The History of the Rifle, pt. I
For everyone who has played Empire: Total War, or who is familiar with 18th century history, you will know that the common weapon of war in that era was the smoothbore musket. These weapons had a huge role in the defeat of the Aztec and Inca empires, which were the two most powerful entities in the pre Columbian Americas. During the US Civil War and the second half of tge 19th century, however, it was not the smoothbore musket that was the standard weapon of soldiers, but the rifle, so called because of the rifling made inside the barrel, which greatly improved the range and accuracy of the weapon. This post, and the next one (part II) will give a brief overview of how this change came to be, the origins of the rifle, and how it has developed from the 19th century to the present. I have no doubt that for many people reading, the things in this post will be things they already know, but I do feel it is important to make such a thread anyways, as it connects the era of Empire: Total War to the era that our mod covers in some fairly important ways.
The History of the Rifle, pt. I - Origins to the 19th century
(picture of a 16th century German rifle, from Google)
Before we can really delve into the history of the rifle, we need to look at the history of firearms as a whole, even if only briefly. 'Firearms' as we know them originated in China, and their emergence seems to have begun around the 11th or 12th century. The Chinese had gunpowder (made by mixing sulfur with saltpeter) for a long time before firearms emerged, and it is evident that the T'ang dynasty (which began in the 7th century and collapsed in the 10th century AD) knew fully well the effects of gunpowder, and its explosive qualities when exposed to fire, and were also well aware that it could be utilized in warfare. Firearms took different forms over time; first the hand cannon, which was mostly effective as a strictly psychological weapon to frighten horses; then the arquebus, which was more effective but was still extremely inaccurate and had a short range. By the 14th century the Chinese had muskets, which were long and awkward but more effective than any of its predecessors. The Chinese found that by firing the muskets simultaneously while in a line (something they had done with bows since ancient times) they could achieve a much greater effective range with these weapons than by having soldiers firing them individually. The Manchu used well trained musketeers in combination with well trained archers and huge numbers of pikemen and cavalry to defeat the established Ming Dynasty, and from there would conquer the rest of China and establish the Qing dynasty. The Qing would continue to utilize combinations of musketeers, archers, pikemen and cavalry as the standard structure of their armies until the mid 19th century, when their century and a half long period of isolation from Europe ended.
Returning to the firearm itself, these weapons of war were powerful from the outset, even if only for the fact that they had a psychological impact on whoever they were used on. The Chinese knew this, and others quickly caught on. Trade allowed other powers to attain them, and merchants who sold them made good money. It is because of this that they traveled along the 'Silk Road', which was a very important trading route that connected Asia to Europe. Europeans would attain them, and very quickly learned to make their own gunpowder and firearms. The use of firearms thus logically followed an east to west development; the Turks were among the first to use them in Europe; the English, at the opposite corner of Europe and isolated by water, among the last. The muskets which were being used in China since the 14th century saw widespread use in Europe by the end of the 16th century, and by some in Europe (like the Spanish) long before then.
It is at this point that we finally see the emergence of the rifle. Europeans made two major contributions to the evolution of the firearm, the first of which is the rifle, the second of which is the bayonet. The 'bayonet' is so called because of the area of its supposed invention (Bayonne in France); it is certainly important and I encourage anybody interested to do research on the internet about it, how it came to be and how it changed warfare; in this post however I am focused upon the rifle.
The 'rifle' gets its name from rifling, which is a process of cutting grooves inside a barrel. Rifling a barrel of a musket can greatly improve the accuracy of the weapon, but who first found this out is totally up to speculation. Archers had long known that adding a twist to their fletching would improve the accuracy of their arrows. There are even some who claim that Leonardo Da Vinci invented the rifle. For our purposes these speculations are unimportant. What is important to know is that by the mid 16th century, Europeans were well aware that firearms with rifled barrels were more accurate, and they had begun to produce them in a huge variety of design, length and bores. They were not, however, weapons of war. Cutting grooves in the barrel had two major effects: in addition to improving the accuracy of the gun (as I mentioned earlier), it also had the effect of making reloading the gun a much longer and detrimental process. Bullets at that time, which were ideally spherical (although in many cases they weren't, and sometimes would be literally rocks that had been picked up off the ground), had to be rammed down the length of the barrel, as (again, ideally) they would be made to fit tightly on the inside of the barrel, because if they did not the accuracy of the weapon would suffer greatly, since gas and much of the explosive energy would literally go around the bullet and be lost. Due to this, reloading a rifle meant that the bullet would press against the inside of the grooves, meaning they took much longer to reload and reloading them would literally damage the rifling, meaning that over a prolonged period of use the rifle would essentially 'revert' back to a smoothbore weapon. This meant that the rifle was not seen as a suitable weapon of war at that time, since for musketeers their primary duty was seen not as accuracy but rather to pour out volleys of bullets as fast as they were able to, with actual accuracy being seen as important for units of men armed with crossbows, bows, and other such older weapons, which were in general more accurate and could fire faster, but lacked the range and psychological impact of the musketeers.
A place that rifles did see regular use was in hunting. In hunting game, reloading is largely irrelevant, as whatever you may have shot at will be long gone by the time you reload, or, if you are unlucky, on top of you. The most important thing becomes accuracy. You essentially have one shot, and because of this many of the noblemen (who were, for the most part, the only ones allowed to hunt) used rifles.
It was not until the 18th century that we saw meaningful use of rifles on the battlefield. During the American Revolution, certain frontiersmen fighting against the British would use rifles, weapons which they were very familiar with as they had used them for hunting, and as such they depended upon them for survival. They largely imitated the Native Americans in that they would fire them while hidden behind trees. For the British Loyalist soldiers this meant not only that they were easy targets, but that they could not fight back against them effectively unless they mounted a bayonet charge, something which is hard to do in the heat of battle while in forested areas with difficult terrain. It was after this experience that the British adopted the rifle as a weapon of the battlefield, and they would soon have their own units of riflemen, and in a very short period of time it was in fact the British who were making some of the most significant advancements in rifle technology, to the point where during the US Civil War many officers preferred to arm their men with rifles of British make, and for the Confederacy the British Pattern 1853 Enfield became the standard infantry rifle.
Despite the adoption of the rifle by a number of European armies, it still had the same major drawback as before; it was slower and harder to reload. This factor meant that Riflemen units were typically made up of men who were exceptionally accurate with these weapons, and functionally these units would move across the battlefield in a loose order, initiate firing at the greatest possible distance and utilize natural cover whenever possible. In the 1840s we see a major innovation that would change things, and pave the way for the rifle to replace the smoothbore musket as the standard infantry weapon on the battlefield: the Minie bullet. This bullet was not spherical, but conical, was smaller than the bore of the inside of the barrel, and had a 'skirt' at the base, so that when the gun was fired, the force of the explosion would 'lift' the skirt, causing it to spread out and catch the rifling on the inside of the barrel. What all of this essentially meant is that with this bullet, the rifle could be reloaded as quickly as a smoothbore weapon. With this style bullet, we see European armies begin a process of rapid change, and we see standard infantry no longer being armed with smoothbore muskets, but rather with 'rifled muskets', which are full length muskets that have had their barrels rifled, or rifles that are made from the start to be the length of a musket. The Crimean War in 1853 was the conflict that proved, without a doubt, the effectiveness of Line Infantry armed with rifles; British and French soldiers fought against Russians who were largely still armed with smoothbore weapons. The US Civil War, which began seven years after the conclusion of the Crimean War, saw both sides using rifles as their standard infantry weapon, while also using tactics that did not truly accommodate for the weapon, and because of this, sadly, many of the major battles had an unnecessarily high rate of soldiers who were killed in action.
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