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.
The Venetians had ships armed with cannon as early as 1380 A.D., and in
Henry VIII.’s reign the wrecked _Mary Rose_ carried _breech_-loaders,
designed on a principle which may possibly have suggested the wire guns
of the present. The tube of iron or brass (for both were used) was
surmounted by rings of iron which had evidently been slipped over the
tube and hammered on while red-hot. These then contracted upon cooling,
and pinched the bore smaller, so that, intentionally or not, the bore
was made to expand to its original size upon an explosion occurring
before any stress was put on the metal of the internal surface by the
powder-gas. That is to say, all the first part of the strain went to
expand the rings on the outside of the gun before the inside had
reassumed its natural dimensions; or, in other words, the tension
between the external big circumference and the internal small one was
equalised, just on the same principle as it is in the latest big guns.
This is known, because some of the _Mary Rose’s_ big guns were got up
from the sea about half a century ago. She was over-weighted, and it is
quite probable that her loss had a good deal to do with teaching the
nation that before everything a warship must be handy, so that, when the
Spaniards sent their great ships to fight Elizabeth, her smaller craft,
and Britain’s uncertain weather, between them sank or squandered the
whole Spanish fleet.