The Complete English Wing Shot

By far the greatest inventions in gunnery have been made by chemists. The cleverness and boldness of many wonderful inventions for loading at the breech all aimed at the well-nigh impossible. The powder was always ignited from without, and had to be either partly or quite loose in order to facilitate ignition by means of external fire. That is what beat the inventors of five centuries, who were for ever trying to find a breech-loader, a revolver, or a magazine weapon. In default of these working satisfactorily, they tried weapons with seven barrels, and others with fewer. But it was all to little purpose; the detonator had not been discovered by the Rev. A. J. Forsyth, and the chemist to the French army of Louis XV. had not then invented fulminate of mercury. Consequently a closed-up cartridge containing its own means of ignition was impossible, for although detonating substances were known years before, they were such as did not always wait to be detonated—in other words, they were not stable. They were too dangerous for use, but nevertheless the attempts made at breech-loaders, and especially at magazines, were more than equally dangerous. One weapon had eight touch-holes in eight positions in the barrel, which was eight times charged, one load and charge upon top of the next. That nearest the muzzle was fired first (if the weapon was ever fired at all), and so on, down to that nearest the breech. What prevented the first igniting the rest, and sending all off together with a burst weapon, is not known. If they did not go off all together, one would suppose the firing of several loads in succession would give to those loads in the breech the best ramming ever known. But for this ramming to excess this invention went very near to a more perfect success than any modern magazine weapon. The trouble with all the latter is what to do with the empty cartridge-case. But this old weapon had no cartridge-case. Its ignition was from the outside, and was always ready. It is true that the difference of length of movement of shot within the barrel would make some difference to the velocity of each shot, but not more than would be equalised by a very small extra dose of powder for those charges nearest the muzzle.

Another form of repeater was a breech-loader which carried several charges of powder in the stock, which, in turn, were shaken into a revolving chamber, in front of which, before it was in place for firing, the bullet was inserted for each load, as its turn came round. Other repeaters were simple revolvers, much like the weapon in use now, but of course used without cartridges of self-contained ignition material.

Indeed, the ingenuity expended on breech-loading before the advent of detonating powder for ignition was really greater than the more modern efforts to do a much more simple thing. At the same time, had they succeeded, as they very nearly did, by doing without a removable cartridge-case, they would have accomplished that which is still required for the perfect working of magazine and automatic weapons.

The most elaborate of all the old repeaters was a revolving double-chambered German weapon. It had ten chambers, and each of these carried two charges, with a touch-hole for each. The majority of the old breech-loaders had movable blocks on the principle of the Martini, but instead of the hinged blocks being solid, as in that weapon, they were mostly hollowed out to take the charge and the bullet; sometimes held in a cartridge, but generally with the powder loose, and always loose when in the chamber, in order that there should be free communication with the touch-hole.

Sometimes the barrel was hinged in order to drop down at right angles with the stock, and this was really the forerunner of our drop-down guns of to-day, which are consequently some centuries old in principle, and had it not been for the absence of detonators there would have been nothing left for the nineteenth century to invent.

It has been said that the Prussians were first to take up the principle of the breech-loader for war, but that refers only to the detonated modern breech-loader. Some of the soldiers in the American War of Independence were armed with the breech-loader already mentioned, in which the trigger guard unscrewed the opening into the breech; but although this invention was possibly the soundest in joining of all the old ones, it was slow, and probably was not much used for that reason.