Rifle | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Rifle

The modern rifle is considered a descendant of the musket, a large caliber smoothbore weapon for infantry use. By 1550, the musket had become the most important weapon in Europe, because the ammunition was easier to load and the destructive power was greater than any alternative weapons. About the same time, gunsmiths in central Europe had created a better way to reach a target: rifling. The term, which came from the German riefeln, referred to a method of cutting spiral grooves in the gun barrel to impart spin to the ball. Such spin would help stabilize the ball in flight and give it greater accuracy over a longer range. At first rifling was not a success because it was expensive to cut the grooves and the ball often got stuck on the grooves when it was loaded.

In the 1720s German and Swiss gunmakers who had settled in the Pennsylvania colony addressed these problems. Over a period of 50 years they worked to finally produce the famous Kentucky rifle, probably named for its most famous user, Kentuckian Daniel Boone (1734-1820). The caliber of the ball was reduced to.40 inches (1.02 cm), which allowed a lighter weight and increased velocity. The stock was slimmed down and the barrel was extended to as much as 48 inches (122 cm). The ball was made slightly smaller than the inside diameter; for a tight fit, it was wrapped in a patch of greased linen or very thin buckskin. For the next 100 years the Kentucky rifle was the most accurate weapon in the world.

Shortly before the American Revolution, the demand for a gun that could be loaded more quickly than the standard muzzle loaders prompted British army major Patrick Ferguson (1744-1870) to create a breechloader of simple design. He made a vertical screw-plug which could be lowered by turning a lever to expose a chamber in the breech of the gun. The ball was dropped into this vertical hole and rolled forward until stopped by the raised tracks of the rifle barrel. Powder was added and the plug was screwed back to seal the breech. It could be fired at a much faster rate than its counterparts. In 1819 John Hall of Maine invented a variation of this gun: his had a hinged breech block arranged so that its front end could be raised above the top of the barrel, thus exposing a chamber which could be quickly loaded and the block snapped down again to line up with the bore of the gun.

About the same time Hall was working on his breechloader, the Scottish minister and inventor Alexander Forsyth (1769-1843) began experimenting with firing mechanisms, and he eventually created the first percussion lock. Joshua Shaw (1777-1860), an English artist living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, came up with a small percussion copper cap that fit over a metal nipple. When the hammer hit the cap containing a small chemical charge, it exploded and fired the main charge. The United States Army used Shaw's cap in the rifle it produced for its forces in 1842. This weapon was the best in the world for years to come: it was accurate and could penetrate 8 inches of pine at 100 yards. Eli Whitney, known more for his work with the cotton gin, created the concept of interchangeable parts for these rifles, thus paving the way for the mass production of firearms.

Improvements in ammunition for rifles came next. The existing spherical balls were not aerodynamically sound, primarily because they usually had dimples from the process used to mold them. The French army captain Claude-Étienne Minié (1804-1879) invented a bullet (known as the Minié Ball) which was shaped much like modern bullets with a flat base and a pointed nose. The flat base was hollowed out slightly, because when the powder exploded, it expanded the bullet's diameter enough so it would fit the bore tightly. The shape gave the bullet greater accuracy and range. With its reduced size it could be dropped in as easily as a musket ball, thus making the rifle as quick to fire as a smoothbore musket. This development eliminated the musket's last advantage and gave predominance to the rifle. The Minié ball and the rifle were used extensively in the American Civil War with devastating effects.

In 1848, Christian Sharps, John Hall's former apprentice, created a reliable, single-shot rifle with a breechblock that lowered when the trigger-guard lever had been dropped. The cartridge was inserted, and, as the breech was closed, a metal edge cut the end off the paper cartridge, exposing the powder charge to the action of the percussion primer. This weapon, used by many snipers during the Civil War, gave birth to the term "sharpshooter."

When metal cartridges appeared with built-in primers, the rifle was ready for another major improvement. Gunsmen noticed that metallic self-contained cartridges could be fed mechanically into a barrel repeatedly instead of being fed one at a time. The Henry rifle, named for American B. Tyler Henry, came out in 1860. It carried 15 cartridges in a tube under the barrel, from which the cartridges were fed into the breech by a mechanism operated by swinging the trigger guard forward and back. Oliver Winchester (1810-1880), who had no knowledge of firearms, purchased a Connecticut arms-manufacturing company and hired Henry as supervisor. Henry's system became the basis of the famous Winchester repeating rifle.

A German design, the Mauser M1898, served as a model for further United States Army rifle development. In 1903 the Springfield Armory created a gun that served well in both World War I and II. The Springfield was a bolt-action rifle: it had a steel cylinder bolt containing most of the mechanism needed to make the gun shoot. A knobbed handle stuck out on the right side of the bolt, enabling the soldier to move it forward and back as well as to lock upon a cartridge in the chamber. When the bolt was all the way back, a five-round clip was put into the magazine from the top. Pushing the bolt forward carried the top cartridge into the chamber. After firing, the bolt was opened, which extracted and ejected the fired shell and cocked the gun for the next shot. Most hunting rifles still use the bolt-action technology. World War II occasioned the adoption of an even better rifle, the Garand. Unlike the bolt-action Springfield, the Garand was semiautomatic: it removed its own fired shell and put a new one into the chamber by a little gas spurting from a hole in the barrel near the muzzle and moving a piston in a cylinder under the barrel. As a semiautomatic, the trigger had to be pulled by hand and released after every shot.

Since World War II, the rifle has been refined, but the basic design and mechanism have changed little. The United States military replaced the Garand with the M-1 and, later, the M-16, capable of firing 20 bullets in 6 seconds. Many rifles in use around the world are based on designs from the 1950s or before, such as the well-known AK-47. Some more recent rifles are designed with plastic parts, and though light weight, are extremely durable. Some rifles popular for military use in the late 1990s are more more compact than their predecessors, with the magazine and breech located behind the trigger. An example is the French FA MAS assault rifle.