January 20, 2013
A (Not So) Brief History of the Gun
By Trevor Thomas
As debates about guns and gun rights in America
rage, truly to understand the gun, one needs to look at its history. The story of the gun is a fascinating and
riveting look not only at history, but also at science, business, politics,
justice, and morality. Throw in a great
deal of ingenuity, a good deal of heroism, and a small dose of romance and the
story of the gun is the world's greatest tale of human invention.
The gun's story begins with the invention (or
discovery) of gunpowder. Gunpowder most
likely was invented just prior to 1000 A.D. [They say
in China. But the history of China is the history the history of an island
empire, a land surrounded by deserts and jungles as isolating as the Pacific is
to Australia.] It became rather
prominent around the turn of the twelfth century. Theories abound about who actually invented
gunpowder, but no one really knows.
According to noted historian Ian Hogg, [One of the late twentieth century’s finest historians of
firearms] "[t]he first positive statement relating to gunpowder
appears in a document written in 1242 by Roger Bacon entitled On the Miraculous
Power of Art and Nature. Hogg also notes
that since, during that period, "fiery compositions" were considered
an element of the "Black Arts," Bacon, a Franciscan friar, concealed
his formula in an anagram (which remained unsolved for over 600 years).
Early guns were really cannons. The first illustration of a cannon appears in
a 1326 work entitled On the Duties of Kings, prepared for King Edward III of
England. These early cannons fired large
stone balls -- sometimes weighing up to 200 pounds. However, such stones were still lighter than
iron shot of a similar diameter and, due to the relative weakness of early
gunpowder, were safer to use.
Such cannons were massive and thus difficult to move. Smaller calibers that were more mobile were
much desired. This led to the
development of the "hand-gonne."
These were simply miniature iron or bronze cannon barrels attached to
the end of a lengthy wooden staff.
By the 15th century, "arms of fire" with a
lock, stock, and a barrel -- the same basic look we have today [And where that old phrase comes from] -- became
somewhat common. The first weapon that
could be carried, loaded, and discharged by a single man became known as the
matchlock. This was a muzzle-loading gun
that was discharged when a hand-lit match was lowered into the flash pan.
The term "lock" most likely originated
from the fact that the gun-lock operated in a similar fashion to the locking
mechanisms of the day.
These early guns were not very accurate or
reliable. They could be quite dangerous
to use (as the burning wick necessary to ignite the powder in the flash pan was
often in close proximity to the stores of powder on the user), and were
virtually useless in wet weather. The matchlock also was not very useful for hunting,
as the burning wick alerted most every type of game. [Most
likely by the smell, not the sight.]
A new lock design for igniting the powder was
needed. Thus, around 1500 A.D., the
world was introduced to the wheel lock.
The wheel lock made use of a centuries-old process for lighting fires:
striking stone [flint] against steel and
catching the sparks. No longer was a cumbersome and dangerous burning cord
necessary for discharging a gun.
For the first time, a firearm could now be carried
loaded, primed, and ready to fire.
Again, the actual inventor is unknown, but Leonardo da Vinci had one of
the earliest drawings of a wheel lock design.
The wheel lock also led to another advancement in
firearms: the pistol. For the first
time, a weapon could now be carried concealed.
It was at this point that many of the first laws against carrying
firearms came into being.
Like the matchlock, the wheel lock had its
shortcomings. If the wrench necessary to
wind the wheel [spring] was lost, the weapon was
rendered useless. Also, with over 50
individual parts, the wheel lock was of a complicated and intricate
design. This made the gun very costly to
own and difficult and expensive to maintain.
Efforts toward a simpler, less expensive, and more
reliable gun led to the next significant step in firearms: the flintlock. The first flintlock design was by the
Frenchman Marin le Bourgeois around 1615.
The flintlock was a more simple design, and most of the moving parts
were inside the gun. This made it much
more weather-proof than its predecessors.
For over 200 years, the flintlock was the standard
firearm of European armies. It was used
in the greatest battles of the 18th century and helped determine many of the
rulers of Europe, not to mention helped set the borders of many European nations. The flintlock brought to an end the armor-wearing
knight and also saw the end of the Napoleonic wars.
The flintlock was also the customary firearm of the
young United States and was instrumental in our battle for independence. In fact, to battle lawlessness and Indians,
and to put food on the table, the gun was the most essential and prized tool in
early America. As soon as they were old
enough properly to hold and fire a flintlock, many young American boys were
expected to help feed their families.
Thus, generations of boys growing up and using guns from a young age
played no small part in America winning her independence. "The Americans [are] the best marksmen
in the world," lamented a minister of the Church of England in 1775.
The first original American contribution to firearms
was the Kentucky rifle (which was made in Pennsylvania).
This gun was superior to most every European
contemporary. It was longer and lighter,
and it used a smaller caliber than other muzzle-loading guns at the time. Most importantly, as the name indicates, the
Kentucky gun was "rifled."
This process, which involves cutting helical grooves inside the gun
barrel, greatly increased accuracy. [Doing this by
using a hand broach in a barrel 30” long is rather intimidating.]
A bullet fired from a rifled gun spins and thus
helps stabilize any bullet imperfections (which were usually significant in the
18th century) that otherwise would distort flight (think bow and arrow vs.
slingshot).
In spite of all this, most American Revolutionaries
still carried smooth-bore muskets.
Kentucky rifles did take longer to load than smooth-bore muskets, and
often the volume of fire was/is more important than accuracy. General George Washington did make significant
use of American marksmen armed with the Kentucky rifle, though. These riflemen played major roles (as in
picking off British officers) in such conflicts as the Battle of Saratoga (see
Morgan's Riflemen).
The birth of a new nation meant the need for a
national armory. In 1777, General
Washington settled on a strategic location in Springfield Massachusetts as the
setting for the armory. In addition to
being important for our national defense, the Springfield Armory led the world
in technological advancements that would change manufacturing forever.
The manufacture of firearms at Springfield helped
usher in the age of mass production. An
ingenious inventor named Thomas Blanchard, who worked for the Springfield
Armory for five years, created a special lathe for the production of wooden gun
stocks.
Such a lathe allowed for the easy manufacture of
objects of irregular shape. This led,
for example, to the easy mass production of shoes. Many other technical industries -- such as
the typewriter, sewing machine, and bicycle -- were also born out of the gun
industry. Factories that produced such
products were often located near firearm manufacturers, as the firearms
industry possessed the most skilled craftsman necessary for creating the
complicated parts for such machines.
The Springfield Armory also introduced contemporary
business practices to manufacturing.
Concepts such as hourly wages and cost accounting practices became
customary at Springfield and were important steps in modernizing manufacturing.
The next step in firearms development came from a
minister. Due to his severe frustration
with the delay between trigger pull and gunfire (which too often allowed for
the escape of his prized target: wild ducks) from his flintlock, the Reverend
Alexander Forsyth invented the percussion cap.
Inside the cap is a small amount of impact-sensitive
explosive (like fulminate of mercury). Thus, muzzle-loading guns now did not
have to rely on exposed priming powder to fire, were quicker to fire, and were
almost completely weather-proof.
However, gun users were still plagued by a centuries-old problem: they
were limited to a single shot before reloading. Enter Samuel Colt.
Making use of the percussion cap, in 1836, Colt
(with the aid of a mechanic, John Pearson) perfected and patented a revolving
handgun. Although little of Colt's
design was original, he ingeniously brought together existing features of
previous guns and fashioned them into a mechanically elegant and reliable
revolver.
Along with being an inventor, Colt was a shrewd and
capable businessman. His genius was not
only in his gun design, but in the techniques used to manufacture it. His guns were made using interchangeable
parts (made by machine and assembled by hand). [An idea
brought to the fore by Eli Whitney the inventor of the “Cotton Gin”, the
machine that made slave cotton production profitable.]
In 1847, with an order of 1,000 pistols from the
U.S. Army but no factory to build them, Colt looked to noted gun-maker Eli
Whitney (often called "the father of mass production") to help fill
the order. It was the production of guns,
and men such as Whitney and Colt, that led the way in the pioneering and
perfection of the assembly line. [This would be the
production of the Colt Patterson, built at the town in New Jersey that had been
founded to utilize the water power of the falls to drive multiple production
facilities.]
When Colt's American patent expired in 1857, there
were many who stood ready to take the next step in firearms -- none more so
than a pair of men who had spent much of their time perfecting ammunition:
Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson. In 1856,
just in time to take advantage of Colt's expiring patent, their partnership
produced the world's first revolver that fired a fully self-contained
cartridge. This cartridge was a
"rimfire" variety that Smith and Wesson patented in 1854.
As handguns were progressing, long arms were
beginning to catch up. This is where
another American icon enters our history: a wealthy shirt maker named Oliver
Winchester. Winchester took over a
fledgling arms company in 1855 and in 1857 hired a gunsmith named Tyler Henry
to turn it around.
By 1860, Henry had created a breech-loading
lever-action repeating rifle (firing 16 rounds). The Henry Repeating Rifle was
a tremendously popular, useful, and reliable gun. It was this weapon that began to make the single-shot
muzzle-loading rifle obsolete. [The Henry is still
produced in Brooklyn, and is known by its brass side panels. During The Civil
War Confederates said ”It was the rifle that was loaded on Sunday and could be
fired all week.”]
In 1866, Winchester improved on the Henry rifle and
produced a model named after himself.
The Winchester model 1866 fired 18 rounds, had a wooden forearm to make
it less hot to handle, and contained the familiar side-loading port. [This is the rifle we know from the westerns of the 40’s and
50’s. The Ringo Kid in Stagecoach.]
It was in 1873 that the two most legendary guns of
the Old West were produced -- the Winchester model 1873 (which was a larger
caliber than the 1866 model) and the Colt model 1873, otherwise known as
"The Peacemaker." Carrying on
with the savvy business sense of its founder, the Colt Company built this model
to hold the exact same ammunition as the Winchester model 1873. [.44-40]
Though such guns put more firepower in the hands of
an individual than ever before, they paled in comparison to what was next. With virtually every step in gun advancement,
there were many attempts toward the same goal.
This was no different for the "machine gun."
Certainly the most famous of the early versions of
the machine gun was the Gatling Gun.
Mounted on a central axis with six rotating barrels, the Gatling Gun was
fired by hand turning a rotating crank mounted on the side. Although not a true automatic, the Gatling
could achieve several hundred rounds per minute. [Welcome
to Wounded Knee.]
The most successful and famous of the early fully
automatic guns was the Maxim gun.
Invented by an American-born Brit, Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, this gun was
introduced in 1884. The maxim was
completely automatic in the sense that it was "self-powered." In other words, using the tremendous amount
of energy that was released when the gun was fired, it was now unnecessary for
a discharged cartridge to be manually ejected and the next cartridge to be manually
loaded. With the Maxim gun, this action
continues with a single trigger pull.
Maxim's gun could fire 10 rounds per second.
Maxim spent several years studying how to put the
recoil energy of a gun to good use. He
patented virtually every possible way of automatically operating a gun -- so much
so that, as Ian Hogg put it, "he could have probably quoted [only] one of
his many patents and stifled machine gun development for the next 21 years, since almost every successful
machine gun design can be foreseen in a Maxim patent."
Men like John Browning [America’s
greatest firearms designer], Baron Von Odkolek, John Thompson [And his trusty sub-machine gun, the gangster’s friend],
Mikhail Kalashnikov [The farther of the AK-47.],
and several others built off Maxim's success, and machine guns became smaller
and lighter.
This brings us into the 20th century, where fully
automatic weapons that could be carried and operated by a single man were
commonplace and necessary for any successful army. [At
least after 1944 with the introduction of the StG 44 (Sturmgewehr 44, literally "storm (or assault)
rifle (model of 1944") to the Waffen SS.]
From before the founding of this great nation,
firearms have been essential to the preservation of life, the enforcement of
law and justice, and the establishment and protection of liberty. Our Founding Fathers understood well how
important the gun was to the founding and maintaining of liberty in the U.S.
Thus, they gave us: "A well regulated militia,
being necessary to the security of a free state..." And just what is the
"militia"? No less than the
co-author of the 2nd Amendment, George Mason, tells us: "I ask, sir, what
is the militia? It is the whole people[.] ... To disarm the people is the best
and most effectual way to enslave them."
What's more, the technology that drove the
progression of firearms and the improved manufacturing and business practices
adopted at gun factories propelled the U.S. into the Industrial Age. America owes much to the gun. Americans, whether they are gun owners or
not, whether they love them or despise them, would be wise to remember all that
the gun has meant to this nation and hope and pray that guns remain in the
hands of its citizens.
Trevor Grant Thomas: at the Intersection of
Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason. www.trevorgrantthomas.com
