I kind of remember from high school history class that one of the big things that made the Civil War different was the extensive use of rifles. The part the book missed from what I remember is why armies could use rifles so much, the invention of the minie ball. So was there any technical reason that some guy couldn’t have invented a version of the minie ball in the 1700’s? (I mean besides Claude Minie not being born before then:) )
Not really, except that developments that led up to the development of the minie ball had to be made first, by somebody.
The move from smoothbores to rifles was just part of an evolution of the gun, but if some smart guy had figured stuff out sooner, then perhaps the minie ball would have been invented sooner, too.
Let’s get out technical stuff down first.
The Minie Ball was a cylindrical slug with a pointed nose and a hollow base. It was developed by a French ordinance officer early in the 19th century to ease the loading of rifled muskets. Up until then the standard rifle and musket ammunition was a more or less spherical lead ball. To take advantage of the increased accuracy rifling provided the ball was patched, that is wrapped in, a piece of cloth or leather which increased the diameter of the ball so that it bit into the rifling so that the fired ball rotated on its directional axis when fired. The problem with this was that it was a real pain to load a muzzle loading rifle-musket with a patched ball. The patched ball had to be hammered down the bore and it just got worse once the weapon had been fired a few times and the fouling from the burnt gunpowder started to build up inside the barrel. Generally an unpatched ball just slid down the bore since it tended to be a bit smaller than the bore diameter.
The Minie Ball solved the loading problem by being a bit smaller than the bore but the hollow base spread out when the charge was set off forcing the spread base into the rifling and imparting spin to the bullet. You had the ease of loading of a smooth bore musket with the accuracy and range of a rifle.
In the American Civil War, however, and in the Crimean War and Napoleon III’s wars in Italy as well, the training had not kept up with the technology. While a rifled musket could reach out to 600 yards or more the relatively low muzzle velocity meant that there was a considerable drop in the bullet’s path. A soldier had to aim low at a close target and aim high at a distant target. Extensive musketry training was pretty much nonexistent. As a consequence the Minie Ball firing rifle musket was used as if it were a smooth bore musket. Commander tended to withhold fire until the target was within 250 yards rather than training their people to take advantage of the weapon’s longer range.
You must remember that while by 1863 most of the Union and Confederacy’s Eastern Armies were equipped with the .68 cal Springfield rifle musket or the Enfield rifle musket of slightly smaller caliber, before that and in the Western Armies many if not most were armed with obsolete US smooth bores and cast off European small arms. The butcher’s bill at places like Shiloh, Elk Horn Tavern, Champion Hill, Chickamauga and countless other engagement was to a great extent run up with smooth bore muskets.
In other words, while the Minie Ball firing rifle musket had the potential to increase the lethality of the battle field in the mid19th century it was not used as efficiently as it might have been.
There is a fair argument that the development of lighter weight and more mobile field artillery had as much to do with the deadliness of mid19th century warfare as the Minie Ball. That is not to say that a one ounce chunk of lead as big as the as the last joint of a man’s thumb moving at just shy of 1000 feet per second wasn’t a real man killer and maimer.
The minie ball was discussed not too long ago in this thread- http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12444763&postcount=57 -, and a point was raised which I’m unsure about: were minie balls practical before machine tooling made rifles standardized enough that a given ball would fit all muskets of a given make?
Rifles had been around for a couple hundred years before the Civil War. Armies tended to avoid them because, as Spavined Gelding mentioned, the black powder back then tended to foul the barrel, and a rifle’s round had to fit tightly or it wouldn’t grip the rifling and spin (and if it doesn’t spin then what’s the point). Hunters used rifles all the time. After a shot or two, they would just stop and clean out the barrel to get rid of the fouling. A soldier didn’t exactly have the time to do this in the middle of a battle, and military commanders at the time didn’t think the rifle really provided that much of a benefit on the battlefield, especially since the smoke from all of the black powder being fired off quickly obscured the battlefield and made the longer range of the rifle practically worthless.
You have to remember that tactics back then were a lot different too. A lot of folks look at an old smooth bore musket and think that it looks a lot like a modern rifle, therefore is must have been used a lot like a modern rifle, but it wasn’t. The musket replaced the bow (or crossbow) and, very importantly, it also replaced the pike. Before muskets, archers had to be protected by pikemen. With musketeers, the guys shooting the muskets were their own pikemen. They would shoot at a distance, then lower their weapons and charge with them like pikes.
Some commanders, like Napoleon, considered rifles to be worthless and didn’t even bother to use them at all. They provided little benefit, and were slow and difficult to load, which was a major detriment.
The Minie ball wasn’t the first attempt at solving this problem, though. You had the hexagonal barrel of the Whitworth rifle, which was used with a hexagonal bullet. Even if the bullet didn’t fit absolutely tightly, it would still spin. You also had the Brunswick rifle, which had two very wide rifle grooves running the length of the barrel and fired a round ball with a “belt” around it. The belt fit into the grooves, so that like the Whitworth rifle the round did not have to be absolutely tight into the barrel. The problem with both of these designs was that you tended to waste power from blowby if the round did not fit tightly, and you also tended to lose a bit of stability if the round was able to bounce its way down a looser fitting barrel. If you wanted these designs to shoot accurately, the round still had to fit tightly, which took you right back to the slow loading problem.
Minie’s solution meant that an undersized round could be rammed down into the barrel, which allows it to be loaded even if the barrel is fouled. The Minie ball’s expanding skirt had grease grooves in it which would provide a good enough seal to inflate the skirt so that it gripped the barrel tightly, giving the round a good spin. With the Minie ball, you now had all of the advantages of a rifle compared to a smooth bore musket, but you no longer had the disadvantages of slow loading that the rifle had formerly suffered from.
This didn’t mean that the rifles were always an advantage. It depended on how you used them. The British did well with their Enfields in the Crimean War where they went up against Prussian smooth bore muskets. However, in the Italian war of 1859, the French, armed with smooth bores, were able to defeat Austrians armed with rifles. The French charged in and kept the battle close and relied a lot on the bayonet, which negated the rifle’s greater range on the battlefield.
Technically, there’s no reason that anyone from the early 1700s couldn’t have figured this out. It just happened to take that long for Minie to get his bright idea.
In the 1840s and 1850s, “rifled muskets” (a term peculiar to rifles of the same general design as the smooth bore muskets they replaced) took over as the main infantry weapon. At the same time, there was also a conversion from flintlock to caplock. The caplock design was much more reliable, and much more immune to the effects of weather and humidity.
The Civil War ended up seeing a huge change in tactics. Changes in both weapons and tactics made a huge difference. Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg probably would have been successful 50 years earlier, but on the new and changing battlefield it ended up being a blood bath. Pickett was asked to regroup his men, and he basically said “what men?” Bayonets also went from being of major importance on the battlefield, accounting for a third of all battlefield casualties during the Napoleonic and U.S. Revolutionary wars, to being almost useless, accounting for less than 1 percent of battlefield casualties during the Civil War.
I hear this a lot, and I don’t agree with it. Sure, there was a lot of bullet drop compared to a modern rifle, but the bullet drop isn’t as bad as it is often made out to be. I shoot a reproduction 1853 Enfield, which is made exactly like they used to make them back then (except using modern machinery, so the parts are maybe a bit more precise) and the sight adjustments for 100, 200, 300, and 400 yards are pretty minimal. It’s when you get above those ranges that you have to flip up the ladder part of the sight and really have some significant drop.
There are two actual problems, IMHO. The first is that the default range for both the Springfield and the Enfield is 100 yards, so if you shoot at someone who is only 50 yards away you are going to be about 4 inches too high. So, they’d tell you to aim for the enemy’s belly button. The second problem is that soldiers were trained to fire quickly. They weren’t really given much training other than that, since training costs time and money, both of which were in short supply at the time. So soldiers would often set their sights for 300 yards at the start of the battle, and would then (understandably, under the circumstances) forget to set them back to 100 as the enemy charged. This would also make them shoot high at close range.
Probably just a typo, but the Springfield was a .58 cal (and the Enfield was .577).
It depends on who made them. The British, French, and even the much less experienced U.S. armories were capable of turning out consistent weapons, even before they started putting a huge emphasis on making things by machine instead of by hand. On the other hand, the Austrians were nowhere near as consistent. They made the Lorenz rifle, which was the third most popular rifle during the Civil War, after the Springfield and Enfield rifle-muskets. The Lorenz rifle had a reputation for poor quality and inconsistency in manufacturing. If you got a good Lorenz rifle that was within tolerance it was just as good as an Enfield or a Springfield. If you got a bad Lorenz, it was almost worthless, and soldiers would toss them aside on the battlefield as soon as something better became available.
it’s also worth noting that rifled (e.g. non-sabot) shotgun slugs are pretty similar in concept and execution to the Minie ball.
Engineer, typo it is on the .68 and .58 cal thing.
I will argue with you on the “aim low” thing. Most Civil War infantry small arms had pretty primitive sights, as you know. The leaf sight on the Springfield is typical. If, as you say, the default sight was set for a hit at 100 yards (zeroed at 100 yards) then at 1000 feet per second there was a bullet strike some 5 feet below the line of the bore. There are all sorts of accounts of the first volley going high. There are also all sorts of accounts of commanders giving instruction to “aim low.”
My own epiphany on this featured an M-1 rifle zeroed at 250 yards and a 25 yard pop-up target. As shown by the dust puff the first round went a good six to 12 inches high. That was with a weapon with a fairly flat trajectory – some 2300 feet per second. The effect with a weapon with less than half that muzzle velocity would be even more dramatic. This is born out by my experience with a Dixie Gun Works reproduction .58 cal. Springfield.
It is worth noting that the Minie Ball had a fairly brief existence. With the wide spread use of fixed cartridge ammunition and breech loading military rifles the conditions that made the Minie Ball desirable and useful went away.
The Springfield used leaf sights. With both leaves down the sight is set for 100 yards. The first leaf is set for 300 yards and the second leaf is 500 yards.
Here is a picture for those who aren’t familiar with them (the leaves are marked 3 and 5 for 300 and 500 yards respectively):
The Enfield used a ladder sight, which is better (IMHO). It looks like this:
There is a slider that you push up. With the slider all the way back, the rifle is set for 100 yards. Each “step” forward is 100 yards. As you can see in the picture there are 3 steps, so you get 200, 300, and 400 yards that way. At 500 yards you flip the entire ladder up, and move the slider up and down, lining it up with 100 yard marks that aren’t really visible at all in that picture, but trust me, they are there. My Enfield goes up to 900 yards. Later models went up to 1200 yards. Realistically, hitting anything beyond 600 yards was mostly luck though, so those 1200 yard sights were more than a little optimistic.
Here is a better picture of just the sight, so you can see which part flips up:
The Lorenz rifle had either block sights or leaf sights. I don’t know what ranges the leaves were set for.
Leaf sights probably were the most common type during the Civil War, with ladder sights coming in second.
I’m having a little trouble following your math here. Where did you get 5 feet from?
At 100 yards, assuming I did my math right, it is going to take the minie ball roughly 0.3 seconds to reach 100 yards. At y=1/2gt[sup]2[/sup] I get a drop of about 1.4 feet, not 5 feet.
So, like I said, you have to aim for their belly button up close. You do have to aim low, but you don’t have to aim that low. That’s my only argument with all of this. There is an issue of bullet drop, but I just think in most discussions on this subject it gets a little over-exaggerated.
You also need to be able to accurately judge distances if you want to use the sights. That’s easy enough on a shooting range where I shoot. It’s not so easy on a battlefield where the various ranges aren’t conveniently marked out for you. Soldiers at the time were drilled on shooting and reloading speed. They weren’t given a lot of training on estimating distances.
Come to think of it, how did they aim earlier models of rifled flintlock muskets that didn’t have rear sights? Just line up the bayonet lug with the target and hope for the best?
Rifles weren’t used much by militaries prior to the invention of the Minie ball, because of the barrel fouling and slow loading problem mentioned earlier. When rifles were used, they usually had some sort of sight on them. If the rifle was designed to accept a bayonet (some weren’t) then it usually used the bayonet lug as the front sight. If not, they usually used a blade type front sight. The rear sight was sometimes a simple V-notch type.
Rifles back in the flintlock days were much more common in civilian use. These were almost always custom one-off jobs made be ye olde local blacksmith, so some had sights and some didn’t. Your typical Kentucky or Pennsylvania rifle usually had some sort of sight on it though.
If it doesn’t have sights, you just kinda look down the barrel and hope for the best. If you’ve got a bayonet lug, that helps. I have a reproduction 1756 British long land pattern musket, which is a smooth bore, but that’s exactly how I aim it. On some muskets the tang screw (the screw at the rear that holds the barrel to the stock) sticks up a bit and you can kinda use that as a rear sight, but on my musket the tang screw sits pretty well flush and doesn’t help you there.
The huge drifting clouds of powder smoke pretty much precluded any attempts at long-range accurate shooting.
Until the American System of Manufactures arrived (development spurred by shortage of skilled labour in America, which could consequently command high wages) to replace the crafts system it’s unlikely they could have produced consistent, accurate rifle-muskets in large numbers at an acceptable price.
Delvigne’s work on saboted, and later cylindro-conical bullets anticipated Minié in many respects.
Someone forgot to devide by two. :smack:
Because of some fiction books I’ve been reading lately (David Weber’s Safehold books, if anyone is interested), I’ve become very aware of my lack of knowledge about the development and evolution of artillery & guns, and about the history of naval warfare.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading to correct that, and have so far found both subjects fascinating.
And so, many many thanks to everyone who answered the OP (even tho it wasn’t me who posted it), especially Spavined Gelding and engineer_comp_geek. Detailed, thoughtful, concise and eloquent postings from y’all have increased my knowledge and also confirmed that I knew what I thought I already knew. It’s folks like y’all that continue to justify the many hours I spend reading the Dope.
A bullets trajectory is roughly parabolic, but it typically starts out at an upward angle. This means it crosses the line of sight going upward at a fairly short range, and then again at the sight-in distance. Gravity starts working on it as soon as it leaves the muzzle, but has to overcome the upward component before the bullet starts falling downward. The sight line slopes downward with respect to the barrel, and is straight, so the divergence between the barrel line and the sight line is proportional to the distance beyond the crossing point.
So if we assume
V=900 fps I don’t know the ballistic coeffiecients of mini balls, so i’m going to ignore drag…a source of error.
Hs=1" This is the height of the sights above the bore center.
t 100yd=.3 seconds, so the drop due to gravity is
0 .3sec^2 * 32.2 f/sec^2 * 12in/ft *1/2=17.38 in.
So at 100 yd. our barrel needs to be aimed at a point 18.38" above our sight line. At 200 yards, this is 36.8" above the sight line. Gravity at that distance causes a drop of:
0 .6sec^2 * 32.2 f/sec^2 * 12in/ft *1/2=69.5"
So at 200 yards the bullet hits 69.5-36.8=32" below point of aim. This is quite a bit less than the trajectory difference of 69.5-17.38=52.12"
If instead, we sight-in at 200 yards, then the barrel is aimed 70.5" high at 200 yards, but that is only 35.25" high at 100yd. So the bullet will hit
35.25-17.38"=17.87" high at 100 yards.
The above is only about a third the error you would expect if you just compare the drop due to gravity at the two ranges. You can improve this even more by raising the sight line, as is done on the AR-15/M-16. This is great unless you tip the rifle a bit.