolific small arms in the entire world.

 

I know I have been going on a while about how guns work and how they evolved, but I also wanted to discuss how they evolved in purpose, Are they meant for war? Are they designed for hunting? Should gun laws be stricter? I’ll try to be as cohesive as possible here, but this is mainly my opinion.

Guns have evolved quite a lot in purpose, instead of inaccurate weapons meant to be used in large formations, now they’re used for a much more tactical purpose in the military, with less soldiers needed for fighting, nowadays a small squad of 3 well armed soldiers can take on a group of 30 with the right tactics and equipment. They do have other purposes like hunting and recreational shooting, but guns have always but from the 1500’s they’ve always been used for warfare

 

And here has been a brief review on the evolution of firearms, the most important ones in history.

 

 

 

 

Sources :

Matchlock Image:

http://woodsrunnersdiary.blogspot.com/2011/04/for-doc-from-alaska-how-to-use.html

Gunpowder:

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=4130

(https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/07/02/the-chemistry-of-gunpowder/)

Percussion:

http://guns.wikia.com/wiki/Percussion_rifle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Caplock.gif

Flintlock:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Illustration-of-the-firing-mechanism-for-the-M1816-standard-issue-flintlock-musket_fig6_309101812

Metal Cartridges

The Bullet Cartridge

Rifling and Smoothbore

https://science.howstuffworks.com/shotgun8.htm

Breech-Loading

https://civilwarweaponstech.weebly.com/breech-loading-rifles.html

https://www.nps.gov/vafo/learn/historyculture/upload/Muskets-and-Rifles-with-arrowhead.pdf

Lebel 1886

(http://www.thefirearms.guide/ammo/ammo-101)

 

 

What questions did you need to research in order to research your topic?

For the most part, how the old muskets worked and the actions for muzzle loading rifles since I wasn’t versed in musket technology, how gunpowder worked since that was a scientific question that I didn’t know, and what brass cartridges are made of.

 

What new or familiar digital tools did you try to use as you worked through this project?

Nothing new, other than the document adding used for placing images into the post  itself.

 

What was the process you used to investigate the topic?

I searched the information I didn’t know, like the musket actions, and tried to double check if it was accurate, but since it was complicated due to the massive variety in the actions and models I decided to generalize and look  for the most used and common musket designs. For the more modern topics like the StG 44, barrel rifling and bullet composition, I decided to be more lenient since these are so broad and widespread that there isn’t really a way to fake how a barrel works or what a bullet is made of, I was also exposed to the StG 44 quite often in my free time since I like to watch videos of gun channels explaining and shooting these weapons.

 

How did you verify and cite the information you found?

I looked at multiple sources and tried looking for inconsistencies in the information, luckily almost all sources I had were either simplified information for the scientific and mechanical portion, while the inconsistencies could be ironed out since date estimates aren’t entirely true or false.

 

How did the process of completing this challenge go? What could you have done better?

It was quite difficult for me to find out what to say or put into the post, because I tend to keep on rambling and rambling on the minute details of certain things like the battle doctrine, tactics used, caliber names, things that don’t really add to the research, but were interesting to know. In the end I could have improved by giving more visual evidence rather than pictures, and the flow of the questions, since at one point I jumped from 1886 to 1944 without discussing WW1 era rifles, but I felt like I did well since I didn’t go onto a tangent about the small little details when this was a post researching about the evolution, evolution is usually the big changes rather than the small details.