Our histories and novels abound with records of the deeds of valor associated with our ancestors who fought with the many old guns we see parked at the Naval Academy, navy yards, and city parks throughout the country. There is little in print concerning the development of ordnance, for our valiant forefathers apparently chose the weaker weapon and shunned the pen.
Such early records as exist indicate that guns were invented in 1330. They were used by the Moors at the siege of Algebras, Spain, in 1344. Edward III of England used cannon (Latin canna, a tube) at Crecy in 1346, though Froissart makes no mention of this, and at a very early period Santa Barbara, who lived in the fourth century, was made the patron saint of all gunners.
The progress in ordnance was very slow up to the years 1840-50, one of the great difficulties being the inability to cast large guns. Most of the early guns, like “Mons Meg” (a.d. 1460) now on view at Edinburgh Castle, Scotland, were made from bars of wrought iron placed together like barrel staves and bound with welded wrought iron bands. Brass and bronze guns were first used. They were easier to cast, and if they exploded, as many of them did, the metal would rupture without fragmentation as was not the case with iron guns. Composition guns were shortlived because the extreme heat of the powder broke down the structure of the metal. This was particularly noticeable at the vent, which, however, in later guns was replaceable. Many of the early guns used stone balls, because of the scarcity of metal and the ignorance of metallurgy.
Gun metal, bell metal, and cannon bronze were all very similar and were considered much superior to cast iron because they had greater tenacity and resilience. Up to and including the American Civil War church bells were cast into cannon and were frequently used. Gun metal is a bronze, 16 parts copper to 1 of tin; cannon bronze consists of 9 parts copper to 1 part of tin; bell metal is bronze of 3 parts of copper to 1 part of tin.
In 1778, the Carron Iron Works produced a gun called a “carronade” which became very popular with the British merchantmen and was even adopted in the naval services. The carronade was a short, light gun mounted on the upper decks of ships. It used a large solid ball with a small powder charge and though its range was short, it had a great smashing effect against the wooden ships of that period. The first carronades were fitted with trunnions; carronades of later design were attached by lugs to wooden slides which recoiled on slotted carriages. Carronades had a very small windage compared to other guns of that time and hence lost less of the propulsive effect of the powder charge. The windage was the crescent-shaped area between the projectile and the bore when the gun was loaded. This clearance had to exist in muzzle-loading guns to expedite the loading. It also compensated for the changes in diameter caused by rust, and allowed the use of red-hot shot.
The arming of the U.S.S. Essex with carronades was responsible for her capture by H.M.S. Phoebe and H.M.S. Cherub off Valparaiso in the War of 1812, for her opponents kept out of range and demolished her with their heavier guns. The usual policy of the United States Navy at that period was to employ long-range heavy guns and the victories of our 44- gun frigates and of Perry’s fleet at Lake Erie demonstrated the efficiency of their armaments.
Shortly before the War of 1812, Colonel George Bomford, U. S. Army, attempted to improve our guns and produced the type known as the “columbiad.” This was a cast-iron gun used in the War of 1812 and up to and including the Civil War. It had no cascabel (knob at the breech end) and could be used as a combined mortar, howitzer, and gun, either on land or on shipboard. Colonel Bomford in designing the thickness of metal to use, determined the gas pressures from breech to muzzle empirically. He inserted pistol barrels normal to the bore at regular intervals and then hung a series of pine boards parallel to the bore. These boards were 1 inch thick and 1 inch apart. When the gun was fired, the pistol barrels fired lead bullets and the depth of penetration determined the comparative pressures along the bore of the gun. This type of gun is frequently seen as a relic. As late as 1914 the revolutionary forces fired an old columbiad at the Legalista gunboat blockading Puerto Plata, San Domingo.
As time progressed, attempts were made to forge large wrought-iron guns by using bars and bands which were welded into a monoblock. None of these guns were reliable because the flaws in welding such large masses could not be detected.
The famous “Oregon gun” now at the Naval Academy has quite an interesting history, though it was never fired in action. This gun was designed by John Ericsson, the famous Swedish inventor from Goteborg, and was built at the Mersey Iron Works near Liverpool. Like all the early forged guns it was strong longitudinally but weak transversely, and in the proof firing it developed cracks abaft the trunnions. To rectify this defect, Ericsson had hoops made of wrought iron which were shrunk onto the breech end, up to the trunnion bands. These hoops were 3.5 inches thick and were made of the best American iron, and this gun was fired over 300 times without a casualty. The powder charges used varied from 25 to 35 pounds and the round shot weighed 212 pounds. In a test shot it pierced a target of wrought iron 4.5 inches thick.
In 1842 this gun was mounted on the U.S.S. Princeton along with a similar gun called the “Peacemaker.” The Oregon gun received its name during the agitation which was going on at the time over the Oregon Boundary, when the jingoes were shouting “Fifty-four forty or fight.”
Captain Robert Stockton, U. S. Navy, at one time a great friend of John Ericsson, designed the Peacemaker, which was a 12-inch gun like the Oregon but was a foot wider at the breech and weighed 10 tons; both guns were 15 feet long and were the largest pieces of wrought iron in the world at that time. On February 28, 1844, the Peacemaker exploded, killing Secretary of State Upshur and Secretary of the Navy Gilmer and several others. The Oregon gun was sent to the Naval Academy in July, 1867, where it now rests back of the Marine Engineering building.
In 1849, Colonel Rodman, U. S. Army, introduced an improved method of casting columbiads. He used a hollow core through which a stream of water passed while the metal was cooling, thus cooling the casting from the bore radially.
In the period embracing the American Civil War, gunnery advanced almost as much as it had in all the years that had elapsed since Roger Bacon first experimented with gunpowder in a.d. 1249.
The 24-pounders on the U.S.S. Constitution were fired with two pounds of powder. The heaviest gun of Nelson’s day was a 68-pound carronade; the charge from the forecastle carronade of H.M.S. Victory at Trafalgar is said to have killed 400 Frenchmen on the Bucentaure. When the British fleet bombarded Sevastapol in 1854, the heaviest guns fired were 68- pounders, all smoothbore muzzle-loaders. Ten years after this engagement the Union Forces were using 15-inch Dahlgren smoothbores which fired shells weighing 440 pounds, and Parrott rifles which fired projectiles weighing 300 pounds.
The outstanding naval ordnance expert of our Civil War period was Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, U. S. Navy, designer of the various types of guns which bear his name. The Dahlgren gun was a smoothbore, muzzle-loading, cast-iron gun; the last and best of that type. The thickness of the metal from breech to muzzle was determined by the gas pressures encountered, with a large factor of safety. This gun had a hemispherical breech and all rings were suppressed. An elevating screw replaced the quoin and bed, and the cascabel jaws were open for the gun breeching. The Dahlgren gun was the most widely used type in the Union Fleet. The Monitor in her famous fight with the Merrimac (Virginia) was armed with 11-inch Dahlgren guns. When Admiral Du Pont’s fleet attacked the defenses of Charleston 13 months later, most of his ships were armed with 15-inch Dahlgren guns.
In the eighteenth century, there lived m England a young Quaker who had a scientific mind and no military training. His name was Benjamin Robins, and he established a lasting reputation as a ballistician. In addition to inventing the ballistic pendulum for determining the force of an explosive, he published several valuable studies on rifles and rifling. Unfortunately, a hundred years elapsed before his discoveries were utilized. Although it had been known for many years that a rotary motion in flight improved the accuracy, early ideas about rifling were very vague and the first lands and grooves had no twist. One early account states that the rifling was for the purpose of creasing the bullet, thus saving the teeth and time of the huntsman. Other writers think that because small arms of early days fouled very easily on account of the powder used, rifling grooves were introduced to provide space for the fouling, without making it difficult to ram home the lead bullet. One early ballistic expert published an article to prove that it was not the twist of the rifling which caused the bullet to rotate, but rather the wind in flight; in other words it acted like a windmill. Rifling was used in small arms many years before it was used in cannon. Napoleon introduced the rifle and the rifled cannon into the French Army in 1800 but the former was not a success and was abandoned as an army weapon until 1860 when the British Army adopted it. The rifle was used as a sporting weapon long before it was used in armies.
The first rifled cannon developed and used in this country was named after Mr. R. P. Parrott, manager of the West Point Foundry, Cold Spring, New York, where they were made. The original Parrott cannon was a banded cast-iron gun. Mr. Parrott described his gun as “a hooped gun of the simplest kind composed of one piece of cast iron and one of wrought iron. It had no taper, no screw, no successive layers of hoops.” The Parrott rifle fired a projectile which had a ring of brass or lead attached to its base and called a “sabot.” This sabot was expanded into the rifling by the explosive force of the powder, the use of the sabot giving ample windage for loading but none when fired. The Parrott rifle was very accurate for that day, but proved, however, to be structurally weak. When the Federal fleet attacked Fort Fisher on the North Carolina coast, a large number of Parrott rifles exploded during the engagement and General Gilmore, U. S. Army, who used Parrott rifles extensively on Morris Island in the attack on Charleston, states in his report that 51 blew up. Brigadier General Turner, U. S. Army, reported that the precision of the Parrott rifles was remarkable, “probably excelling any artillery ever brought on the field in siege operations.”
One of the most celebrated of the Parrott rifles was the famous “Swamp Angel,” mounted in “the Marsh Battery” 4 miles from the city of Charleston. The gun itself weighed 16,500 pounds, its projectile 200, the powder charge of 20 pounds was 4 pounds more than the normal charge used, and the elevation was 35 degrees. The gun was mounted at a spot in the salt marsh where the mud was like liquid and extended to a depth of 15 feet, and a facetious officer in charge of mounting the gun put in a requisition for “20 men, 18 feet long, to do duty in 15 feet of mud.” At the 36th round the breech of this gun blew out of its jacket just behind the vent. The “Swamp Angel” was rescued from the scrap heap and is now mounted in Trenton, New Jersey.
With the exception of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate facilities for making guns were very limited. Except for the English guns brought in by blockade runners, the best guns were the rifles designed by Lieutenant John M. Brooke, C.S.N., formerly an officer of the U. S. Navy, who had also collaborated in the redesign of the Merrimac. “The Brooke rifles had a 7-inch bore; at first they were made of cast iron re-enforced by a single series of bands, each 2 by 6 inches, extending from the breech to near the trunnions. Subsequently, the thickness of the cast iron was reduced, the cylinder of the gun extended to just beyond the trunnions, and a second series of bands was shrunk upon the first, breaking joints. The trunnions and the sight-masses were united with the gun by curves.” The Brooke rifles fired a projectile or bolt which weighed 100 pounds and used 15 pounds of powder. With an elevation of 20 degrees, an effective range of 6,160 yards was obtained.
The Confederates used “the Tennessee sabot” to reduce the windage and serve as a gas check. This was a copper disc attached to the base of the shell and was very effective. Two of the guns on the Merrimac in her duel with the Monitor were 7-inch Brooke rifles and there were also two mounted in Fort Sumter when it was attacked by Admiral Du Pont. Their effectiveness is indicated in Admiral Du Pont’s report which states that the U. S. monitor Keokuk, which was protected by 6.25 inches of armor on her two turrets, came within 550 yards of Fort Sumter and was struck 90 times. Both of her turrets were completely penetrated by rifle bolts and 10-inch columbiad solid shot and she sank at her anchorage off Morris Island the next morning. Admiral Du Pont’s flagship, the U.S.S. New Ironsides, engaged at a range of 1,500 yards, because of her heavy draft, at which distance no projectiles penetrated her belt of 4.5 inches of rolled plates. The projectiles from the attacking fleet penetrated the well-set brick masonry of the fort to a depth of 2.5 feet forming craters 3 feet in diameter. Eventually all the walls of the fort were destroyed by some 46,000 projectiles weighing approximately 3,500 tons.
In 1844, Professor Daniel Treadwell of Harvard University built four experimental 32-pounder sea-service guns described as follows:
They consist of a number of rings or hollow cylinders one within the other; the interior part of each ring, equal to about one-third of the thickness of the ring, was of steel and the exterior part of iron; these parts, as well as the different rings, were welded together, and compressed by a hydrostatic machine, which is said to exert a power of 1,000 tons so that the pores of the metal are closed and the metal itself condensed to a degree not to be attained by hammering; the whole was then formed into a gun by turning and boring. The bores are 5 feet 10 inches long and the weight of each gun is less than 1,900 pounds. One of these guns bore a succession of charges commencing with 8 pounds of powder and 1 shot and ending with 12 pounds of powder, 5 shot, and 3 wads.
At this period the science of metallurgy was still in its infancy, though it appeared to be much more advanced in England than in this country, the foundries of England supplying both the Union and Confederate forces with weapons of all kinds. The most famous cannon were the different types of rifles such as Blakely, Whitworth, and Armstrong. In 1855, Captain Blakely, R.A., designed a muzzle-loading rifled cannon, built on the systems of initial tension and varying elasticity. He took out a patent for a “method of forming guns with an internal tube of cast iron or steel inclosed in a case of wrought iron or steel, heated and shrunk upon the cylinder.” The ideas developed by Treadwell and Blakely are used in the modem manufacture of built-up guns. The forward pivot gun on the Alabama in her famous duel with the Kearsarge off Cherbourg was a 100-pound Blakely rifle and General Gilmore states that there was a 13-inch Blakely rifle mounted in the defense of Charleston.
Mr. Joseph Whitworth, a maker of precision instruments and reputed to be one of the foremost mechanical geniuses of his age, was called on by the British government in 1854 to improve its ordnance, though up to this time he knew nothing of that science. In 1857 he published an article on ballistics that had far-reaching effects on the development of ordnance. He pointed out that the amount of twist used in rifling was inadequate, that the weight of the projectile compared to its diameter was not enough to produce the requisite momentum for sustained flight, and finally that the large tolerances used made impossible a proper fit of a projectile in the bore.
The Whitworth rifle was a muzzle- loader with a hexagonal rifled bore and fired hexagonal bolts. “In 1860 Whitworth produced a gun of homogeneous iron, forged in large masses and formed of cylindrical tubes forced one over the other by means of a known hydraulic pressure, not as in the Armstrong system of heating and shrinking.” This gun, a 3-pounder, was remarkably accurate and had a range of 9,600 yards. General Gilmore, U. S. Army, states that he had 16 Parrott rifles and 2 Whitworth rifles placed in batteries against Fort Sumter at a range of 3,400 yards. The first gun to use fixed ammunition was the Whitworth breech loader of 1860, the powder being contained in a tin cartridge.
The greatest rival of the Whitworth gun was the rifled gun made by William Armstrong, who like many others realized that the cast-iron gun had about reached the limit of range and pressures. In 1855 he made his first built-up gun which consisted of
a tube made of wrought-iron bar coiled in a closed helix and welded at a white heat into a solid mass, turned to a true cylinder and re-enforced by outer tubes shrunk on to it, rifled with a large number of grooves, breech loading, a powerful screw holding a sliding vent piece tight against the face of the breech, firing a lead-coated projectile in whose plastic covering the rifling engaged as soon as it started its passage through the bore.
This gun was mounted with a gravity return system, a method used until comparatively recent times.
The accuracy of the rifled gun of the fifties when compared with the smoothbore was found to be as 57 to 1, though there was no increase in range.
While none of the features used by Sir William Armstrong were new, he was the first to combine them successfully in one gun. Colonel Lamb, C.S.A., commanding at Fort Fisher, states that there was an Armstrong gun mounted in the fort when it was captured by the Federal forces but that they had only 10 of the special projectiles for it when the engagement began.
For a time the British Navy went back to muzzle-loading guns but this did not last long, for the breech-loading rifle had at last proved to be a practical weapon and the theories of Benjamin Robins (stated a hundred years previously) were demonstrated to be practical and sound.
When one looks at a modern rifle which can hurl a 2,400-pound projectile to a range of 31 miles, he should remember the long years of evolution which brought this to perfection. No technique is static: 16-inch rifles are a commonplace in our Fleet, 18-inch rifles have been built and tested, and Lord Fisher thought of 20-inch rifles. Undoubtedly the sky is the limit, if we wish to shoot farther than our present guns now do.