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Hand cannon, Ming dynasty, 1379 The first firearms were invented in China, following the invention of gunpowder.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 first firearms were invented in 10th century China when the man-portable fire lance (a bamboo or metal tube that could shoot ignited gunpowder) was combined with projectiles such as scrap metal, broken porcelain, or darts/arrows. [4] [25] An early depiction of a firearm is a sculpture from a cave in Sichuan, China.
In 1861, Richard Jordan Gatling invented the Gatling gun, the first successful machine gun, capable of firing 200 gunpowder cartridges in a minute. It was fielded by the Union forces during the American Civil War in the 1860s. [88] In 1884, Hiram Maxim invented the Maxim gun, the first single-barreled machine gun. [88]
According to Joseph Needham, fire lances or proto-guns were known to Muslims by the late 13th century and early 14th century. [26] However the term midfa, dated to textual sources from 1342 to 1352, cannot be proven to be true hand-guns or bombards, and contemporary accounts of a metal-barrel cannon in the Islamic world do not occur until 1365 ...
Mounted bronze guns that shot iron-fletched darts were also used in a cart style weapon that was the early hwacha. [84] Firearms seem to have been known in Japan around 1270 as proto-cannon invented in China, which the Japanese called teppō (鉄砲 lit. "iron cannon"). [85]
The use of the bayonet, beginning in the 17th century, allowed soldiers to use muskets as pikes in close combat. The flintlock, invented slightly earlier, made firearms more reliable. Cartridges were also invented around this time, and made existing firearms easier to load. [60] Submarine technology gradually advanced during the 17th and 18th ...
I recently asked a friend how many firearms in his extensive collection were 100% American-made. "Three," he replied. That seems like very few considering that, as of 2023, around 393 million ...
This is a timeline of the history of gunpowder and related topics such as weapons, warfare, and industrial applications. The timeline covers the history of gunpowder from the first hints of its origin as a Taoist alchemical product in China until its replacement by smokeless powder in the late 19th century (from 1884 to the present day).