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The Hughes breech-loading cannon 38.1mm gun was designed in 1861 and used by the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. It was manufactured by the Street & Hungerford Company. It was a breech-loading cannon; the breech of the cannon is uniquely like a bolt-action but has no firing pin in its bolt.
Breech-loading provides the advantage of reduced reloading time because it is far quicker to load the projectile and propellant into the chamber of a gun or cannon than to reach all the way over to the front end to load ammunition and then push them back down a long tube – especially when the projectile fits tightly and the tube has spiral ...
A rifled breech loader (RBL) is an artillery piece which, unlike the smoothbore cannon and rifled muzzle loader which preceded it, has rifling in the barrel and is loaded from the breech at the rear of the gun.
The Williams gun was a Confederate gun that was classified as a 1-lb cannon. It was designed by Captain D.R. Williams, of Covington, Kentucky, who later served as an artillery captain with a battery of his design. It was a breech-loading, rapid-fire cannon that was operated by a hand-crank. The barrel was four feet long and a 1.57-inch caliber ...
The Whitworth, designed by Joseph Whitworth and manufactured in England, was a rare gun during the war but an interesting precursor to modern artillery in that it was loaded from the breech and had exceptional accuracy over great distance. An engineering magazine wrote in 1864 that, "At 1600 yards [1500 m] the Whitworth gun fired 10 shots with ...
Muzzle-loading artillery came in smoothbore and rifled form, the rifled guns increasingly taking over from the smoothbores as time past and technology improved. Most were made of bronze because of a lack of metallurgic technology, but cast and wrought-iron guns were common as well, particularly later on.
Heavy artillery during the Civil War consisted of siege artillery, garrison artillery, and coastal artillery. Siege and garrison artillery were larger versions of field artillery, mounted on heavyweight carriages which allowed them very limited mobility: the M1839 24-pounder smoothbore was the largest one which could still be moved by road.
The 3.2-inch gun M1897 (81 mm), with its predecessors the M1885 and M1890, was the U.S. Army's first steel, rifled, breech loading field gun.It was the Army's primary field artillery piece in the Spanish–American War, Philippine–American War, and Boxer Rebellion from 1898 to 1902.