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Featured Article: Brief History of Muzzleloaders
A Brief History of Muzzleloaders
By Ethan Yazel
Sometime around 900 BC, the Chinese invented black powder. Presumably, it was the kind of technological advancement no one had ever seen but it did not take long for it to ignite a series of changes that would impact the next 2000 years in ways no one ever thought possible. Black powder was first used for and is still used today in many fireworks. Black powder enthusiasts always recognize the smell in some form or another at fireworks display or backyard cookout.
While celebratory at first, it didn’t take long for humanity’s wheels of ingenuity to start turning. The Chinese quickly figured out that they could develop strong tubes with a solid end and turn the black powder into propellent for a cannon or a mortar like we would think of today. Unlike the rest of muzzleloading, which would change radically over time, you can find hundreds of these same cannon and mortar designs dotted around the US at capital buildings, museum and monuments, a testament to their use well into early American history.
Early Chinese mortars were cast tubes, made of brass or iron and then just loaded him through the muzzle just like you would see American Revolutionary War era mortars, and that was really the first of the muzzleloading industry. Soon, these mortars were shrunk down to about 12” long and placed on the end of a staff. Called “Handgonnes” or “hand cannons” became common in China in the 13th century and made their way through Asia and Europe by the 14th Century. Handgonnes were the parent of the earlier “Firelance”, essentially a small fireworks holder on the end of a spear, used to surprise an opponent before or during melee combat. The Handgonne attempted to improve on this, taking the shooter out of melee combat by increasing range and accuracy, all made possible by improvements to the blackpowder of the time. Despite the improvements, the handgonne was reliant on its fuse to fire, making it slow and cumbersome.
In the fourteen hundreds, you start to see the development of the matchlock in Europe. This created a mechanical element to go with the fuse, The match lock holds a fuse in kind of a little arm on the side of your gun and when you pull the trigger it drops that fuse into a pan primed with a little bit of black powder and that priming pan. That spark travels into the barrel through a hole in the side of the barrel, and we call that a touch hole and that lights off the main charge in your barrel. This is where we started to see the first concepts of the muzzle loading rifle in use in the manner that will eventually be carried by an individual in the late eighteen hundreds. Matchlocks were also some of the first firearms to incorporate a trigger, a dynamic shift from the early handgonnes.
The matchlocks started to change a little bit in Germany. In the mid-1400s, a group of German gunsmiths figured out how to rifle a barrel. Every barrel, until the mid-late fourteen hundreds was smooth, like a modern shotgun. These early German gunsmiths figured out how to rifle these barrels and start getting a twist in the barrel, allowing for the projectile to be more accurate over greater distances, and this is where we start to see German engineering start to change the world.
In the fifteen hundreds, gunsmiths and shooters grew tired of this fuse concept and began looking for something more reliable. The Wheellock is developed and is the first muzzleloading lock to use metal and iron to create a spark like you want to light a fire with your flit in your striker.
While the ignition is different, the wheel lock is mechanically similar to the matchlock. A spring-loaded arm, or “Dog” that holds a piece of pyrite is cocked by rotating it towards the muzzle (the opposite of a flintlock’s cock). Then, a wrench is used to cock a coil spring attached to a rough steel wheel. When the trigger is pulled, the arm retracts, placing the pyrite on the t rough edged steel wheel, the coil spring unwinds, rotating the wheel to create sparks that ignite the priming pan and then the main charge.
This is arguably one of the most complicated muzzleloading locks ever in history. Muzzleloaders are loved for their simplicity, but when you consider the engineering and design skills needed to build these locks by sun and candlelight without any modern machining technologies it becomes a fascinating point in history for anyone interested in making things with their hands. While not nearly as popular in the United States as the flint and percussion locks, there are a few builders keeping the wheellock and matchlocks alive, especially in Europe. A man by the name of Bolek Maciaszczyk manages an online course where students build their own wheellock muzzleloaders, and there is a large Facebook group called “Matchlock and Wheellock guns” keeping the tradition alive.
After another 100 years or so, we begin to see the development of the Flintlock, which is one of the things that people really think about when they see a muzzle loader, where you have the cock holding a flint that strikes against a hardened piece of iron or steel called the “frizzen” to create a spark that drops it into your priming pan and then ignites your charge. When we think about the early United States, the American Revolution and the American long rifle, this is the ignition system that was used during that time, and
we can tie it directly back to those German gunsmiths.
When American gunsmiths began building the American long rifle in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and along the East Coast, they were heavily influenced by those German builders, because many of the builders were German. They had either come to the new world themselves or were trained under those German masters and brought their skills to the new world.
When you look at early long rifles, you really see that German influence in the design of the rifle. It is very easily denoted in the carving or engraving, even the shapes of the stock and hardware like the trigger guards are very similar. This influence stays with American muzzleloaders in one form or another through the flintlock era.
While we kept those German influences, American gunsmiths needed to adapt the flintlock rifle for North America. Barrel length was one of the main things to change. Many German muzzleloaders at this time had barrels that measured only 30in in length, a stark contrast to the 40”-60” barrels we see being used in the early 1700s. In a young colonial America, metal was not easy to come by making short barrel more affordable, but cheap is worthless if you can’t shoot. Early American blackpowder burned a lot slower than powder from Europe. Without an extended burn time in a long barrel, American shooters would be unable to take game accurately at longer distances. For a population that depended in many ways on hunting to put food on the table, this was a necessity.
The American long rifle was the main firearm in the United States, in one form or another, for nearly 100 years. It helped us win and keep independence, put food on the table for countless families, and defined a generation bold enough to step into the wilderness and make it home.
By the 1820s, the eastern half of the United States was looking less and less like wilderness, and more like a fledgling industrial powerhouse. Until this point, every muzzleloading ignition system needed to use a mechanism to ignite priming powder to ignite the main charge. These systems were self-sufficient for many, as long as you had priming powder and flint, you could shoot. However, as industry always marches forward, muzzleloaders were not immune and oftentimes at the forefront.
The percussion cap is developed in the early 1800s, and along with it, the Percussion lock. With the percussion cap and lock, the ignition of your main charge is all internal to the mechanism of the muzzleloader and you don’t have to worry about your pan getting wet or your flint getting dull. As long as you have a good cap and your barrels dry, your charge is going to go off. This makes a muzzleloader a lot more reliable, but you are now depending on someone else to manufacture, sell, and ship those caps. In my opinion, the use of caps is a nod to the growing settlement of the United States, transitioning from a wild frontier to kind of a colonized space where you don’t necessarily need to be able to make everything you need to live in your pack, it can be assumed that there is a town nearby with supplies. Of course, this is relevant only to the eastern half of the United States at this time. Those in the west were in many respects a second generation of frontiersmen living on the edge, only able to depend on themselves to survive.
Up until this point, reload speed is really up to the shooter and how fast they can prime the pan and ram the projectile down the barrel. But that’s about to change because alongside the percussion cap and percussion lock, we see the development of the percussion revolver, which paved its way for the self-contained ammunition and the cartridges that we use today. As fast as paper cartridges were for hunters and the military, they could never be as fast as the Colt revolving pistol, perhaps one of the biggest advancements in muzzleloading, and engineering. Until this point, one could draw a steady line from the firelance to the percussion rifle, but these revolvers caused a big shift that would lead to the first downturn of muzzleloaders.
Once you get into the 1880s, you have the development of smokeless powder and in terms of military and hunting use, it really runs over black powder and muzzleloaders. You have cartridges now, you have repeating arms, you have more than one shot and it just makes it easier for everybody and we have the industry to support it . A regular person doesn’t have to contract a gunsmith for a custom rifle, or make their own supplies, everything can be ordered through a catalogue at the general store.
This really changes history and the industry of America and the whole world really. You may recall the dynamic changes of late 19th century cities, food production became mechanized, clothing production became mechanized, iit was the same for firearms. For many, the muzzleloader falls by the wayside. But, as much as it changed things, for a lot of people it didn’t.
A lot of people held onto their muzzleloaders even through the smokeless and repeating arms era. These people could supply and run their muzzleloaders independently of catalogs and stores. Even up through the Great Depression in the early nineteen hundreds, you see people still using their muzzle loaders because that’s what they could afford, liked and ultimately used to get through tough times.
In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Post War America became fascinated with American History. The Bicentennial of our independence from England was fast approaching, television brought Fess Parker as Daniel Boone, and it seemed like every child was playing frontier settler. Companies like Thompson Center, CVA, and Dixie Gun Works started to pop up at that time and serve the interest of the muzzleloading enthusiast around the country. It’s worth noting that hundreds if not thousands of small mom and pop muzzleloading shops as well as gunsmiths and craftspeople flourished to support the sport and its enthusiasts in an intimate and personal way, albeit on a smaller scale than the large companies. In 1985, muzzleloading took another huge change, Knight invented the first modern inline muzzleloader. We had in line flintlocks like the Ferguson rifle, which is kind of a famous technological feat for the time, but this was the first modern inline muzzleloader and it really changed the game for muzzleloading competitors and hunters, bridging the gap between traditional sidelock muzzleloaders and a modern centerfire rifles.
Again, we have the industry around muzzleloading to support it like we saw in the mid-1800s. Some say that history repeats, and I believe it does. Over the last year, muzzleloading has seen an explosion in interest that I believe rivals the American bicentennial. Supplies were sold out, for nearly 8 months a muzzleloading kit was impossible to find, and even now in the middle of 2021, forums and chatrooms are bustling with talk about muzzleloaders.
Ford gets a lot of credit for his work to advance industry, but none of it would have been possible without muzzleloaders. I hope to see muzzleloaders remembered not only as “old timey” firearms, but as bastions of independence, precision and human ingenuity.
Ethan Yazel ILoveMuzzleloading.com NMLRA Field Representative
Sources Samuel E. Dyke, The Pennsylvania Rifle (Lancaster: Sutter House), 1974. Joe Kindig, Thoughts on the Kentucky Rifle in its Golden Age (York, PA: Trimmer Printing), 1960. Neil L. York, “Pennsylvania Rifle: Revolutionary Weapon in a Conventional War?,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 3:103 (1979): 302-324.
Kendig Jr., Joe (2002). Thoughts on the Kentucky Rifle in its Golden Age-Second Edition. York, PA: George Shumway. ISBN 0-87387084-0
Hindle, Brooke; Lubar, Steven (1986). Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revoluation 1790-1860. Washington, DC and London: The Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-87474-540-3
“Rifles of Colonial America” Vol. II, by George Shumway, G. Shumway Publisher. RD7, Box 388b, York PA, 17402
Andrade, Tonio (2016), The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-13597-7.
https://www.hunter-ed.com/muzzleloader/studyGuide/The-Development-of-Muzzleloaders/222099_88828/
Editor Note: Not only is Ethan a good friend of mine but he is most definitely a friend of the N-SSA. He regularly host a Black Powder podcast on his website (and any of your favorite podcast apps). Take some time to check out his website. By the time you are reading this his episode with your’s truly will be live on his website where we talk Black powder N-SSA and shooting. He can be reached on any social media sites @ Ilovemuzzleloading or by email at ilovemuzzleloading@gmail.com.
John Dahlgren and the Half-Charge Myth
As the smoke cleared around the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first clash of ironclad warships, neither USS Monitor nor CSS Virginia were especially damaged. To be sure each ship sported dents, scrapes, a few casualties, significantly depleted ammo stores and in Monitors case a turret that had decided to moonlight as a merry-go-round, but both vessels could (and did) live to fight another day. For both sides there was rejoicing and recrimination, on the one hand the ships armour had held up whilst on the other the enemies armour had also held up under the pounding fire. As time passed various ideas, solutions and explanations were advanced but after the passage of over a century and a half a commonly held belief is that Monitor’s 11” guns were capable of smashing through the armour of her Confederate opponent but had been prevented from doing so by only firing half-charges, whether this was due to a Navy order or hesitancy on the part of her crew depends on the version being told. If only the guns had been allowed to be used at full power, then surely the Union monitor would have emerged with a decisive victory? As it turns out, the truth is more complex, but to see why, we need to wind back the clock 18 years from the time of that battle to an earlier time.
In February 1844 many of the great and the good of the thencurrent US government were gathered aboard the new steam warship USS Princeton, in addition to the ships battery of shortrange carronades the ship also carried a pair of large 12” muzzle loading guns. One was named the ‘Oregon gun’ and had been constructed using newly developed techniques thousands of miles away in Liverpool, England. The other, ‘Peacemaker’ was of a similar size but built more locally in New York using older gun forging methods. Three times on the voyage down the Potomac the giant gun was fired to much appreciation, then as the ship headed back up the river a final firing was called for. The lanyard was pulled but instead of the now-familiar muzzle flare the gun failed catastrophically, almost instantly turning into a 12-ton pipebomb. Six men, including the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy, were killed immediately and more than a dozen were injured. President Tyler avoided becoming a casualty only because he was below-decks at the time. Five years later, in 1849, another gun under testing exploded, this time killing the gunner. Present at this latter incident was 40-year old Lt John Dahlgren, this and other incidents led to two primary developments. Firstly, the US Navy decided that the standard ‘service charge’, the amount of powder used to propel a shell or shot, should be set at a safe level by careful testing of new guns being considered for service as opposed to simply trying to get as much explosive down the barrel as was thought safely possible. The two incidents previously described, and others seemed to strongly council against following the latter trend in the future. Secondly, Dahlgren determined that not only would he develop a gun that was suitable for firing both solid shot and explosive shells (many guns of the time could do one of the other but rarely both with any degree of success) but also that his guns would not be as much a hazard to their operators as they were to the enemy. His guns would weigh somewhat more than the average contemporary weapon of a similar calibre and would also fire their projectiles at a somewhat slower velocity when compared to some guns of the period such as the British 68lb’er, but he was true to his goal, they worked, and they did not explode. In part with was due to their new ‘soda-bottle’ shape, which helped them resist the pressures of firing, but also by backing off from the leadingedge of muzzle velocity the stresses imposed on the gun were simply less than might be experienced in other guns. Partially to compensate for this reduction in the overall kinetic energy of the shot or shell and partially simply because his techniques allowed for it, Dahlgrens guns would grow rapidly in size as his work progressed. By the late 1850’s 10” and 11” guns were being made and by 1862 a 15” version was also under construction, whereas in the rest of the world the typical large naval gun in use varied from 6” to just over 8” in the vast majority of cases. Whilst as mentioned some guns had somewhat higher muzzle velocities this did not overly trouble Dahlgren for he believed that larger if slower projectiles would do more ‘smashing’ damage to the sides of enemy ships, keeping in mind that during the development of these guns the worlds fleets were made of wooden vessels since the ironclad age was not (quite) upon them. And so we come to the Battle of Hampton Roads, neither ironclad as it turned out was especially well equipped to deal with the other, CSS Virginia had a variety of guns but most of its ammunition was thin-walled explosive shells, perfect for dealing with the flammable and fragile wooden warships it was designed to fight but near useless against an armoured opponent against whom the shell would either smash open resulting in a low-order detonation that was more pyrotechnic display than actual threat, or else explode properly against the iron plates but still see most of their energy either expended into open air or reflected back into it by the solid armour. What solid shot was available put some dents in the Union ironclad, but did little else. Conversely, USS Monitor packed a pair of 11” Dahlgren guns as its sole armament, these were larger than any gun on the Virginia (which thanks to Confederate looting of Norfolk Navy Yard was also carrying Dahlgren guns amongst its other weapons, albeit smaller 9” variants) but a relative slow projectile with a large surface area is almost the exact opposite of what you want to punch through armour unless you use overwhelming power, hence the outcome
of the battle. The Monitor’s guns that day were using 15lb service charges, i.e. each 166lb projectile was sent downrange by the ignition of 15lb of gunpowder. The reason for this was simply that Navy instructions said that this was what should be used, the 11” was a relatively new weapon to the Navy with scarcely half a decade of service under its belt and Dahlgren had been exacting in testing his guns hundreds of times to make sure that combination of charge and shot (or shell) was safe. He had recommended that 15lb of powder would suffice and thus the US Navy entered 15lb as the weight of powder to be used in the operation of the guns. Thus, at the Battle of Hampton Roads, the gun crews of USS Monitor were using what their training told them was the reasonable safe and permitted charge. To use anything more was to invite a repeat of the Princeton incident, only now inside an armoured turret that would magnify the effect of any explosion and likely kill them all shortly before shrapnel bouncing off the interior walls finished off any lucky survivors. So, if the US Navy regulations are so clear, where does the ‘halfcharge myth’ come from? Simply put, when the results of the battle came in Dahlgren was as disappointed as anyone else, in early 1862 the 11” gun was the most powerful weapon the USN possessed, if the Confederate Navy had already developed a way to prevent it from scoring any meaningful damage then the entire Union fleet would be helpless to stop ships like the Virginia from doing as they wished, instead it would only be the seaworthiness and range of the ironclads (and the outside chance of simply mobbing the ship with boarding parties at horrific cost) that would limit their operations. Thus, as well as continuing work on the 15” gun, Dahlgren applied himself to carefully testing his existing weapons further. There were a few ways to improve the performance of the guns, use a powder than gave off more energy per lb burned, this was possible as new forms of gunpowder were being developed at the time, albeit this would be something of a trial and error approach at first. It was possible to use a different form of shot, perhaps one made of steel, but the technology to mass-produce steel shot was a few years off in the US of 1862. The simplest approach was simply to increase the size of the service charge, run some experiments and see if the gun exploded. If after a few hundred shots it was still intact and did not show worrying amounts of wear then a larger service charge could be issued to safely increase the power of the gun. This would be done fairly rapidly, which was understandable considering the Civil War was in full swing, and soon revised orders were being issued stating that 20lb service charges were now safe for the 11” gun, Dahlgren diligently repeated his test cycles and over the course of the war the service charge weight increased in a series of steps such that by the end of the war a 25lb service charge was in regular use with a 30lb charge also authorised, albeit only if the gun was not considered worn or otherwise at risk. A few enterprising captains would fire their guns with even larger charges but it is doubtful whether this bought them any substantial increase in performance, the relatively short barrels of the guns meant that past a certain point if the gun held much of the excess powder would simply be blasted out of the muzzle unburnt. Later Union monitors (USS Monitor herself being lost in poor weather not too long after her debut battle) would wreak considerably more havoc on their Confederate opponents using the new heavier service charges, but unfortunately the fact that later testing had revealed that a charge double that originally thought safe was in fact viable to use has led some to (correctly) conclude that the 11” Dahlgren was always capable of using these charges and that (incorrectly) the US Navy or Dahlgren knew about this but restricted Monitor to a ‘mere’ 15lb charge on or before her famous encounter. In fact, Dahlgren’s guidance at the time was spot on for current Navy practice and reflected the results of the tests that had been conducted at the time. The fact that he had unwittingly designed such a strong weapon that it could in fact withstand considerably more pressure was not known in early 1862 and would only emerge gradually over the following months and years. To draw an analogy from another war 80 years later, in World War 2, some British battleships equipped with the 15”/42 gun were issued so-called ‘super-charges’ to increase the range and penetration of their shells. For almost 3 decades prior the guns had used a slightly smaller charge with perfectly adequate results but faced with advances in enemy firepower and protection and unable to otherwise modify the guns and their turrets in wartime (as was done to some ships in the late 1930’s) increasing the size of the charge was determined the best way to keep the ships ‘competitive’ although it was known that this would stress the guns more. Like Dahlgren, these charges were only issued because of a specific need and after extensive testing to ensure they wouldn’t cause the guns themselves to fail. With the gulf in time and ship capability between WW1 and WW2 it is easy to see why assertions that a ship such as HMS Malaya was firing ‘under-powered’ charges at Jutland and was only brought up to ‘true potential’ in the 1940’s are simply wrong. The story of the 11” Dahlgren in the American Civil War is essentially the same, just compressed into a few years instead of a few decades.
Editors Note-
Want to hear more content like this article? be sure to check out Mr. Dahlgran YouTube Channel at
https://www.youtube.com/c/Drachinifel
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