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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
Rifle. History of invention and production
Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us A rifle is a rifled small arms designed to be held and controlled when firing with two hands with the stock resting on the shoulder.
Hand firearms appeared as early as the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries, but for a long time they served only as an addition to edged weapons. Many years passed before the guns became suitable for arming the entire infantry, and only at the beginning of the XNUMXth century did the flintlock smoothbore musket with a bayonet, firing round bullets, finally supplant the pike. However, even then, handguns remained far from perfect: muskets were heavy and bulky, loaded from the muzzle and had a low rate of fire (about one shot per minute). In 1807, the Scotsman Forzich invented a gunlock in which a shot was caused by the ignition of an explosive composition from the impact of a steel pin. This was a huge step forward, as the flintlock fired 30% misfires even in dry weather. In 1815, the Englishman Egg invented copper caps filled with a mixture of hunting gunpowder and hypochlorous potassium. In 1821, Wright introduced brass caps filled with an explosive mixture. However, all these innovations could not increase either the rate of fire of the musket or the lethal force of its shot. Meanwhile, at the end of the 1480th century, the first rifled weapon appeared in Germany - a rifle. Gun barrels began to be provided with grooves inside, in which dirt accumulated after the burning of gunpowder. These grooves, whose invention in 1630 is attributed to Zollner from Vienna, were at first parallel to the axis of the gun. Around XNUMX, it was experimentally established that a bullet, which is given a rotational motion in the barrel, flies much further and hits much more accurately than a bullet fired from a smoothbore gun. To tell the bullet rotation, the rifling inside the barrel began to give a helical shape. So the internal bore turned into a kind of nut. However, such important advantages of a rifle as accuracy and range were accompanied by a very tangible drawback, since driving a bullet into the bore through the screw rifling was a tedious and difficult operation. As a result, even an experienced shooter could fire no more than one shot every five minutes from a rifle. Because of this, for two centuries the rifle remained unsuitable for widespread use in the army, especially in the XNUMXth century, when the entire battle was sometimes decided by the frequent fire of deployed lines. In addition, in order to speed up loading, the rifle was supplied with a too short barrel, and it was no longer suitable for bayonet fighting. All this time, the rifle remained almost exclusively a hunting weapon. The problem naturally arose: how to combine the advantages of a rifle with the ease of loading a smoothbore gun? At first they tried to make bullets of a slightly smaller diameter than the internal bore. Such a bullet easily passed through the rifling, but the resulting gap had an extremely harmful effect - during the shot, gases burst through it with force, the bullet received insufficient initial speed, and the useful qualities of the rifle were largely lost. The French officer Delvin came up with a way to correct this inconvenience by changing the shape of the bullet. In 1828 he designed a rifle with a chamber in the breech narrower than the entire barrel. First of all, during loading, gunpowder was poured into the chamber, followed by a bullet of a smaller diameter than the bore; having reached the edge of the chamber, she could not go further and remained in place, resting against her edges, a few blows with a hammer on the ramrod were enough to drive the soft lead of the bullet into the rifling and expand its diameter so much that it turned out to be closely fitted to the walls trunk. At the very first tests, the greatest inconvenience of this system was revealed - the bullet lost its spherical shape from impacts and became somewhat flattened, lost the helical rotation given to it by rifling, which means that the accuracy of shooting significantly decreased. Then Delvin decided to completely abandon spherical bullets and proposed making them oblong (cylindrical-conical). This invention was especially important. The Delvin rifle itself was never widely used, but the bullet shape he found turned out to be extremely successful and soon replaced the former spherical one everywhere. Indeed, an elongated bullet had many advantages over a round one: having passed through the rifling at the moment of the shot, it began to rotate around the longitudinal axis and flew with its sharp end forward. Due to this, its friction against the air was much less than that of a spherical bullet of the same diameter. She flew further and had a much flatter trajectory. At the same time, an oblong bullet entered the bores better, which made it possible to reduce the steepness and depth of the cut. Having significantly more weight than a spherical bullet, such a bullet flew out of the barrel at the same speed. In other words, the lethal force of a rifle loaded with a Delvin bullet has increased markedly, while its caliber has remained the same. Another idea of Delvin - that the bullet should change its diameter after it reached the end of the barrel - was also used, but in a more rational form. The main inconvenience of the Delvin rifle was that, after flattening, the bullet partly caught on its edges with the circular ledge of the chamber, and this weakened the force of the shot. The French colonel Thouvenne in 1844 figured out how to avoid this inconvenience. He removed the protrusions of the chamber and made the bore, as before, the same along its entire length. In the center of the bolt that locked the bore, he reinforced a short, strong steel rod, or pin, around which lay the poured gunpowder. During charging, the bullet, which had a smaller diameter than the bore, was easily driven through the rifling with a ramrod. At the end of the barrel, it hit the check, spread out wide and fit snugly against the walls of the barrel, and the expansion was much more correct than in the Delvin rifle. In a short time, the Thuvenne rifle became widespread, and until the end of the 40s of the XNUMXth century it was adopted not only in France, but in many states of Northern Germany. Soon, however, it turned out that this rifle also had major drawbacks: the effort that the soldier had to make in order to flatten the bullet remained very large, and when shooting from the knee or lying down, it was also very inconvenient. The rifle had strong recoil, besides, the check made it difficult to clean the barrel and often broke. In 1849, Captain Mignet proposed an improvement that avoided these inconveniences. He discovered that if a recess is made in the bullet, then the gas formed during the shot tends to expand the walls of this cavity so as to force it to fit snugly against the barrel and enter the rifling. Mignet's idea was entirely based on the use of this effect. He eliminated the pin at the bottom of the bore and restored the original simplicity of the rifle, which it distinguished before Delvin and Thouvenne. But in the pool they began to drill a cone-shaped cutout from the side of the base. At the time of the shot, it expanded and fit snugly against the walls of the barrel.
The effect achieved by such a simple improvement was amazing: the new rifle loaded as easily as a smoothbore musket, but was much better than the old rifle, surpassing it in range and accuracy. Therefore, the Minié rifle was the first rifled weapon that became widespread in Europe. This was also aided in no small measure by the fact that all the old smooth-bore muskets, with the help of a very simple alteration, could be converted into rifles suitable for the use of the Minié bullet. For example, in Prussia, in less than a year, rifling was made on 300 old muskets. Following France, the Minié rifle in various local modifications was adopted in England, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, and then in Russia.
However, by the time the Mignet rifle was such a great success, an invention had already appeared that directed the development of firearms in a completely different direction. While others tried to change the shape of the bullet without fundamentally changing the design of the rifle itself (it was still a muzzle-loading ramrod gun), the Prussian gunsmith Dreyse worked on creating an important addition to the rifle - he created the shutter. The advent of the shutter was an era in military affairs, and Dreyse rightfully has the glory of one of the greatest mechanics in the history of military equipment. Although it cannot be said that the idea of \uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbthis device belongs entirely to him, it was he who first found the solution to the most difficult engineering problem - he created a rifle that was loaded from the breech. Many of Dreyse's predecessors along this path (the first attempts to create a shutter date back to the Middle Ages) failed primarily because they did not have high-precision metal-cutting machines at their disposal. After all, the connection between the bolt and the barrel must be strong and withstand the enormous pressure of powder gases. At the same time, the shutter should move easily and be quickly installed in place. In other words, he could work only with the smallest tolerances in deviation from the normal dimensions of parts - no more than thousandths of a millimeter. For a long time these difficulties seemed insurmountable, and only the technical capabilities of the XNUMXth century made it possible to adequately resolve them. In this sense, the rolling shutter was the brainchild of its time. However, the fact that Dreyse had a high-precision lathe at his disposal in no way detracts from his fame as the inventor of the device, which remains to this day the most important accessory of any small arms.
Dreyse took the first step towards creating a new rifle back in 1828, when he came up with the so-called unitary cartridge for a smoothbore needle gun. This immediately allowed to increase its rate of fire. Prior to this, the loading process included many different operations: pouring powder, pushing a bullet, installing a piston. Dreyse came up with the idea of placing a powder charge, a bullet and a primer in a paper shell - a sleeve. Loading after that was reduced to only two operations: removing the spent cartridge case and inserting the cartridge into the barrel. Breaking the fuse in the Dreyse gun was carried out with a needle penetrating through a hole in the breech. In 1836, Dreyse crowned his many years of work with the creation of a bolt-action needle rifle that was loaded from the breech. The bolt he designed was a cylindrical box screwed to the breech, in which a piston moved back and forth. Inside this piston-gate, a strong needle also moved freely, playing the role of a striker.
When opening the shutter, it was necessary to first push back the needle c. Then turn the shutter lever d to the left and push it back - then a through hole (cartridge window) opened, where the cartridge was inserted. Then the shutter was installed in place (in this case, the cartridge was sent into the bore) and turned it again. Lever d fell into a special cutout in the wall of the box, and the bolt tightly locked the bore. Placing the weapon on a combat platoon consisted of simply pulling back the needle c. At the same time, the trigger was cocked, holding the spring in the firing position. When the trigger was pressed, the spring mechanism descended, and the needle pierced into the cartridge with force and ignited the primer. Thus, with the introduction of the bolt, loading the rifle was reduced to five simple movements that could be done in any position and even on the go. In 1840, the Dreyse needle rifle was already adopted by the Prussian army. However, needle guns became widespread only twenty years later - during the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. Their use led to a radical change in combat tactics. Closed columns were replaced everywhere by deployed chains.
The creation of a needle gun was a huge step in the development of small arms, which only after that began to take on its modern form. However, the Dreyse rifle also had its drawbacks: paper cartridges quickly dampened, the needle was a rather vulnerable part of the mechanism and broke. These inconveniences were eliminated after the introduction in the 70s of the XNUMXth century of a unitary cartridge with a metal sleeve and primer, which was ignited by hitting the striker. Author: Ryzhov K.V.
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