Breechloader

Breech-loading provides the advantage of reduced reloading time because it is far quicker to load the projectile and propellant into the chamber of a gun or cannon than to reach all the way over to the front end to load ammunition and then push them back down a long tube – especially when the projectile fits tightly and the tube has spiral ridges from rifling.

In field artillery, the advantages were similar – crews no longer had to get in front of the gun and pack ammunition in the barrel with a ramrod, and the shot could now tightly fit the bore, greatly increasing its power, range, and accuracy.

[5] Meanwhile, in China, an early form of breech-loading musket, known as the Che Dian Chong, was known to have been created in the second half of the 16th century for the Ming dynasty's arsenals.

Roughly two hundred of the rifles were manufactured and used in the Battle of Brandywine, during the American Revolutionary War, but shortly after they were retired and replaced with the standard Brown Bess musket.

In Paris in 1808, in association with French gunsmith François Prélat, Jean Samuel Pauly created the first fully self-contained cartridges:[9] the cartridges incorporated a copper base with integrated mercury fulminate primer powder (the major innovation of Pauly), a round bullet and either brass or paper casing.

In 1845, another Frenchman Louis-Nicolas Flobert invented, for indoor shooting, the first rimfire metallic cartridge, constituted by a bullet fit in a percussion cap.

It was so called because of its .5-inch needle-like firing pin, which passed through a paper cartridge case to impact a percussion cap at the bullet base.

It began development in the 1830s under Johann Nicolaus von Dreyse and eventually an improved version of it was adopted by Prussia in the late 1840s.

This, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, eventually caused much interest in Europe for breech-loaders and the Prussian military system in general.

The carbine was used extensively by the Forest Rangers, an irregular force led by Gustavus von Tempsky that specialized in bush warfare and reconnaissance.

The French adopted the new Chassepot rifle in 1866, which was much improved over the Dreyse needle gun as it had dramatically fewer gas leaks due to its de Bange sealing system.

The British initially took the existing Enfield and fitted it with a Snider breech action (solid block, hinged parallel to the barrel) firing the Boxer cartridge.

Following a competitive examination of 104 guns in 1866, the British decided to adopt the Peabody-derived Martini-Henry with trap-door loading in 1871.

Single-shot breech-loaders would be used throughout the latter half of the 19th Century, but were slowly replaced by various designs for repeating rifles, first used in the American Civil War.

The M1867 naval guns produced in Imperial Russia[24] at the Obukhov State Plant used Krupp technology.

Later on, however, the Mauser M71/84 rifle used self-contained metallic cartridges and used a rotating bolt to open and close the breech.