Muskets, carbines and revolvers. The professor describes technological advances that allowed soldiers to fire faster and with more accuracy. All right, guys. How are yall doing today . Welcome to class. Today as i talked about a little bit earlier this week we have a special lecturer here. You may have a class with him. He is the chair of our history and Political Science here at gillford Technical Community college. What you may not know about the doctor is that hes a military historian. Hes an expert in military history. He has published at least four books on anything from weaponry, he collects a host of artifacts which he has brought and will share with us today. He is a phd. Earned his dockerate from texas christian fort worth. It was a while ago but hes an expert. If you get an opportunity to take a class with him, take a class. So were going to continue to and we get to look at the aspect of weaponry and its impact on the war. So without further ado i will hand the class over to the doctor. Thank you. The theme interest todays lecture is going to be about technology warfare. A lot of our classes we deal with the politics of war but a lot comes down to the individuals in the field and the weapons they were issued because thats what you need for warfare. One thing i found fascinating in research is looking at the early 19th century in other words say from the year say 1800 up to the American Civil War from 1860, 6165. This was also a period in the United States of intense invention. Americans were incredibly creative at this time. We were really a world leader in inventing just about everything, everything from steam ships to Steam Powered factory tuesday the telegraph, just layer after layer of invention, creativity. And in a kind of strange unfortunate way, though, we see that a lot of these inventors started using their talents in inventing weapons. In other words, there was a certain technological revolution in weaponry technology during the early 1800s, and this is one of the factors that leads to such high casualties in the American Civil War that you see this throughout history or repetition that it takes military leadership very often if you look through the past to catch up to military thinking and strategy. It tends to stay in the past war, and Technology Goes ahead and then military thinking has to catch up with technology. And what we see is when we enter the American Civil War that most military thinking was still along the lines of the American Revolution. In other words, warfare that have happened decades earlier or. A lot of these american generals their hero was napoleon boneparte. And they had new weapons based on old weapons. Thats one thing im going to get through to show the advances in various weaponry that we see in the American Civil War and how thats going to affect how casualties happen. First of all, i brought in the basic weapon of an American Revolutionary war soldier. This is a its actually an american copy of a french musket that was used at the time. This is the french call it a sharliville, but it is a single shot, flintlock musket. Anybody ever know anything about these . They were very slow to shoot. And just the weapon itself dictated how any battle would have happened for really over 250 years. From the American Civil War back this kind of weapon dictated how the battle would happen and its just because of the limitations and this weapon cant really be aimed. Okay, the basic idea behind the flintlock musket im going to use my artistic genius here. What would be the basic part of this musket . The most important part is the barrel. Now you can understand why my freshman art teacher started crying. But if you think of a barrel its really just a long pipe. Its just a metal pipe, and its plugged up at one end and its open at this end. See this is the barrel. And what we have here is we drill a small hole or they drill a small hole in this side. Im making a lefthand musket here. And what happens is if youre going to load this, the soldier is told to load and it was essentially a round ball like this. These could be 69 to 75 caliber, three quarters of an inch, about an ounce of lead. The soldier himself would have been told to load. He would raise the musket like this and this is the lock. So you would have to take this which is called the frizzen or the battery. Its very hard steel, flip that up and this is the hammer. At that time they called it the cock because it looked like a roosters head. Youd pull that bike, bite off the paper and youd put a little bit of powder in this pan, this flips back, it holds the powder in place. You then drop the musket like this. You take the rest of your powder and the ball, you drop it in, you pull out your ramrod, and that is where you get it you have to do that. Imagine somebody was shooting at you while youre doing this. It is taking a long time. Imagine someone shooting at you while youre doing this. You now finish that. Youre now pretty much ready to go. Your officer or your sergeant says ready, you pull it to full cock, and then never said aim, they said ready. You cant aim these things. You kind of level it and then pull the trigger. You have a piece of flint. This illustrates much better. This is a pistol from the same time, this is a piece of flint. This is the steel. If you do like this you saw the sparks come out. So its flint hitting the steel. Thats why its called flint lock. If youre lucky whats going to happen next . Well, what happens next is when the gunfires this goes forward, the sparks fall into the pan right here. The sparks go through the hole, hit the powder inside the musket, and with luck the ball this powder will explode the ball will go rolling out the barrel. And if youre lucky that ball might go how far . 50 yards or 100 yards. Its not going to go very far. And because its rattling down the barrel its not going to be very accurate. If i were shooting to the back of this room i might be able to hit somebody, i might not. That would be kind of discouraging, wouldnt it, and it takes a long time. Whats going to happen if its raining . Its going to get on the powder, the spark will spark. If its raining, really, humid, muggy that might make it not work. Thats why you then as a soldier are issued a bayonet which turns your musket into basically a spear. So thats why we have that. So youve got maybe two or three shots in a battle and then you just are trained to go at your enemy with the musket and in other words if you didnt follow a set of rules the battle wouldnt have worked. A musket like this if it wept off would create a huge amount of smoke. And then if youre thinking youve got several thousand guys firing at the same time youre going to have massive levels of smoke. To make a battle work for this reason you have to follow certain rules. Soldiers would line up shoulder to shoulder in line and face another group of soldiers, the enemy soldiers lined up, in other words, shoulder to shoulder. The idea is i might be aiming at you but i might hit him. So if im shooting at least im going to hit somebody. And the same thing happens. If youre shooting at me you might miss me but youre going to hit the guy next to me. Thats why they have to be very close to make it work. Its also why you see the soldiers are color coded. In the American Revolution what colors did the british soldiers wear . Yeah, they were known as the red coats. What color did we wear . Yeah, we wore blue. You know why . Very good. We got our clothes, our weapons from the french. Guess what color the french wore . Blue. So if you go to the American Civil War you see thats why we were wearing blue clothes like this in the American Civil War. Federal United States troops wearing blue. The hats they wore, the only reason they wore the hats like this, the french wore hats. We copied everything french. This is called a kepi, like french for cap. This is why people fought like that. You have to be close together to be able to hit what youre going to should. Then we have a break through in technology as we go from the 20s and then the 30s to the 1840s. One part of this break through is the use of the rifle musket or rifling. Someone figured out if you take this barrel and cut grooves in the barrel and make them twist, in other words the grooves twist as they go down the barrel youre going to take that bullet and instead of having it rattle down the barrel, if you have the bullet just a little bit smaller than the bore, the inside of the barrel, then it will fit tightly into those grooves. So youve got the soft lead bullet, and ill just pass these around. Heres a round ball, and theres a bullet, what we call the mini ball. Its shaped like what we think of as a bullet. Im doing a little bit better now. The mini ball youll see if you look at the base of it, its kind of hollow, isnt it . So if you look inside its shaped like this. Its got this hollow in it. The idea is when you fire the musket that the power of the charge will make this spread out a little bit. So itll spread out to here, itll grab the rifling and go down that bore, and itll be much, much more accurate. So instead of missing that person at 100 yards youre going to hit what youre shooting at. As a matter of fact you could hit somebody 300, 400 yards away. You have super accuracy with these things, and you could fire them quickly because instead of having the loose powder to set it off whats called a percussion cap, and ill pass this one around. This is is the percussion cap, which ill switch to the musket im talking about. This rifle has the percussion cap right here. It uses the mini ball and that means your loading is going to be much faster. You would take a cartridge like this, drop it on the floor. By the way, if youre doing a archiloical work you see they drop cartridges all the time, they were being shot at, afraid and you can find mini balls like this where they just dropped them and they were in perfect shape. The soldier himself would grab this perfect cartridge, put it in the muzzle like that, and youd still use your ram iron but its fast. A lot of guys would stick it in the ground so itd be faster the next time. You pull this, put that percussion cap on here, and you could fire. The thing about it is you could hit somebody 100 yards away accurately. Guys got way too close, there was no way to miss, and you see union tens of thousands of soldiers getting killed in a single battle. So this is, you know, one of the reasons why we see the casualties, something very accurate. And its also showing a lot of the invention. The one thing about this particular rifle, though, and it Shows Technology that was too far ahead of its time. The rifle itself has an invention on it that was made to make the percussion cap even obsolete, and you see whats going on in there. This is a roll of caps. And these caps are like today you could get it, there are toy cap guns. When you cock, it pulls the cap forward so its automatically priming itself. Whats the problem with this . What happens when you run out . And very often that was a problem. The soldiers couldnt find the caps, and also they got wet sometimes. Another problem was its a little bit more complicated than using just the cap. Again, a lot of these soldiers are straight off the farm. Theyve had almost no experience with real machinery and so the soldiers or officers figured out maybe this is too complicated so they can still use the cap on it, but you see an attempt to make these more efficient. So it was a pretty nice idea in practicality. If you have any questions feel free to ask. Going to the ideas that did not work. This is an attempt to make a soldiers weapon you do not have to use a ramrod with. It was meant to be what we call a breach loading musket. And the idea is they actually equipped it with a bolt, so if you do it right you you pull it back like a modern weapon. You take your cartridge, you put it in there. You close the bolt and it still needs a percussion cap. Guess where . Its on the bottom. So this is how this one was made. And you take your percussion cap and put it there. Whats the problem with that . It could fall out. But its a great idea. It just confused soldiers and was not all that practical. Only about a thousand of these were made. So it was a great experiment, brilliant idea. But in practicality it doesnt work. Another great idea that doesnt work, you see anything odd about this . What is strange about this . Its got two hammers. The idea behind this was an inventor whose brother had been killed out in the west fighting native nativeamericans in the battle thought american explorers should have more shots in their guns, so he creates a two shot musket where you put two cartridges in the barrel and then with luck you have your hammers cocked and with luck one trigger fires one hammer shoots the front cartridge, the next trigger shoots the back cartridge and youve got two shots in one barrel. How successful do you think this was . Not. But it was a great idea. Sometimes great ideas just get pushed out into the field and not tested. I think the biggest jump in technology we see in the civil war as far as firearms it would not be for infantry. If you know about the military you have at least three branches. You have artillery, you have infantry, you have calvary. We do see, however, with the calvary there was much more innovation. They wanted shorter weapons that could be easy to use while on a horse. And you also wanted weapons that could be fired rapidly and loaded easily. So this is where we see most of the innovation i would say or the useful innovation. So i brought several calvary weapons here, which were invented by individuals and each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. First one i picked up. Doesnt that look a little bit neater . This is whats known as a burn side carding. It was invented by a famous civil war general by the name of embros burnside. Guess what style we had . Sideburns, they just switched it around. The term sideburns comes from general embros burnside. He didnt make a penny off this really. He got cheated off his patents but its a brilliant concept. The burnside carding has a rifle barrel. Its short, easy to carry on your horse. Its got a ring so you can put it on a strap so you dont lose it. And to fire it you press this little lever and this drops. So you have the entire inside of this exposed. So thats easy. You dont have to ram things. You do that, and it uses a metallic cartridge. In other words not a made out of paper that can get messed up in the rain. Its got a brass or copper holder for the powder. So the powder is in the copper back. Its got the bullet in the front, and to load it you just place it right here. And then push this forward. You still have to use the percussion cap, but its much, much faster to use. It works in the rain, and you can fire probably 5 to 10 times more rounds in the same time as it takes to fire two rounds in one of these or one round, really. So a big break through. And another inventor named smith invents his own carding. Its called the smith carding. If you want to load this you press a button right here. It pops open. It uses a cartridge like this. It was made out of the lead bullet with a rubber hard rubber cartridge in the back. That fits right in there, then you close it and youre ready to go. It also needs a percussion cap. This is a good example of looking down the barrel and actually seeing the rifling in it. So you can actually see those grooved cuts in the barrel that make that bullet spin. Brilliant idea. If youve ever heard the term sharpshooter, a lot of people think it comes from this particular cardine. Its called the sharp cardine, one of the most popular used in the civil war. Its light and to load it you use a cloth cartridge. Either cloth, linen or made out of animal skin. And to load it, you pull that down, you put your cartridge right there. The back of the cartridge has to be opened. Theres like a razor blade in the back of this. It cuts it off, youre ready to go like a cigar trimmer. And then it also uses a percussion cap. This was one of the more popular guns used in the civil war. Again, some of the longer ones were used by Sharp Shooters for sniping. After the civil war this became one of the most popular types used for buffalo hunting out in the west. So this is the famous sharps caring. The most revolutionary was this carding and was invented by a man named Christopher Spencer and spencer came up with several Brilliant Ideas one of which was a new cartridge. His cartridge was totally selfcontained. It looks pretty much like a modern cartridge, doesnt it . It looks like a giant. 22. His cartridge was the standard led mini ball. The cartridge itself is totally selfcontained. It has the powder in this copper case. And instead of having a percussion cap for priming, the primer is in that rim around the base of it. So you dont need a percussion cap. Its a huge jump. And if that wasnt a jump enough, to load it he invents a magazine that goes in the back of the carding. So this magazine holds seven cartridges. So if you have a spencer and youre in a battle, a fight the soldiers would typically have the thing loaded with this magazine like that. They would have had seven magazines in a pouch or box attached to their saddle. And so to fire it all you had to do was load it, do that, cock it, fire it, so you could shoot dozens of shots in a very brief time. It was incredibly effective. Does the army adopt it . Why would the army not adopt it . Its simple, very efficient, super wellmade, but why would they not adopt it . It wasnt that expensive, but it was expensive to ship. The army they were looking at and going soldiers will waste too much ammunition. They say its too easy to shoot. Soldiers will waste ammunition. Were not going to buy this gun for the army. That makes sense, doesnt it . Spencer is one of those guys that doesnt give up. In a famous story spencer takes one of his cardings, goes directly to the white house and gets a meeting with Abraham Lincoln and a famous story he and Abraham Lincoln go out on the white house grounds and Abraham Lincoln gets to test fire one of these himself. As soon as he does this lincoln orders his generals youre accepting this rifle. It took really a president ial order to take one of these or for us to adopt this. So this is the famous gun. It works wonderfully. As soon as lincoln was dead at the end of the civil war the army took back all these, put a little device on