History of the firearm
The history of the firearm begins in 10th-century China, when tubes containing gunpowder projectiles were mounted on spears to make portable fire lances.
Firearms were instrumental in the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the establishment of European colonization in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw an acceleration in this evolution, with the introduction of the magazine, belt-fed weapons, metal cartridges, rifled barrels, and automatic firearms, including machine guns.
The earliest known depiction of a gunpowder weapon is the illustration of a fire lance on a mid-10th century silk banner from Dunhuang.
[2] The fire lance was a tube, made of paper and bamboo,[3] filled with black-powder and attached to the end of a spear, which was used as a flamethrower.
[8] [9] The oldest surviving firearm is the Heilongjiang hand cannon dated to 1288, which was discovered in modern-day Acheng District where the History of Yuan records that battles were fought.
Li Ting, a military commander of Jurchen descent, led foot soldiers armed with hand cannons to suppress the rebellion of the Eastern Christian Mongol Prince Nayan.
[10] Kublai Khan's mostly-failed invasion of Vietnam and of Java (1258–1288) may have spread the knowledge of making gunpowder-based weapons to Southeast Asia.
A stele inscription by Trương Hán Siêu dated to 1312 recorded guns and shots ("súng đạn") among the loots that the Vietnamese obtained from the Chams in a campaign.
Ahmad Y. al-Hassan claimed that the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 pitted the Bahri Mamluks against the Mongol Empire.
One major obstacle preventing matchlock guns from large-scale adoption was complaints that strong wind and rain could either blow away or ruin priming powder placed in the flash pan.
Mentioned in Shen Qi Pu, Zhao later developed the "Xuanyuan arquebus" (Chinese: 軒轅銃, romanized: Xuānyuan-chòng, named for the Yellow Emperor), which used a novel rack-and-pinion mechanism.
This firing mechanism was connected to both the serpentine and flash pan cover and designed so that whenever the trigger is pulled, the serpentine was lowered at the same time as flash pan cover opened, minimizing the priming powder's exposure to open air and thus reducing the risk of priming powder being blown away by strong wind or spoiled by rain.
The Chinese military book Wubei Zhi (1621) describes Turkish muskets that used similar rack and pinion mechanisms, which were not known to have been used in European firearms at the time.
[24] A pole gun, the bedil tombak, was recorded in Java in 1413,[25][26]: 245 The knowledge of making "true" firearms came after the middle of the 15th century.
Indian craftsmen modified the design by introducing a short, almost pistol-like buttstock held against the cheek, not the shoulder, when aiming.
[31]: 41 [32] Malay gun founders, regarded as at the same level as those of Germany, quickly adapted these new firearms and birthed a new type of arquebus, the istinggar.
In the Deccans, the Bahmani sultanate led by Mohammed Shah I used a train of artillery against the Vijayanagara Empire under Harihara II.
[35] When the Portuguese reached India in 1498, they brought with them firearms, among them the matchlock musket and man-of-war (ships) armed with cannons.
[37] In the early 16th century, Zamorin of Calicut, had begun to emulate the Portuguese and began to arm his ships with naval gun pieces, combining local and imported technology.
[43][44] Around the late 14th century in Italy, smaller, portable hand-cannons or schioppi were developed, creating in effect the first smoothbore personal firearm.
The Hussite army consisted mostly of civilian militia who lacked the skill, experience and often weapons and armor comparable to that of the professional Crusader invaders that they faced.
For artillery, Hussites used the Czech: houfnice, which gave rise to the English term, "howitzer" (houf meaning crowd for its intended use of shooting stone and iron shot against massed enemy forces),[47][48][49] bombarda (mortar) and dělo (cannon).
Pulling the trigger allows the hammer or striker to fly forward, striking the "firing pin," which then strikes the "primer," igniting an impact-sensitive chemical compound (historically, first fulminate of mercury, then potassium chlorate, now lead styphnate) which shoots a flame through the "flash hole" into the cartridge's propellant chamber, igniting the propellant.
Previously, each round was custom-made as needed: the shooter poured loose powder down the barrel, used leather or cloth for wadding if time allowed, selected a suitable projectile (lead ball, rocks, arrow, or nails), then seated the projectile on top of the powder charge by means of a ramrod.
