GUNS

The use of gunpowder as a weapon to fire projectiles dates back to tenth century China, when bamboo tubes were used to launch spears during battle. Indeed, the development of modern firearms has advanced by quantum leaps since those early days. This week Tidbits looks at the names behind some of the guns that have played a vital role in shaping our country and establishing us as a free nation.

• During the the Revolutionary War, the muzzle-loading musket was the standard model of gun in use. Muskets were unwieldy, and loading was tricky and difficult to do on horseback. Even the most practiced soldiers were only able to fire a musket two or three times per minute.

• In the 1830s Christian Sharps went to work for a gunsmith in New Jersey. There he was introduced to a new type of gun, a breech-loader, which could be loaded from the back instead of down the muzzle. He began tinkering with gun design until he patented a model in 1849 that was smaller, easy to load from the breech -- even while on horseback -- and could be fired numerous times without reloading.

• Sharps named the gun after himself and set up a factory. Although most soldiers in the Civil War were issued muskets, some soldiers, especially elite corps of highly trained marksmen, began to carry Sharps’ rifles instead. After the Civil War, pioneers, buffalo hunters, and U.S. troops moving westward carried the new, improved gun. Eventually Christian Sharps’ name came into our lexicon meaning one who has dead-eye aim; a crack shot or a marksman: a Sharpshooter.

RICHARD GATLING

• Richard Gatling’s father was constantly tinkering with the equipment on the family farm in North Carolina. Richard readily adapted with the same interests and together he and his father invented machines designed to sow cotton, rice, and wheat. He opened a factory to manufacture them, but soon became bored managing the operation and went back to the business of tinkering and inventing things.

• When the Civil War broke out he was horrified by the carnage and decided to do something to halt the pain of war. His plan was to invent a unique gun that was so formidable and devastating that it would end war forever.

• By 1862 he had designed a revolutionary weapon consisting of six to ten mounted barrels fixed to a rotating drum. By turning a crank, the gun could fire dozens of bullets in an unending stream. The use of multiple barrels avoided overheating a single barrel by rapidly firing out of several. When Union troops used it against the Confederate army, the results were overwhelming. The U.S. Army quickly ordered hundreds more of the weapons, and soon armies all over the world were using them.

• Richard’s dream that it would end war for all time did not come true, but the armament was named after its inventor: the Gatling gun.

LEAD SHOT

• Making lead shot for shotguns was time-consuming in the 1800s. Lead was rolled into sheets and the sheets were chopped into bits, or it was drawn out into wire and cut into pieces. The resulting shot was expensive and of poor quality. James Watt, inventor of the first practical steam engine, had a recurring dream one week. In it, he seemed to be in a heavy rainstorm but instead of water drops, he was being pelted with tiny lead pellets that bounced and rolled about him on the ground. Intrigued by the dream, Watt experimented by releasing molten droplets of lead from the top of a church tower into a large water-filled tub below. When he recovered the pellets, he found to his amazement that during their fall they had shaped into perfectly round pellets, instantly hardening upon landing in the water. To this day, lead shot is made by the same process that Watt dreamed up.

SMITH AND WESSON

• In 1852 Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson were working together at the National Armory in Massachusetts, and shared a passion for guns and ways to improve them. They formed their own company and crafted a new lever-action firearm, but were unable to successfully market them. They sold the failing company to shirt manufacturer Oliver Winchester, who started the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. After some refinements the new rifle gained popularity and Winchester became extremely successful.

• However, Smith and Wesson continued to tinker. They invented a better cartridge and then literally built a revolver around the bullet to fire it. Their creation was the first successful self-contained cartridge revolver in the world. They followed that with the hammerless revolver. The revolutionary new firearms were in immediate demand, and large orders were purchased by the U.S. Cavalry and the Russian Imperial Government.

• By the time Smith died in 1893 and Wesson in 1906, they had literally revolutionized the American firearms industry.

MIKHAIL KALASHNIKOV

• Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in Russia in 1919 and was conscripted into the Russian army in 1938. Trained as a tank mechanic, he demonstrated amazing mechanical abilities. He designed an automatic counter that would register the number of...

READ the rest of the story here. Click the link to the full issue here. It's fun, it's FREE. It's Tidbits!