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The Whitworth rifle was an English-made percussion rifle used in the latter half of the 19th century. A single-shot muzzleloader with excellent long-range accuracy for its era, especially when used with a telescopic sight , the Whitworth rifle was widely regarded as the world's first sniper rifle .
The 12-pdr rifle was designed in the early 1850s by British manufacturer Joseph Whitworth, who had recently been contracted to improve the Pattern 1853 Enfield.During his experiments with the Enfield, Whitworth was inspired to begin experimenting with a hexagonally-rifled barrel; Whitworth would later apply these principles to his field guns.
Common rifle cartridges, from the largest .50 BMG to the smallest .22 Long Rifle with a $1 United States dollar bill in the background as a reference point. This is a table of selected pistol/submachine gun and rifle/machine gun cartridges by common name. Data values are the highest found for the cartridge, and might not occur in the same load ...
A rifle is a firearm designed to be fired from the shoulder, with a barrel that has a helical groove or pattern of grooves ("rifling") cut into the barrel walls.The raised areas of the rifling are called "lands," which make contact with the projectile (for small arms usage, called a bullet), imparting spin around an axis corresponding to the orientation of the weapon.
In service, the rifle was sometimes referred to as a mountain gun, though this might stem from a confusion over caliber sizes. [3] From a design standpoint, the weapon was unique. Like all of Whitworth's designs, the weapon had a hexagon-ally rifled barrel. It was also a breechloader, an unusual feature for the time.
Cartridge adapters have also been made to use .38 caliber handgun cartridges with bullet diameters of approximately .357-inch (9.1 mm) in .35 caliber rifles designed for bullets of .358-inch (9.1 mm) diameter. [3] Supplemental chambers in .22 caliber, and potentially .17 caliber as well, pose a special problem not shared by larger calibers.
The gun used polygonal rifling, a principle invented by Whitworth in 1853.The concept was to use the hexagon to impart a very rapid spin to the projectile. The method of manufacturing the rifling was thus described by the Report of the Armstrong & Whitworth Committee of the British War Office (1866):
Originally a 4 Linjers (11.77 mm) caliber derivative of the M1855, this long rifle had hexagonal Whitworth-style rifling. It was fitted either with a simple two-leaf rocking sight (on rifles issued to the rank and file) or with a tangent-leaf on rifles issued to snipers. In total about 8,500 were manufactured between 1860 and 1867, the majority ...