When was rifle invented

To avoid this problem, gunsmiths developed new types of ignition systems that protected gun powder from the elements. The percussion system, developed in , used a small copper cap filled with charge. Rear-loading or breechloading systems developed by gun manufacturers, including Sharps, Maynard and Burnside, packed the projectile and powder together in a single, combustible cartridge.

The system not only saved time, it also avoided exposing gun powder to wet conditions. Next, gun manufacturers set their focus on speeding up the time required to reload a weapon. Another concept mounted multiple barrels onto a single stock to gain more bang for every trigger pull. Double-barrel shotguns are still produced today.

The Spencer Repeating Rifle Company patented a design at the start of the Civil War that was capable of repeated firing following a single ammunition load.

The Spencer gun a favorite of President Abraham Lincoln loaded multiple cartridges at once by storing them in a magazine at the rear of the gun.

Each shot was then fed into the chamber through a manual mechanism. Benjamin Henry developed a similar model, in the Henry, and patented the design in One of the most acclaimed firearms designer in history, John Moses Browning of Ogden, Utah , began designing for the New Haven-based Winchester Repeating Arms Company in and created a version of the rifle that incorporated a pump action.

Browning, however, would become best known for his contributions to automatic loading firearms. In automatic weapons, power generated by the firing of the weapon is used to eject empty cartridges and reload. The M2 was adopted by the U. The M was the U. And the BAR would be used extensively by U. Before Browning developed his semi-automatic handguns and machine guns, Indianapolis, Indiana-based Richard Gatling had already created an earlier, more primitive version of the machine gun.

In the early s, Gatling received a patent for a hand-cranked, multiple barreled weapon that could fire rounds per minute. Hirem Maxim, an American-born British inventor, would take the machine gun to the next level with his Maxim gun. The weapon harnessed the recoil energy from each bullet fired to eject a used cartridge and pull in the next one. The Maxim machine gun of could fire a barrage of rounds per minute and would soon arm the British Army, and then the Austrian, German, Italian, Swiss and Russian armies.

The barrage of fire generated by machine guns on all sides lead to the development of trench warfare, since shelter became critical for soldiers trying to avoid rapid-fire sprays of bullets from the new weapons. A generation later, during U. While the Thompson was developed too late to be used in World War I, its inventor, John Thompson, marketed the gun through his company to law enforcement.

But the weapon also found its way into the hands of criminals whom law enforcement was targeting. That slaughter and others like it inspired the first federal gun control law in American history: The National Firearms Act of , which forbade a private market for the Thompson. The short-barreled weapon with steep front-sight posts and curved magazines offered the rapid-fire of machine guns with lighter-weight portability. The deadly effectiveness of the Kalashnikov in the Vietnam War led defense forces at the Pentagon to produce a new U.

Both can fire up to rounds a minute. Into the 21st century, modernized versions of the fully automatic AK and the M, chiefly the M4 carbine, have dominated U. In the civilian world, the AR, a semi-automatic version of the M has become popular among gun sports enthusiasts, as well as among mass shooters in Newtown, Conn. Today, the term semi-automatic refers to auto-loading guns that require a trigger pull for every shot fired, as opposed to fully automatic weapons which can fire multiple shots for every trigger pull.

National Park Service. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Marks on the gun indicate that it was used by German mercenaries during the American Revolution. Around , men stop carrying rapiers, and guns became the weapon of choice for a duel. Various guns were used, until a true dueling pistol was officially standardized in , as "a 9 or 10 inch barreled, smooth bore flintlock of 1 inch bore, carrying a ball of 48 to the pound.

This pair of flintlock pistols was made with ivory stocks and unusually elaborate decorative details. Samuel Colt developed the first mass-produced, multi-shot, revolving firearms. Various revolving designs had been around for centuries, but precision parts couldn't be made with available technologies.

Colt was the first to apply Industrial Age machining tools to the idea. Mass production made the guns affordable. Reliability and accuracy made the Colt a favorite of soldiers and frontiersmen. The Colt depicted is a Third Model Dragoon percussion revolver ca.

A Colt with such lavish decoration and gold inlay is extremely rare. In the second half of the 18th century, musket design branched out. This period produced a number of single-purpose firearms. The forerunner of modern shotguns was the fowling piece, developed specifically for hunting birds.

Among the upper classes, fowling was a leisure sport. Fowling pieces for the very affluent were often lovely works of art, but impractical for hunting. The last war to use only muzzle-loaded guns. Introduced at the start of the Civil War, Spencer repeating guns were technically advanced, used cartridges a recent development , and could fire 7 shots in 15 seconds. German immigrants to Pennsylvania in the early 18th century brought their gunsmithing skills and blended English-style muskets with German rifle technology to create a specifically American hybrid, popularly known as a " Kentucky rifle.

At that time, the distinctive difference between a rifle and the standard musket was that the former's barrel was grooved and the latter's was smooth. Among other things, the grooves imparted spin and stability to a bullet as it hurtled through the barrel, allowing it to fly farther and truer than a musket's. The downside was that it took much, much longer to load a rifle than a musket, so it was really a question of quality versus quantity. Q: Was the rifle initially used for hunting or for military uses?

A: Paradoxically for a gun so closely identified with the military, the rifle began life as a weapon you'd have around the house — if you lived in a cabin in the woods and mountains of the 18th-century frontier — because you needed it for protection and, most importantly, hunting. For their owners, rifles' relative accuracy and range more than compensated for their high maintenance, the long hours of necessary practice, and their low rate of fire. It had virtually no military use for a very long time.

Q: How did the rifle then become a military tool? A: Eighteenth-century armies relied on massed, synchronized broadsides to demolish the foe's formations in short order, a tactical task that required fast-loading muskets rather than rifles, which were much more fiddly and needed no little training to master. That meant that rifles were essentially restricted to specialists. They were a kind of niche interest. During the War of Independence, for instance, the Americans mobilized small bands of backwoods riflemen, but not for very long and to very little practical effect.

The vast majority of Revolutionary combat between the armies was conducted by musket, not rifles. It wouldn't be until just before the Civil War that the two competing types of weapon — rifle and musket — merged to form what was known briefly as a "rifle-musket," soon shortened to just "rifle. Since then, rifles have been a staple of every army in the world. Q: When did rifles become controversial? A: Depends on what you mean by "controversial.

Within military circles, there were polite and intellectual debates over the proper employment of rifles and muskets on the battlefield and, later, between advocates of single-shot rifles and repeating ones. There were also debates concerning the appropriate caliber of ammunition, the use of magazines to feed cartridges into the chamber, the introduction of semiautomatic mechanisms, and so forth. But this is par for the course with any form of technology. Within military organizations, there are always ongoing, evolving debates between contending factions or schools of thought.

The central debate of the last few centuries has concerned the relative importance of firepower and marksmanship in warfare, the quantity and quality question I mentioned before. Pretty much everything gets back to that issue somewhere along the line. Q: When and how did rifles become something that people wanted to limit or ban? Is that a late 20th-century development? A: Guns, not rifles in particular, have always been subject to bans or restrictions, but such attempts stem from diverse motives and vary from culture to culture.

Thus, in the Greek and Roman era, there was an aristocratic suspicion of projectile weapons bows, spears , because the cowardly killed from afar rather than up close. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this snobbery was applied to bullet-launching weapons.

Shakespeare , in "Henry IV," Part 1, mentions a "certain lord" who claims that "but for those vile guns, he would himself have been a soldier. There were, accordingly, efforts to suppress their use on the battlefield, partly for reasons of noble prestige and partly for reasons of economy armor did not come cheap, after all. In seventeenth-century America , the various powers England , France , and Holland made sure to stop guns reaching hostile Indian tribes but freely traded with those allied with them.

In this instance, limitations were imposed for purely geopolitical reasons. During the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century, there were strenuous efforts to restrict the supply of gunpowder and ammunition, if not weaponry, to Indians in order to suppress what we would probably call guerrilla warfare and to make them more reliant on Washington and more willing to sign treaties in return for gunpowder.

So, here we see gun restrictions being used for military and strategic gains. Over in Japan , on the other hand, the Tokugawa shogunate used firearms to instill order and then banned them outright even its own for the sake of stability and the preservation of its sword-based samurai hegemony. Meanwhile, the ruling Mamelukes in Egypt forbade guns, not because they feared uprisings or loved swords, but because they thought them suitable only for Christian infidels.

Q: When did the rifle become a "sexy" weapon, one that people prized for its sleekness, its beauty, and so on? Was that an early development or a modern one? A: I'm not entirely convinced that "sexy" is the correct way to describe a rifle.