Who invented the mitrailleuse?
Toussaint-Henry-Joseph Fafchamps
Joseph Montigny further improved the weapon, completing the transportable 37-barrels Montigny mitrailleuse (also known as the "Fafschamps-Montigny mitrailleuse") in 1863. From 1859, Joseph Montigny proposed his design to Napoleon III, which led to the development of the French Reffye mitrailleuse, designed by Jean-Baptiste Verchère de Reffye with the collaboration of Montigny, and which was adopted by the French Army in 1865. The invention of Fafschamps thus became the basis of the "mitrailleuse", which was used by the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Initially kept under wraps as a secret weapon, it became widely used in battle by French artillery during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71).
Pinfire cartridge
The pinfire cartridge was greatly improved by the 1846 patent (number 1963) by Benjamin Houllier of Paris which introduced a base wad and effectively made the cartridge gas-tight which greatly improved the performance. They were cheap and clean shooting. These improved pinfire guns grew in popularity in France and some were imported by British gun makers to overwhelming indifference on the part of the gun users there. They were prejudiced technically against a gun that 'broke' in the middle, despite the much vaunted benefits of breechloading. They owned muzzle-loaders of exquisite perfection, considered themselves the best engineers in the world (inventing the Industrial Revolution), and had a poor view of the French - the old enemy and an unreliable ally.
Mitrailleuse
The different variants of the mitrailleuse concept were distinguished by their number of barrels and their different calibers, as the following table summarizes.
Volley gun
A breech-loading volley gun that was reloaded using multiple breech pieces, similar to the later mitrailleuse, was developed in France in 1775 by a Du Perron.
Louis-Guillaume Perreaux
Louis-Guillaume Perreaux (19 February 1816 – 5 April 1889) was a French inventor and engineer who submitted one of the first patents for a working motorcycle in 1869.
Morane-Saulnier L
In December 1914 the famous French aviator Roland Garros, then serving with "Escadrille 23", worked with Raymond Saulnier to create a gun synchronizer, using the gas operated Hotchkiss light machine gun. However the firing rate fluctuated too much for the synchronizer to function properly. As an interim measure, they then designed a "safety backup" in the form of braced "deflectors" (metal wedges) fitted to the rear surfaces of the propeller blades at the points where they could be struck by a bullet. Garros took his Type L fighter into combat with the deflectors in March 1915 and achieved immediate success, shooting down three German aircraft in April, a noteworthy feat at the time. The bullets that the French used were not likely to damage the harder steel of the wedges themselves. On 18 April 1915, Garros' deflector-equipped Type L force-landed behind German lines and was captured before he could destroy it.
Mitrailleuse
Most variants of the mitrailleuse were mounted on an artillery-style carriage. This made them heavy and cumbersome to handle on the battlefield, with gun and carriage weighing up to 900 kg (2,000 lb).
History of weapons
The invention of gunpowder weapons revolutionized siege warfare, Gunpowder is said to have been conceived in China. It was when the Mongols, after invading China, went on to subdue Japan. Their ships sunk from being hit by a typhoon, resulting in half of their army drowning at sea. Marine archaeology has revealed that the Mongols were carrying gunpowder in ceramic pots, similar pots with ignited fuses had been shot from mechanical artillery against the Japanese defenders. Even the old Japanese paintings show the Japanese samurai defending themselves against bombs and rockets hurled by the invaders.
Some historians have observed that only 14 percent men in Europe owned guns,
over half of those guns were unusable during the later Middle Ages. The invention of gunpowder weapons replaced only catapults and onagers, the change was slow. Buying guns in those days was a costly affair, the cost of one gun was the equivalent of two months pay for a skilled artisan. By 1450, inventors improved the make of the gun and introduced the matchlock gun. Though inventors came with new technology, the process of reloading after every shot was very time consuming, by the time they were reloading the gun, the cavalry would charge and annihilate the entire unit of shooters.
Artillery
After the British artillery was shown up in the Crimean War as having barely changed since the Napoleonic Wars the industrialist William Armstrong was awarded a contract by the government to design a new piece of artillery. Production started in 1855 at the Elswick Ordnance Company and the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, and the outcome was the revolutionary Armstrong Gun, which marked the birth of modern artillery. Three of its features particularly stand out.
First, the piece was rifled, which allowed for a much more accurate and powerful action. Although rifling had been tried on small arms since the 15th century, the necessary machinery to accurately rifle artillery was not available until the mid-19th century. Martin von Wahrendorff, and Joseph Whitworth independently produced rifled cannon in the 1840s, but it was Armstrong's gun that was first to see widespread use during the Crimean War. The cast iron shell of the Armstrong gun was similar in shape to a Minié ball and had a thin lead coating which made it fractionally larger than the gun's bore and which engaged with the gun's rifling grooves to impart spin to the shell. This spin, together with the elimination of windage as a result of the tight fit, enabled the gun to achieve greater range and accuracy than existing smooth-bore muzzle-loaders with a smaller powder charge.
His gun was also a breech-loader. Although attempts at breech-loading mechanisms had been made since medieval times, the essential engineering problem was that the mechanism couldn't withstand the explosive charge. It was only with the advances in metallurgy and precision engineering capabilities during the Industrial Revolution that Armstrong was able to construct a viable solution. The gun combined all the properties that make up an effective artillery piece. The gun was mounted on a carriage in such a way as to return the gun to firing position after the recoil.
Henry Metcalfe (military officer)
Captain Henry Metcalfe (October 29, 1847 – August 17, 1927) was an American Army ordnance officer, inventor and early organizational theorist, known for his 1873 invention of a detachable magazine for small arms, for his work on modern management accounting, the development of the "time card" and his theory on the role of middle management.
John Pedersen (arms designer)
Many of Pedersen's U.S. military efforts were stymied by fate. Although the Navy recommended adoption of his .45 pistol design, the outbreak of World War I led to the design being shelved in favor of the M1911 pistol already in production for the Army. His most famous invention, the Pedersen Device, never had a chance to significantly affect the battles on the Western Front during World War I: the war ended before it could be manufactured in quantity and sent to France to equip the American Army (only 65,000 were produced out of planned production of 500,000). In the 1920s U.S. Army Ordnance selected his .276 Pedersen cartridge to replace the .30-06 in the infantry rifle and tested Pedersen's unique toggle-linked semi-automatic rifle in competitions at Aberdeen Proving Ground. The Pedersen rifle lost out to the rifle designed by John C. Garand. General MacArthur later vetoed the adoption of .276 Pedersen as the new infantry cartridge. General George S. Patton owned a Remington Model 51 and was thought to favor the weapon and is seen in many photos of the era wearing it as his personal sidearm. During World War II, John Pedersen's attempts through the Irwin-Pedersen Arms Company to mass-produce M1 Carbines for the U.S. military failed.
Mitrailleuse
Following their campaign against Arabi Pasha in Egypt during 1882, the British recorded having seized several mitrailleuses. None of these seemed to have been used in combat.
Girandoni air rifle
The Girandoni air rifle was an airgun designed by Tyrolian inventor Bartholomäus Girandoni circa 1779. The weapon was also known as the "Windbüchse" ("wind rifle" in German). One of the rifle's more famous associations is its use on the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore and map the western part of North America in the early 1800s.
La Mitrailleuse
La Mitrailleuse is a painting by British Futurist artist Christopher Nevinson, made in 1915 while he was on honeymoon leave from service as an ambulance driver with the RAMC on the Western Front in the First World War. In an article in "The Burlington Magazine" in 1916, artist Walter Sickert called the work "the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war in the history of painting".
Cutlass
Cutlasses are famous for being used by pirates, although there is no reason to believe that Caribbean buccaneers invented them, as has sometimes been claimed. However, the subsequent use of cutlasses by pirates is well documented in contemporary sources, notably by the pirate crews of William Fly, William Kidd, and Stede Bonnet. French historian Alexandre Exquemelin reports the buccaneer François l'Ollonais using a cutlass as early as 1667. Pirates used these weapons for intimidation as much as for combat, often needing no more than to grip their hilts to induce a crew to surrender, or beating captives with the flat of the blade to force their compliance or responsiveness to interrogation.
Madeleine Malraux
On 8 January 1943, she married , a journalist and half-brother of André Malraux. From their union was born on 11 June 1944, a son, Alain Malraux, who never knew his father. On 21 March 1944, Roland Malraux was arrested by the Gestapo in Brive-la-Gaillarde and deported to Neuengamme in Germany. He died during the bombardment of the ocean liner "Cap Arcona" by the RAF off Lübeck Bay on 3 May 1945.
It is during this same year 1943 that Madeleine Lioux met for the first time André Malraux at her parents' home and her then companion . The future minister of General de Gaulle will not know the same fate as his half-brothers. Indeed, shortly before his arrest, Roland had introduced André Malraux to the head of the Footmann network, another network of the SOE: . After he joigned the Resistance under the name of Colonel Berger, André Malraux was in turn arrested by the Germans at Gramat on 22 July 1944. Transferred to the of Toulouse, he was liberated by a "coup de force" from the Maquis on 19 August.
Mitrailleuse
A machine gun is still referred to as a "mitrailleuse" in French, following the pattern set by the adoption of the "Mitrailleuse Hotchkiss" in 1897. The FN 5.56 mm NATO machine gun, the Minimi, derives its name from the term "Mini-Mitrailleuse", "small machine gun". Submachine guns may be called "mitraillettes", the diminutive of "mitrailleuse", although they are also called "pistolets mitrailleurs" ("mitrailleuse pistols").
Mozambique Drill
According to anecdotal history, the technique originated with a Rhodesia soldier, Mike Rousseau, engaged in the Mozambican War of Independence (1964-1974). Fighting at the airport at Lourenço Marques (modern-day Maputo), Rousseau rounded a corner and encountered a FRELIMO guerrilla, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, at 10 paces (~7.5 meters). Rousseau immediately brought up his Browning HP35 pistol and performed a double tap maneuver, a controlled shooting technique in which the shooter makes two quick shots, to the target's torso. Rousseau hit the target on either side of the sternum, usually enough to incapacitate or kill outright. Seeing that the guerrilla was still advancing, Rousseau attempted a head shot that hit the guerrilla through the base of his neck, severing the spinal cord. Rousseau related the story to an acquaintance, small arms expert Jeff Cooper, founder of the Gunsite Academy shooting school, who incorporated the "Mozambique Drill" into his modern technique shooting method.
Pierre-Auguste Sarrus
Pierre-Auguste Sarrus (March 14 or 15, 1813 – May 3, 1876) was a French musician and inventor.Nevertheless, Pierre-Auguste Sarrus is not famous for his military career, but for having invented a music instrument to replace the oboe and bassoon in military music in 1856. Pierre-Louis Gautrot built this instrument and patented it under the name sarrusophone.
Sniper
The Whitworth rifle was arguably the first long-range sniper rifle in the world. A muzzleloader designed by Sir Joseph Whitworth, a prominent British engineer, it used polygonal rifling instead, which meant that the projectile did not have to bite into grooves as was done with conventional rifling. The Whitworth rifle was far more accurate than the Pattern 1853 Enfield, which had shown some weaknesses during the recent Crimean War. At trials in 1857 which tested the accuracy and range of both weapons, Whitworth's design outperformed the Enfield at a rate of about three to one. The Whitworth rifle was capable of hitting the target at a range of 2,000 yards, whereas the Enfield could only manage it at 1,400 yards.
Optical microscope
The actual inventor of the compound microscope is unknown although many claims have been made over the years. These include a claim 35 years after they appeared by Dutch spectacle-maker Johannes Zachariassen that his father, Zacharias Janssen, invented the compound microscope and/or the telescope as early as 1590. Johannes' (some claim dubious) testimony pushes the invention date so far back that Zacharias would have been a child at the time, leading to speculation that, for Johannes' claim to be true, the compound microscope would have to have been invented by Johannes' grandfather, Hans Martens. Another claim is that Janssen's competitor, Hans Lippershey (who applied for the first telescope patent in 1608) also invented the compound microscope. Other historians point to the Dutch innovator Cornelis Drebbel with his 1621 compound microscope.
Mitrailleuse
The battlefield use of the mitrailleuse as artillery was a fatally flawed concept. To avoid being hit by Dreyse rifle fire, the mitrailleuse batteries were systematically deployed beyond about 1,400 m (1,500 yards) from the Prussian lines. Although the maximum range of the mitrailleuses was 3,400 m (3,700 yards), the distances at which they were typically engaged rarely exceeded 2,000 m (2100 yards) which was less than the reach of French field artillery. However accurate fire at 1500 yards was always extremely difficult to achieve with the typical open sights present on the mitrailleuse. For instance, mitrailleuse bullet impacts on the ground could not be observed in the far distance unless enemy ranks had been disrupted by hits from them. It may be noted that modern machine guns are typically used at ranges far shorter than their maximum range—the M60 machine gun, for instance, is normally used at an effective range of 1,100 m (1,200 yards), compared to its maximum range of 3,725 m (4,074 yards). The mitrailleuse, by contrast, was often used at the outer edges of its range and without the benefit of optical range finding equipment. These deficiencies in the operational usage of the Reffye mitrailleuse proved disastrous in the Franco-Prussian War.
Air gun
In the hands of skilled soldiers, they gave the military a distinct advantage. France, Austria and other nations had special sniper detachments using air rifles. The Austrian 1770 model was named "Windbüchse" (literally "wind rifle" in German). The gun was developed in 1768 or 1769 by the Tyrolean watchmaker, mechanic and gunsmith Bartholomäus Girandoni (1744–1799) and is sometimes referred to as the Girandoni air rifle or Girandoni air gun in literature (the name is also spelled "Girandony," "Giradoni" or "Girardoni".) The "Windbüchse" was about 4 ft (1.2 m) long and weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg), about the same size and mass as a conventional musket. The air reservoir was a removable, club-shaped, butt. The "Windbüchse" carried twenty-two .51 caliber (13 mm) lead balls in a tubular magazine. A skilled shooter could fire off one magazine in about thirty seconds. A shot from this air gun could penetrate an inch thick wooden board at a hundred paces, an effect roughly equal to that of a modern 9×19mm or .45 ACP caliber pistol.
René Baillaud
He invented the "paraboloïde" a precursor of the radar. This instrument made it possible to establish the position of planes without having to see them, using only the sound they produced. The precision of the instrument was such, that it was used during the first world war by the French military, to reppel night attacks from German bombers by pointing searchlights at them. This furthermore represented a rare technological superioty for the French. After this remarkable start in the fields of acoustics, he nonetheless decided to abandon this field. The reason being that his professor's own instrument didn't get chosen by the French military, and René feared he would have no academic future in this field. He then turned chronometry.
Edmund Zalinski
Edmund Louis Gray Zalinski, (December 13, 1849 – March 11, 1909) was a Polish-born American soldier, military engineer and inventor. He is best known for the development of the pneumatic dynamite torpedo-gun.
Mitrailleuse
Although innovative and capable of good ballistic performance, the Reffye "mitrailleuse" failed as a tactical weapon because its basic concept and operational usage were flawed. Furthermore, only 210 Reffye mitrailleuses were in existence at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Their field use was discontinued by the French Army after 1871. After the Gatling gun was replaced in service by newer recoil- or gas-operated weapons, the approach of using multiple barrels fell into disuse for many decades. However, some examples were developed during the interwar years, but only existed as prototypes, or were rarely used. The word "mitrailleuse" nonetheless became the generic term for a machine gun in the French language because of its early appearance in the field of weapons, although the "mitrailleuse" itself was manually operated.
M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle
By July 1918 the BAR had begun to arrive in France, and the first unit to receive them was the US Army's 79th Infantry Division, which took them into action for the first time on 13 September 1918. The weapon was personally demonstrated against the enemy by 2nd Lt. Val Allen Browning, the inventor's son. Despite being introduced very late in the war, the BAR made an impact disproportionate to its numbers; it was used extensively during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive and made a significant impression on the Allies (France alone requested 15,000 automatic rifles to replace their notoriously unreliable Chauchat machine rifles).
Frédéric Geille
Colonel Frédéric Cyrille Jules (Fred) Geille (Brest, November 19, 1896 - Saint-Germain-en-Laye, July 21, 1976) () was a French military officer. Frédéric was the 1st French paratrooper and a Fighter pilot () of the French Air Force as well as a commander and founder of various units and initiatives. He is also considered as the Father of French paratroopers and the inventor of French High-Altitude Operational Jumpers ().
Rifle
Soon after, the Carabine à tige was invented by Louis-Etienne de Thouvenin, which provided for a stem at the bottom at the barrel that would deform and expand the base of the bullet when rammed, therefore enabling accurate contact with the rifling. However, the area around the stem would clog and get dirty easily.
Mitrailleuse
The French Army used the mitrailleuse as an artillery weapon, rather than an infantry support weapon—a role later filled by the machine gun. As a matter of fact, the official name of the Reffye mitrailleuse in the French Army was ""le Canon à Balles"", a designation that translates literally as: "cannon that fires bullets":
Minié ball
The Minié ball, or Minni ball, is a type of muzzle-loading spin-stabilized bullet for rifled muskets named after its co-developer, Claude-Étienne Minié, inventor of the French Minié rifle. It came to prominence in the Crimean and American Civil War.
Ribauldequin
As an early type of multiple barrel firearm, the "ribauldequin" is sometimes considered the predecessor of the 19th century mitrailleuse.
Mitrailleuse
The mitrailleuse's dependence on manual loading meant that its firing rate depended greatly on the skill of its operators. A skillfully manned Reffye mitrailleuse could sustain four volleys (100 rounds) per minute in ordinary operation and reach five volleys (125 rounds) per minute during emergencies. The rapidity of discharge of each individual volley (25 rounds) was controlled by the gunner's action on a small manual crank on the right side of the breech. The weapon's 25 barrels were not discharged all at once, but in rapid succession. Because it was so heavy (1,500 lbs), the Reffye mitrailleuse did not recoil during firing and thus did not need to be re-sighted on its target after each volley. This essential absence of recoil during firings was promoted by Reffye as a considerable advantage over conventional field artillery. Each regular battery of Reffye mitrailleuses lined up six guns firing together, more or less side by side.
General Liu rifle
The General Liu rifle is named after its inventor and the first Superintendent of Hanyang Arsenal - General Liu Qing En (1869-1929), as the rifle never received any other designation. It was probably the first Chinese semi-automatic rifle. The rifle used a muzzle "gas-trap" system similar to Bang rifle (other rifles including this system were: Gewehr 41 and early production models of M1 Garand). The rifle's method of operation could be switched
from gas to straight-pull bolt action by rotating counterclockwise the cylinder located on the muzzle, to revert to gas-operated reloading the cylinder had to be rotated back (clockwise).
The stock had a compartment for cleaning tools.
Norbert Rillieux
Norbert Rillieux (March 17, 1806 – October 8, 1894) was an American inventor who was widely considered one of the earliest chemical engineers and noted for his pioneering invention of the multiple-effect evaporator. This invention was an important development in the growth of the sugar industry. Rillieux, a French-speaking Creole, was a cousin of the painter Edgar Degas.
.44 Henry
Both the cartridge and the Henry rifle are named for Benjamin Tyler Henry, the 19th-century American gunsmith who invented it. Henry designed both in his spare time while he was the foreman of the New Haven Arms Company, and was granted a US patent for his creations on October 16, 1860. While it was not the first repeating rifle, it was one of the first successful designs (alongside the Spencer rifle), and it provided the basis for the iconic Winchester rifle. Part of the Henry rifle's great success was due to the relatively novel self-contained metallic cartridge, which allowed a repeating mechanism to work. Other breechloaders of the time often relied on a simple, separate percussion cap for ignition, just like a typical muzzleloader of the era, and often used paper or linen cartridge cases, which provided no obturation, or sealing of the breech against the expanding gases (such as the Sharps rifle). Some utilized self-contained primers, but still lacked metallic cases (the Dreyse "Needle Gun"). While these one-shot breechloading weapons were great improvements over the muzzleloader, it required the adoption of the self-contained metallic case before repeaters could become viable weapons. The .44 Henry was an early self-contained metallic cartridge, and was one of the great reasons for the ultimate success of the Henry rifle.
Cornelis Drebbel
One of the optical devices some historians believe Drebbel invented when he was working for the Duke of Buckingham was the compound microscope. The device appeared in Europe around 1620 with the earliest account being Dutch Ambassador Willem Boreel's 1619 visit to London where he saw a compound microscope in Drebbel's possession, described as an instrument about eighteen inches long, two inches in diameter, and supported on 3 brass dolphins. In 1621 Drebbel had a compound microscope with two convex lenses. Several of his contemporaries, including Christiaan Huygens, credited the invention of the compound microscope to Drebbel. The invention has many counter claims including Dutch spectacle-maker Johannes Zachariassen's claim that Drebbel stole the idea from him and his father, Zacharias Jansen, and claims that Galileo Galilei used his telescope after 1610 as a type of compound microscope. In 1624 Galileo saw Drebbel's design for a microscope in Rome and created an improved version of it to send to Federico Cesi, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, who used it to illustrate "Apiarum", his book about bees.
History of the firearm
The world's first successful self-loading rifle is the Mondragón rifle, designed by Mexican general Manuel Mondragón and was the first self-loading firearm able to be operated by a single rifleman, since its debut in 1908 it received few modifications (bipod, 30-round drum magazine) and has been used during the Mexican Revolution (Mexican Army) and World War I (Imperial German Flying Corps).
Claude-Étienne Minié
Claude-Etienne Minié (13 February 1804 – 14 December 1879) was a French Army officer famous for solving the problem of designing a reliable muzzle-loading rifle by inventing the Minié ball in 1846, and the Minié rifle in 1849. He succeeded the pioneering work of Henri-Gustave Delvigne and Louis-Étienne de Thouvenin. Minié was born and died in Paris.
Émile Girardeau
In 1934, Girardeau headed the team which developed the first radar system in France. In 1939, Girardeau built with Maurice Ponte radar installations for the defence of Paris against planes (which were destroyed in June 1940). After the fall of France to Germany, Girardeau created a factory for underground forces of free France.
Claude-Étienne Minié
Minié served in a number of African campaigns with the Chasseurs, after which he was eventually promoted to captain. In 1846 he designed the Minié ball, a cylindrical bullet with a conical hollow in the base which expanded when fired. This projectile, combined with his rifle, resulted in a major improvement in firearm accuracy.
Electrical engineering
In 1920, Albert Hull developed the magnetron which would eventually lead to the development of the microwave oven in 1946 by Percy Spencer. In 1934, the British military began to make strides toward radar (which also uses the magnetron) under the direction of Dr Wimperis, culminating in the operation of the first radar station at Bawdsey in August 1936.
Philip James Barraud
Philip James Barraud (1879–1948) was an English entomologist who specialised in mosquitoes. He worked in Iraq and India where he invented the Barraud cage (a box of made of muslin or organdie suspended on a wire frame placed inside insulators containing wet towels) for the transport and study of live mosquitoes.Barraud described many new genera and species of Culicidae. His collection, which included Palearctic Lepidoptera is in the Natural History Museum. The genus "Barraudius" Edwards, F.W., 1921 is named for him.
History of the firearm
The first successful rapid-fire firearm is the Gatling gun, invented by Richard Jordan Gatling and fielded by the Union forces during the American Civil War in the 1860s. It is operated by a hand crank and rotates multiple barrels. The Gatling gun needs a four-man crew to function and has had many upgrades since its introduction and has been used in many conflicts.
Mitrailleuse
A total of 215 mitrailleuses and five million rounds of ammunition had been manufactured by July 1870, but only 190 were operational and available for field service when war with Prussia broke out.
Mitrailleuse
The Prussians and foreign observers were not impressed by the performance of the mitrailleuse. In the case of the Prussians, their views were undoubtedly coloured by propaganda. They had very few machine guns or volley guns of their own and, not least for reasons of maintaining morale in the face of a new weapon technology, they scorned the effectiveness of the mitrailleuse. They nonetheless saw the weapon as a threat and Prussian artillery always made it a priority to engage and destroy mitrailleuse batteries. The weapon's characteristic "snarling rasp" does appear to have made some impression—the Prussian troops called the mitrailleuse the ""Höllenmaschine"" ("Hell Machine, Infernal Machine")
François Mireur
Mireur was born in Escragnolles in 1770, and studied as a medicinal doctor at the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier. In 1792, he became a doctor, but volunteered for the army shortly afterwards. That year, he sang Rouget de Lisle's war song when he was headed to Marseilles to organize and lead volunteers from nearby towns. The song thus became known as "La Marseillaise", which was adopted as the French national anthem in 1795. During the war, he fought at the Battle of Valmy and later served in the Italian Campaign of Napoleon, twice refusing the rank of general. In 1798, he was promoted to general and served alongside Louis Desaix in the Egyptian Campaign, where he fought the Mamelukes and Ottomans. It was in this war that Mireur met his end. While riding a newly purchased Arabian stallion, after only a short distance, he was ambushed by three Mamelukes, and killed before he could call for help. His name was inscribed on the 28th pillar of the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the south pillar, near the avenue Kleber. He was honored as a national hero because of his role in popularising the "Marseillaise".
V-3 cannon
During the same period, French engineer Louis-Guillaume Perreaux, one of the pioneers of the motorcycle, had been working on a similar project since before 1860. Perreaux was granted a patent in 1864 for a multi-chamber gun. In 1878, Perreaux presented his invention at the World Exhibition of Paris.
Needle gun
The Chassepot was named after its inventor, Antoine Alphonse Chassepot (1833–1905), who, from 1857 onwards, had constructed various experimental forms of breechloader, and the rifle became the French service weapon in 1866. In the following year it made its first appearance on the battlefield at Mentana on 3 November 1867, where it inflicted severe losses upon Giuseppe Garibaldi's troops. It was reported at the French Parliament that ""Les Chassepots ont fait merveille!"", or loosely translated: "The Chassepots have done wonderfully!" The undisguised truth is that the heavy cylindrical lead bullets fired at high velocity by the Chassepot rifle inflicted wounds that were even worse than those of the earlier Minié rifle.
Military history
World War II gave rise to even more technology. The worth of the aircraft carrier was proved in the battles between the United States and Japan like the Battle of Midway. Radar was independently invented by the Allies and Axis powers. It used radio waves to detect objects. Molotov cocktails were invented by General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, directing the Nationalists to use them against Soviet tanks in the assault on Toledo. The atomic bomb was developed by the Manhattan Project and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, quickly ending World War II.
Rifled musket
Rifles were more expensive to make than muskets, and were typically used by small units of specialized riflemen trained not to fight in closed ranks, but in open order, spread out as skirmishers or sharpshooters. Since they were not fired over other men’s shoulders or designed for close-combat bayonet fighting, military rifles could be much shorter than muskets, which also made loading from the muzzle easier and reduced the difficulties associated with fitting the bullet into the barrel, although the rate of fire was still slower than that of a musket. 
The problem of slow loading of rifles caused by barrel fouling was solved by the Minié ball, which was invented in the 1840s by French inventor Claude-Étienne Minié. Despite its name, the Minié ball was not a round ball at all - it was long and conical, with an expanding skirt at the rear of the bullet. The skirt allowed the minié ball to be smaller than the barrel's bore, so it would slip in as easily as the ball of a smoothbore. When the weapon was fired, the skirt expanded to fit tightly against the inside of the rifle barrel, with less energy wasted in blow-by around the projectile and insuring that the rifling lands and grooves would impart a stabilizing spin to the minié ball.
Jean Samuel Pauly
Whilst in Paris, Pauly had maintained contact with the weapon manufacturer of Saint-Étienne; using the title "Colonel Jean Samuel Pauly", he established a gunsmith workshop where he designed an automatic bridge and developed mercury fulminate platina. In 1808, in association with French gunsmith François Prélat, Pauly created the first fully self-contained cartridges ; these incorporated a copper base with integrated potassium chlorate primer powder (the major innovation of Pauly), a round bullet and either brass or paper casing. Unlike later cartridges, the case walls didn't provide obturation as the cartridge was loaded through the breech and fired with a needle or a pin; this needle-activated central-fire breech-loading gun would become a major feature of firearms thereafter, and in 1809 Pauly employed the German Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse who would later become the inventor of the famous Dreyse rifle. The corresponding firearm was also developed by Pauly, who made an improved version which was protected by a patent on 29 September 1812, and the cartridge was further improved by the French gunsmith Casimir Lefaucheux in 1836.
It is reported that Napoleon himself said of Pauly's weapons: "Inventions that precede their time remain untapped until general knowledge has reached the same level."
Mark Serrurier
Mark Serrurier (12 May 1904 in Pasadena, California – 14 February 1988) is the son of Dutch-born electrical engineer, Iwan Serrurier, who created the Moviola in 1924 which became the technology used for film editing. Mark was a graduate of Caltech and went on to work on designs for the Mt. Palomar 200 inch (5 m) Hale telescope. The pioneering truss design he invented for that instrument's massive tube structure (the "Serrurier truss") is still used today in large telescope designs. During World War II, Mark worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory testing jet aircraft engines. In 1942, Rolf Sabersky worked in mechanical design on the Southern California Cooperative Wind Tunnel under Serrurier and Hap Richards.
After the war in 1946 Mark took over as president of Moviola Co., his father Iwan’s company. Mark re-designed his fathers invention with many improvements and ran the company until he sold it in 1966. In 1979, Mark accepted a special Academy Award for Technical Achievement"" For the progressive development of the Moviola from the 1924 invention of his father, Iwan Serrurier, to the present Series 20 sophisticated film editing equipment"". He only accepted after insisting that his late father's name would also appear on the statue. The Oscar sat on Mark's kitchen table until his death from Alzheimer's disease on Valentine's Day 1988.
John Bruce Medaris
John Bruce Medaris (May 12, 1902 – July 11, 1990) retired a Major General in the United States Army. During World War II he became a highly decorated colonel in the ordnance corps of the First Army, serving in every campaign from North Africa to Sicily, Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and invasion of Germany. In 1955 he assumed command of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Under his supervision Wernher von Braun and the German Rocket Team developed the Jupiter missile which launched the first U.S. earth satellite into orbit in 1958. Medaris went on to play a role in the post-Sputnik debates over how the U.S. government ought to respond to the Soviet challenge. When the Eisenhower administration decided to create a civilian space agency, assigned long-range ballistic missiles to the Air Force and Navy, then transferred the Huntsville Rocket Team to the NASA, Medaris retired from the army and wrote a critical memoir. Several years later he found an entirely different calling as an Anglican priest.
History of weapons
As well as these advances in firearms and artillery technology, new repeating firearms began to emerge on the battlefield. As soon as matchlocks appeared, there were attempts to create non-muzzleloading firearms. Early attempts such as the Ferguson rifle proved to be too complicated for regular soldiers. By 1836 a German gunsmith Johann Nicolaus von Dreyse invented the Dreyse needle rifle, the first bolt-action rifle, which the Prussian Army adopted for service in 1848. In 1866 during the Austro-Prussian War after the decisive Prussian victory at the Battle of Königgrätz it was obvious that muzzle-loading rifles were ineffective in battle. Soon after, nations all around Europe began adopting breech-loaders and converting their existing service rifles to breech-loaders. Such rifles include the British Snider Rifle and the French Chassepot Rifle. These new rifles, along with the invention of the revolver (patented in 1836) and the advent of machine in the 1860s, displayed the need for the way battles were fought to change. However, it was only until the First World War that military leaders around the world adapted new tactics to employ these weapons.
Mitrailleuse
Several variants of the mitrailleuse concept were developed, with common elements to all of their designs. They were characterized by a number of rifled barrels clustered together and mounted on a conventional artillery chassis or (in the case of one model) a tripod. The ammunition was secured in a single block and placed into the breech, behind the open ends of the barrels. All of the barrels were loaded simultaneously by a manual closing lever or large horizontal screw. A second lever could be worked rapidly (or in some models, a crank could be turned) to fire each barrel in succession. This earned the weapon its French nickname of "moulin à café" (coffee grinder). (A very similar name was earned by the hand-cranked, mechanically loaded, continuous-firing, "coffee mill gun" in America during the American Civil War.)
Gatling gun
Prior to the Gatling gun, the only weapons available to military forces capable of firing many projectiles in a short space of time were mass-firing volley weapons, like the Belgian and French mitrailleuse of the 1860s and 1870s, and field cannons firing canister shot, much like an upsized shotgun. The latter were widely used during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Although the maximum rate of fire was increased by firing multiple projectiles simultaneously, these weapons still needed to be reloaded after each discharge, which for multi-barrel systems like the "mitrailleuse" was cumbersome and time-consuming. This negated much of the advantage of their high rate of fire per discharge, making them much less powerful on the battlefield. In comparison, the Gatling gun offered a rapid and continuous rate of fire without having to be manually reloaded by opening the breech.
Rotary cannon
The Gatling gun was the first gun to use rotating barrels. It was designed by the American inventor Dr. Richard J. Gatling in 1861 and patented in 1862. Hand cranked and hopper fed, it could fire at a rate of 200 rounds per minute. The Gatling gun was a field weapon, first used in warfare during the American Civil War and subsequently by European and Russian armies.
Machine gun
The Gatling gun, patented in 1861 by Richard Jordan Gatling, was the first to offer controlled, sequential fire with mechanical loading. The design's key features were machine loading of prepared cartridges and a hand-operated crank for sequential high-speed firing. It first saw very limited action in the American Civil War; it was subsequently improved and used in the Franco-Prussian war and North-West Rebellion. Many were sold to other armies in the late 19th century and continued to be used into the early 20th century, until they were gradually supplanted by Maxim guns. Early multi-barrel guns were approximately the size and weight of contemporary artillery pieces, and were often perceived as a replacement for cannon firing grapeshot or canister shot. The large wheels required to move these guns around required a high firing position, which increased the vulnerability of their crews. Sustained firing of gunpowder cartridges generated a cloud of smoke, making concealment impossible until smokeless powder became available in the late 19th century. Gatling guns were targeted by artillery they could not reach, and their crews were targeted by snipers they could not see. The Gatling gun was used most successfully to expand European colonial empires, since against poorly equipped indigenous armies it did not face such threats.
Montigny mitrailleuse
Napoleon III showed personal interest in the mitrailleuse. Montigny had approached the French army for the purpose of a sale. Experiments to evaluate the weapon began in 1863 in a French facility near Paris but the decision was made to build a similar weapon by sole French means. Manufacture began at Meudon in 1866 under the direction of Verchères de Reffye and the undisclosed assistance of Montigny. Hence the weapon is usually known as the "Reffye mitrailleuse". Altogether 215 mitrailleuses were manufactured for the French Army before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. They were of the 13mm, 25-barrels type, and used elongated shotgun shell style cartridges instead of foil cartridges as in the Montigny mitrailleuse. The weapon, which was on an artillery carriage, was deployed in six gun batteries and manned by artillery personnel. Most of the time, they were used quite ineffectively to engage distant targets. When the weapon was engaged at the Battle of Gravelotte in 1871, in an infantry support role and at shorter distances, it produced devastating effects.
Richard Fiedler
Richard Fiedler was a German scientist who invented the modern flamethrower. This is a weapon that projects a stream of ignited liquid, usually oil. He submitted evaluation models of his Flammenwerfer to the German Army in 1901. The most significant model submitted was a man-portable device, consisting of a vertical single cylinder 4 feet (1.2 m) long, horizontally divided in two, with pressurized gas in the lower section and flammable oil in the upper section. On depressing a lever the propellant gas forced the flammable oil into and through a rubber tube and over a simple igniting wick device in a steel nozzle. The weapon projected a jet of fire and enormous clouds of smoke some 20 yards (18 m). It was a single-shot weapon - for burst firing, a new igniter section was attached each time it was used for battle or other uses of any sorts. It was first used on the western front both by the Central Powers and the Entente.
History of optics
The earliest known examples of compound microscopes, which combine an objective lens near the specimen with an eyepiece to view a real image, appeared in Europe around 1620. The design is very similar to the telescope and, like that device, its inventor is unknown. Again claims revolve around the spectacle making centers in the Netherlands including claims it was invented in 1590 by Zacharias Janssen and/or his father, Hans Martens, claims it was invented by rival spectacle maker, Hans Lippershey, and claims it was invented by expatriate Cornelis Drebbel who was noted to have a version in London in 1619. Galileo Galilei (also sometimes cited as a compound microscope inventor) seems to have found after 1609 that he could close focus his telescope to view small objects and, after seeing a compound microscope built by Drebbel exhibited in Rome in 1624, built his own improved version. The name "microscope" was coined by Giovanni Faber, who gave that name to Galileo Galilei's compound microscope in 1625.
Mitrailleuse
The mitrailleuse is best known for its service with the French Army but in fact it was first used in Belgium in the 1850s as a static weapon to defend the moats of fortresses. It was a 50-barrel needle fire, paper cartridge weapon which had been designed by a Captain T.H.J. Fafschamps. Then, after 1863, it was improved with only 37 barrels, 11×70mmR centerfire ammunition and the weapon's placement on a wheeled artillery carriage. This transformation was carried out as an industrial venture by Christophe and Joseph Montigny of Fontaine-l'Évêque near Brussels, who sought to sell the new weapon to the rest of Europe.
MG 13
Dreyse Model 1918 Machinegun: In 1907 Louis Schmeisser of Erfurt patented a machinegun named in honor of the inventor of the needle gun by the heads of the factory where it was made which was founded by Dreyse. The Dreyse machinegun was a heavy, usually tripod mounted, belt-fed and water cooled machinegun.
Andrew McNaughton
While there he helped make advances in the science of artillery, and was wounded twice. The need to accurately pinpoint artillery targets, both stationary and moving, led to his invention of a target detection technique using an oscilloscope which was the forerunner of "radar". He sold the rights to that invention to the Government of Canada for only $10.
Daguerreotype
Morse met the inventor of the daguerreotype, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, in Paris in January 1839 when Daguerre's invention was announced [2]. While the daguerreotype fascinated Morse, he was concerned about how the new invention would compete with his telegraph. However, Morse's viewing of the daguerreotype alleviated his fears when he saw how revolutionary its technology was. Morse wrote a letter to his brother Sidney describing Daguerre's invention, which Sidney then published in the New-York Observer on April 20, 1839. While this was not the first report of the daguerreotype to appear in America, it was the first in-person report to appear in the United States.
Hotchkiss M1914 machine gun
At the beginning of the World War I, the Manufacture d'armes de Saint-Étienne proved to be unable to produce enough St. Etienne machine guns. The French military forces chose to adopt the Hotchkiss M1900 with some minor modifications, as the Mitrailleuse Automatique modèle 1914. The Hotchkiss gun is initially supplied to second-line troops but in 1916 front-line units began to use the M1914. That year, a parliamentary committee of inquiry concluded that the Hotchkiss was more reliable than the St. Etienne and the production of the later is stopped.
Mitrailleuse
Having been developed by the artillery they were, naturally, manned by artillerymen and attached to artillery groups equipped with regular four-pounder field guns. Each mitrailleuse battery comprised six guns, each with a crew of six. One man on the front right fired the gun while another man on the front left swiveled the gun sideways for sweeping fire. The four other men attended to aiming, loading, and unloading. Auguste Verchère de Reffye himself consistently viewed the mitrailleuse as an artillery weapon:
Cartridge (firearms)
The first integrated cartridge was developed in Paris in 1808 by the Swiss gunsmith Jean Samuel Pauly in association with French gunsmith François Prélat. Pauly created the first fully self-contained cartridges: 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. The cartridge was loaded through the breech and fired with a needle. The needle-activated centerfire breech-loading gun would become a major feature of firearms thereafter. Pauly made an improved version, protected by a patent, on 29 September 1812.
Mitrailleuse
Mitrailleuses were used in many of the major engagements of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), but their small numbers greatly restricted their effectiveness. Their flawed usage was a serious problem on the battlefield. While the mitrailleuses were inherently accurate, in a ballistic sense, they were often unable to zero in on targets quickly enough at great distances. Individual 25 round salvos were also too tightly grouped and lacked lateral dispersion. To make matters worse, the complex firing mechanism was vulnerable to damage at the hands of inexperienced crews. Fouling of the mechanism by black powder combustion residues and thus difficulties in closing the breech were reported as a problem after prolonged firings.
In a few instances where the Reffye mitrailleuses were put to good use, they showed that they could have a significant impact. Captain Barbe's mitrailleuse battery at the Battle of Gravelotte devastated massed Prussian infantry when they had quickly found the range on their targets, contributing to the exceptionally high Prussian death toll in that battle. Other examples of effective mitrailleuse fire have also been described for the battles of Saint Privat and Mars-la-Tour. For the most part, however, mitrailleuses proved ineffective. It was concluded after the war that Chassepot rifle fire had caused a far greater number of Prussian casualties than the Reffye mitrailleuses. However, about 100,000 Chassepot rifles were engaged in combat in contrast with the less than 200 Reffye mitrailleuses used in battle at any given time.
Medusa Model 47 (multi caliber revolver)
The company that created the Medusa M47 is Phillips & Rodgers Inc., designed principally by Jonathan W. Philips Jr and Roger A. Hunziker, who produced a relatively small numbers of the hand gun in the late 1990s. Jonathan W. Phillips was a gunsmith and he also worked as a computer scientist for NASA. He was mainly responsible for the designing of the cylinder, extractor and ejector mechanism as well as the system that is used for positioning the cartridges. He applied for two patents on February 3, 1993 for the “Ejector and cartridge positioner for revolvers” and the "Ejector and cartridge positioner". He later filed for a patent that was called "Bore for weapons" on February 27, 1996 that online the rifling that the Medusa was going to use. Roger A. Hunziker designed the firing pin mechanism for the Medusa. He filed for a patent on August 1, 1995 for the "Firing pin mechanism". Phillips & Rodgers Inc. not only produced the Medusa M47 revolver but they also made several conversion cylinders for revolvers made by Smith and Wesson, Colt, and Ruger. Very few of the these revolvers were actually produced.
Dassault Mirage III
In 1968, Dassault, in cooperation with the Swiss, began work on a Mirage update known as the "Milan" ("Kite"). The main feature of the Milan was a pair of pop out foreplanes in the nose, which were referred to as "moustaches". The moustaches were intended to provide better take-off performance and low-speed control for the attack role. The three initial prototypes were converted from existing Mirage fighters; one of these prototypes was nicknamed "Asterix", after the internationally popular French cartoon character, a tough little Gallic warrior with a huge moustache.
Minigun
The ancestor to the modern minigun was a hand cranked mechanical device invented in the 1860s by Richard Jordan Gatling. Gatling later replaced the hand-cranked mechanism of a rifle-caliber Gatling gun with an electric motor, a relatively new invention at the time. Even after Gatling slowed down the mechanism, the new electric-powered Gatling gun had a theoretical rate of fire of 3,000 rounds per minute, roughly three times the rate of a typical modern, single-barreled machine gun. Gatling's electric-powered design received U.S. Patent #502,185 on July 25, 1893. Despite Gatling's improvements, the Gatling gun fell into disuse after cheaper, lighter-weight, recoil and gas operated machine guns were invented; Gatling himself went bankrupt for a period.
Mitrailleuse d´Avion Browning - F.N. Calibre 13,2 mm
The Mitrailleuse d´Avion Browning - F.N. Calibre 13,2 mm, more commonly known as the FN Browning M.1939 or the Browning FN (as a nickname) was a heavy airplane machine gun built for export the year prior to WW2 by Fabrique Nationale "FN herstal" in Belgium.
Edmond Michel
Edmond Michel was a Frenchman who immigrated to the United States in the early 20th Century. He lived in New Orleans. His claim to fame was the invention of the handheld circular saw. Watching sugar farmers cut through thick cane stalks with machetes, he believed that there was a better way.
Mitrailleuse
In summary, the Reffye mitrailleuse was rarely used to deliver sweeping fire at close range like modern machine guns. The mitrailleuse six-gun batteries had been designed to deliver fire on targets too distant to be reached with Chassepot infantry rifles or artillery grapeshot. To fulfill this role, at least during the early weeks of the campaign, the mitrailleuses were deployed together with the older "Napoleon" muzzle loaded field guns ("canon obusier de 12") used by the French Army during the Franco-Prussian War. The mitrailleuse crews are on record of having generally objected to being placed in proximity to regular artillery batteries .
Grenade
Marten Hale, better known for patenting the Hales rifle grenade, developed a modern hand grenade in 1906 but was unsuccessful in persuading the British Army to adopt the weapon until 1913. Hale's chief competitor was Nils Waltersen Aasen, who invented his design in 1906 in Norway, receiving a patent for it in England. He began his experiments with developing a grenade while serving as a sergeant in the Oscarsborg Fortress. Aasen formed the "Aasenske Granatkompani" in Denmark, which before the First World War produced and exported hand grenades in large numbers across Europe. He had success in marketing his weapon to the French and was appointed as a Knight of the French Legion in 1916 for the invention.
Joseph Montigny
Joseph Montigny was a Belgian gunsmith, from Fontaine l'Evèque near Brussels, and the developer of the Montigny mitrailleuse, an early European machine gun, in 1863. The design was based on the early 1850s prototype of a volley gun by the Belgian officer Fafschamps. Montigny managed to offer his design to Napoléon III, who adopted it in 1867, with Colonel De Reffye making various improvements to the weapons.
History of the firearm
The first successful assault rifle was introduced during World War II by the Germans, known as the StG 44, it was the first-ever firearm which bridges the gap between long range rifles, machine guns, and short range submachine guns. The assault rifle was a more powerful and had longer ranges than the submachine gun, yet can be used comfortably in close, urban environments and on fully automatic from the shoulder unlike heavier machine guns and long semi-auto rifles, thanks to its intermediate round and select-fire option (switch from fully automatic to semi-automatic). After World War II ended, the assault rifle concept was adopted by every world power and is still being used to this day.
Morane-Saulnier
The Type L has the distinction of being the first fighter aircraft used during World War I when one was fitted with a machine gun firing through the propeller, which was fitted with metal plates to deflect any bullets that struck it. This was flown with success by Roland Garros, who would later be considered to be the first French Ace. A similar system was fitted to the Type N pending the arrival of other machine guns, which made the system workable. While flying his modified Type L, Garros crashed on the German side of the lines and the wreckage was examined by Fokker just prior to Fokker producing a similar system.
Georges Jean Marie Darrieus
Georges Jean Marie Darrieus (24 September 1888 – 15 July 1979) was a French aeronautical engineer in the 20th century. He is perhaps most famous for his invention of the Darrieus rotor, a wind turbine capable of operating from any direction and under adverse weather conditions, and the vertical-axis giromill.
Arthur William Savage
Arthur William Savage (May 13, 1857 – September 22, 1938), was a businessman, inventor, and explorer. He is most famous for inventing the Savage Model 99 lever-action rifle, which remained in production for over 100 years, and founding Savage Arms. However, his most lasting and valuable inventions may be radial tires, and it has been argued, the modern detachable box magazine used in almost all modern military firearms. He also invented an early torpedo and built and raced cars.
Mitrailleuse
After Napoleon III's abdication following the disastrous French defeat in the Battle of Sedan, French war powers fell into the hand of a republican government led by Léon Gambetta. He vigorously organized national defense and the continued manufacture of war equipment. Most of the conventional weapon manufacturing was located in provincial France, but some mitrailleuse repair and even construction continued inside Paris during the city's four-month siege.
Michaux-Perreaux steam velocipede
Pierre Michaux's son Ernest is credited by L. J. K. Setright and David Burgess-Wise as having first fitted the Perreaux patented engine to the velocipede, while Charles M. Falco says it was Louis-Guillaume Perreaux. The Michaux-Perreaux machine was constructed using the first commercially successful pedal bicycle, a boneshaker which Michaux had been building over 400 of annually since 1863, and the single cylinder alcohol fueled Perreaux engine, which used twin flexible leather belt drives to the rear wheel. A steam pressure gauge was mounted in the rider's view above the front wheel, and steam to the cylinder was engaged and regulated with a hand control. The base Michaux velocipede came with a spoon brake but the steam version had no brakes. The engine weighed , and the total weight of the steam velocipede was . A 14 June 1871 addition to Perreaux's patent included the removal of the cranks and pedals from the front wheel, and using an arched instead of straight downtube to allow space for the engine. Although the steam velocipede was functional, it did not have any commercial successors. 
Only one example of the original 1867–1871 machine was ever made, but by 1884, Perreaux exhibited a tricycle version of his steam velocipede, with two rear wheels and the belt driving the front wheel, at the Industrial Exhibition on the Champs-Élysées, Paris. The alcohol-fueled engine had a similar bore and stroke to the original, and developed a steam pressure of 3½ atm (250 kPa) in its boiler, resulting in a speed of . The water tanks were sufficient for two to three hours of operation, resulting in a range of . 
"Years for the Michaux-Perreaux and Roper machines noted, if given."
Berdan rifle
The Berdan rifle ("винтовка Бердана"/"vintovka Berdana" in Russian) is a Russian rifle created by the American firearms expert and inventor Hiram Berdan in 1868. It was standard issue in the Russian army from 1870 to 1891, when it was replaced by the Mosin–Nagant rifle. It was widely used in Russia as a hunting weapon, and sporting variants, including shotguns, were produced until the mid-1930s.
Mitrailleuse
The 13 mm centerfire Reffye mitrailleuse cartridges were loaded into interchangeable steel breech blocks, unlike the Montigny mitrailleuse, whose ammunition was held by the cartridge base in plates. When firing the mitrailleuse, three breech blocks were kept in continuous use: one being fired, one being pressed down on the extractor and one being loaded from a single pre-packaged 25-round box. Adjusting the elevation of the mitrailleuse in accordance to the distance to the designated target was performed with an elevating screw identical to that on a regular artillery piece. The mitrailleuse's barrel could also be moved sideways while firing, to the right and left, in order to adjust for range and provide lateral sweeping fire if needed. The lateral sweep was narrow, however, thus most effective at far distances only. The weapon's field of fire was so narrow that Prussian soldiers were often hit by several bullets at once. During an early engagement of the Franco-Prussian War, at Forbach in Alsace on August 6, 1870, a Prussian general officer (General Bruno von François) was brought down by a very closely spaced volley of four bullets. According to the Prussian regimental record, those four mitrailleuse bullets had been fired from 600 meters away. French artillery attempted to rectify this problem by developing special ammunition capable of firing three bullets from the same cartridge for short-range point-defence.
Franco-Prussian War
The French breech-loading rifle, the Chassepot, had a far longer range than the German needle gun; compared to . The French also had an early machine-gun type weapon, the mitrailleuse, which could fire its thirty-seven barrels at a range of around . It was developed in such secrecy that little training with the weapon had occurred, leaving French gunners with no experience; the gun was treated like artillery and in this role it was ineffective. Worse still, once the small number of soldiers who had been trained how to use the new weapon became casualties, there were no replacements who knew how to operate the mitrailleuse.
Multiple-barrel firearm
The Gatling gun is one of the best-known early rapid-fire spring loaded, hand cranked weapons and a forerunner of the modern machine gun and rotary cannon. Invented by Richard Gatling, it saw occasional use by the Union forces during the American Civil War in the 1860s, which was the first time it was employed in combat. Later, it was used again in numerous military conflicts, such as the Boshin War, the Anglo-Zulu War, and the assault on San Juan Hill during the Spanish–American War. It was also used by the Pennsylvania militia in episodes of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, specifically in Pittsburgh.
Microwave
The first powerful sources of microwaves were invented at the beginning of World War 2: the klystron tube by Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford University in 1937, and the cavity magnetron tube by John Randall and Harry Boot at Birmingham University, UK in 1940. Britain's 1940 decision to share its microwave technology with the US (the Tizard Mission) significantly influenced the outcome of the war. The MIT Radiation Laboratory established secretly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940 to research radar, produced much of the theoretical knowledge necessary to use microwaves. By 1943, 10 centimeter (3 GHz) radar was in use on British and American warplanes. The first microwave relay systems were developed by the Allied military near the end of the war and used for secure battlefield communication networks in the European theater.
Marcello Malpighi
See Timeline of microscope technology for more information.
Although a Dutch spectacle maker created the compound lens and inserted it in a microscope around the turn of the 17th century, and Galileo had applied the principle of the compound lens to the making of his microscope patented in 1609, its possibilities as a microscope had remained unexploited for half a century, until Robert Hooke improved the instrument. Following this, Marcello Malpighi, Hooke, and two other early investigators associated with the Royal Society, Nehemiah Grew and Antoine van Leeuwenhoek were fortunate to have a virtually untried tool in their hands as they began their investigations.
British military rifles
The "Lee" comes from James Paris Lee (1831–1904), a Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor who designed an easy-to-operate turnbolt and a high-capacity box magazine to work with it. The box magazine, either Lee or Mannlicher designed, proved superior in combat to the Kropatschek-style tube magazine used by the French in their Lebel rifle, or the Krag–Jørgensen rotary magazine used in the first US bolt-action rifle (M1892). The initial Lee magazine was a straight stack, eight-round box, which was superseded by the staggered, ten-round box in later versions, in each case more than were accommodated by Mannlicher box magazine designs. The "Metford" comes from William Ellis Metford (1824–1899), an English engineer who was instrumental in perfecting the .303 calibre jacketed bullet and rifling to accommodate the smaller diameter.
Aiming point
Before the First World War the French introduced the collimateur. During that war the British introduced their first parallescope, which was a horizontal mirror placed a few feet from the gun; the layer aimed his sight at its reflection. In the 1950s the parallescope was replaced by the prism parallescope that was more robust and easily positioned. In the 1970s the US introduced a modern version of the French device and called it a collimator. In the same period infra-red beacons had some very limited use.
Aileron
There are still conflicting claims today over who first invented the aileron. Other 19th century engineers and scientists, including Charles Renard, Alphonse Pénaud, and Louis Mouillard, had described similar flight control surfaces, possibly serving as further inspiration to Boulton aside from Count d'Esterno. Another technique for lateral flight control, wing warping, was also described or experimented with by several people including Jean-Marie Le Bris, John Montgomery, Clement Ader, Edson Gallaudet, D.D. Wells, and Hugo Mattullath. Aviation historian C.H. Gibbs-Smith wrote that the aileron was "...one of the most remarkable inventions... of aeronautical history, which was immediately lost sight of".
François Mireur
François Mireur (February 5, 1770 – July 9, 1798) was a French general who is notable for having sung the war song for the Army of the Rhine, "La Marseillaise" in 1792 when he volunteered for the newly created republican army. He later served under Napoleon Bonaparte and was killed in Egypt in 1798.
Lee–Metford
Small numbers of Lee–Metford rifles were built as, or converted to, experimental semi-automatic loading systems, such as the British Howell and South African Reider and the best-known of which was the Charlton Automatic Rifle, designed by a New Zealander, Philip Charlton in 1941 to act as a substitute for the Bren and Lewis gun light machine guns which were in chronically short supply at the time. During the Second World War, the majority of New Zealand's land forces were deployed in North Africa. When Japan entered the war in 1941, New Zealand found itself lacking the light machine guns that would be required for local defence should Japan choose to invade, and so the New Zealand Government funded the development of self-loading conversions for the Lee–Metford rifle. The end result was the Charlton Automatic Rifle (based on the obsolete MLE), which was issued to Home Guard units in NZ from 1942. Over 1,500 conversions were made, including a handful by the Australian firm Electrolux using Lithgow SMLE Mk III* rifles.
Jean-Baptiste Verchère de Reffye
De Reffye developed in 1866 the Reffye mitrailleuse (named "Canon à balles"), one of the best early machine guns, which was used during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It was based on the earlier Belgian Montigny mitrailleuse of 1863.
Reffye 75 mm cannon
De Reffye also developed in 1866 a mitrailleuse (named "Canon à balles"), one of the best early machine guns, which was used during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Merrill carbine
The Merrill carbine was a breechloader firearm designed by Baltimore, Maryland gunsmith and inventor James H. Merrill. It was one of several firearms either manufactured or altered by Merrill in fulfillment of contracts with the Union government during the U.S. Civil War.
Matthew Piers Watt Boulton
Matthew Piers Watt Boulton (22 September 1820 – 30 June 1894), also published under the pseudonym M. P. W. Bolton, was a British classicist, elected member of the UK's Metaphysical Society, an amateur scientist and an inventor, best known for his invention of the aileron, a primary aeronautical flight control device. He patented the aileron in 1868, some 36 years before it was first employed in manned flight by Robert Esnault-Pelterie in 1904.
Ugo Cerletti
Away from his medical work, Cerletti is credited with introducing the idea of white uniforms for alpine troops in order to reduce visibility during the First World War. He also invented artillery missiles with delayed-action fuses. These were used by the Italian and French armies in order to create mine fields between enemy positions.
Louis-Guillaume Perreaux
Perreaux moved to Paris, where he began working on and patenting a range of inventions including a multi-chambered gun, a lock mechanism in 1841, a circular power saw in 1843 and scientific instruments such as the Perreaux Dividing Machine, invented in 1846, which could precisely calibrate the divisions on a glass thermometer using a screw driven micrometer with a chisel attachment or accurately measure the distance between two points to within a micron (one thousandth of a millimeter).