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A French blunderbuss, called an espingole, 1760, France Musketoon, blunderbuss and coach gun from the American Civil War era. The flared muzzle is the defining feature of the blunderbuss, differentiating it from large caliber carbines; the distinction between the blunderbuss and the musketoon is less distinct, as musketoons were also used to fire shot, and some had flared barrels.
Self-loaders use energy to reload. The world's first machine gun was the Maxim gun, developed by British inventor Sir Hiram Maxim in 1884. The world's first successful self-loading rifle was the Mondragón rifle, designed in 1908 by Mexican general Manuel Mondragón. It was the first self-loading firearm able to be operated by one person.
Musketoons had a brass or iron barrel, and used a wheellock, flintlock or caplock [1] firing mechanism, like the typical musket of the period. They were fired from the shoulder like the musket, but the shorter length (barrels were as short as a foot (30 cm) long) made them easier to handle for those in restricted conditions, such as mounted infantry and naval boarding parties.
The term, however, remained and musket became a generic descriptor for smoothbore gunpowder weapons fired from the shoulder ("shoulder arms") into the mid-19th century. [18] At least on one occasion musket and arquebus were used interchangeably to refer to the same weapon, [ 19 ] and even referred to as an arquebus musket . [ 20 ]
A pair of early dragons from Poland fitted with the miquelet lock A dragon, found at a battlefield in Cerro Gordo, Veracruz, Mexico. A dragon is a shortened version of blunderbuss, a firearm with a short, large caliber barrel which is flared at the muzzle and frequently throughout the entire bore.
As for the infantry soldier himself, Napoleon primarily equipped his army with the Charleville M1777 Revolutionnaire musket, a product from older designs and models. Used during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the Charleville musket was a .69 calibre, (sometimes .70 or .71) 5-foot-long (1.5 m), muzzle-loading, smoothbore musket.
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The Kalthoff repeater was a type of repeating firearm that was designed by members of the Kalthoff family around 1630, [1] and became the first repeating firearm to be brought into military service. [2]