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Early German musket with serpentine lock. A matchlock or firelock [1] is a historical type of firearm wherein the gunpowder is ignited by a burning piece of flammable cord or twine that is in contact with the gunpowder through a mechanism that the musketeer activates by pulling a lever or trigger with their finger.
A firelock is a firearm in which the priming is ignited by sparks. [3] [4] [5] More specifically, it refers to the mechanism or lock of such firearms. It may also refer to a gun's lock which uses slow match to ignite the powder charge. [6] [7] The matchlock was a lever mechanism that simplified the ergonomics of firing. Slow match would be held ...
By 1645 a matchlock musket cost 10 shillings in Britain compared to 15 shillings for a flintlock musket. However, flintlocks were still much cheaper than wheellocks; in 1631 the Royal Armoury's purchase records show the going rate as 3 pounds (60 shillings) for a pair of wheellock pistols versus 2 pounds (40 shillings) for a pair of flintlock ...
Muskets of the 16th to 19th centuries were accurate enough to hit a target of 50 cm (20 in) in diameter at a distance of 100 m (330 ft). At the same distance, musket bullets could penetrate a steel bib about 4 mm (0.16 in) thick, or a wooden shield about 130 mm (5.1 in) thick. The maximum range of the bullet was 1,100 m (1,200 yd).
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 Habsburg commander in the mid-1560s once referred to muskets as double arquebuses. [18] The matchlock firing mechanism also became a common term for the arquebus after it was added to the ...
A musket was a muzzle-loading smoothbore long gun that was loaded with a round lead ball, but it could also be loaded with shot for hunting. For military purposes, the weapon was loaded with ball, or a mixture of ball with several large shot (called buck and ball ), and had an effective range of about 75–100 m (246–328 ft).
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In 1658, Caspar made a repeating rifle that featured a sliding box-breech and had a capacity of 7 rounds. [17] Harman Barnes also made magazine guns in London, one of his guns used a rectangular sliding breech block with two chambers (and had a capacity of 5), [ 17 ] another used a cylinder breech system (and had a capacity of 6). [ 18 ]