";s:4:"text";s:4636:" About 1610, the muzzleloading, smoothbore flintlock musket was invented as an improvement on the matchlock musket, a similar firearm that depended on a lit match for ignition. Prussia demonstrated to European armies the impact of more rapid fire on the battlefield when its "needle gun" breechloaders badly outclassed Austrian weapons during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Ninety percent of the soldiers killed on the fields of battle owed their fate to a deceptively simple hand-held gun and its companion projectile: the rifle-musket and the minié bullet.Pfc. The inspiration for the bullet came to Norton while he was stationed in India and observed natives using blowpipes as weapons. The explosion of the gunpowder would drive the iron cup forward and expand the bullet’s base to fit the rifling grooves snugly.U.S. It is said that the Minie Ball had to do with 90% of the deaths of the war. (Minie´is properly pronounced min-YAY, but Americans pronounced the name as "Minnie.") Developed over a generation, its final design was the fruit of independent work by men from Great Britain, France, and the United States.Hundreds of thousands of Union troops carried the 1861 Springfield onto the battlefields of the Civil War, and untold numbers of Confederates captured the weapon and used it themselves. Because the ammunition had to fit inside the barrel tightly in order to fit in the spiral rifling grooves, soldiers had a tough job forcing it down from the muzzle, especially under combat conditions, when repeated firing quickly filled the grooves with the residue of burnt powder. (The Union imported a similar number for its troops. Rifle bullets, primarily the minié bullet, caused 90 percent of all these casualties. Who is The best rapper in Between 1861 and 1865, the Springfield armory manufactured nearly 800,000 of the guns; private contractors built 880,000 more; and slightly modified 1863 and 1864 models accounted for an additional 500,000. Armed with a Springfield, a competent shooter could hit a 27-inch bull’s-eye at 500 yards, the best performance to date for a standard-issue infantry weapon. Napoleon often used his cavalry as a surprise offensive weapon, sending his horsemen on charges to trample infantrymen armed with smoothbore flintlock muskets. When the shooter pulled the trigger, the cock fell and scraped the flint against a rough piece of metal known as the frizzen pan cover. The new bullet, which was commonly called the Minié ball by the time of the Civil War, was extremely destructive. (The development of conical-shaped shells also began a revolution in artillery as ammunition like the Parrott and James shells allowed for true rifling in cannon, giving the guns longer range and greater accuracy. Consequently, the colorful cavalry charges of the Napoleonic era became all but obsolete. Since troops armed with rifled muskets could stand off and fire from a greater distance, this smoothbore advantage only occurred during close-quarters fighting.“Fritz over thar tho’ght he was going to have a cinch with us raw Americans.