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The Minié ball, or Minie ball, is a type of hollow-based bullet designed by Claude-Étienne Minié for muzzle-loaded, rifled muskets. Invented in 1846 shortly followed by the Minié rifle , the Minié ball came to prominence during the Crimean War [ 1 ] and the American Civil War where it was found to inflict significantly more serious wounds ...
Claude-Etienne Minié (13 February 1804 – 14 December 1879) was a French military instructor and inventor famous for solving the problem of designing a reliable muzzle-loading rifle by inventing the Minié ball in 1846, and the Minié rifle in 1849. He succeeded the pioneering work of Henri-Gustave Delvigne and Louis-Étienne de Thouvenin.
The Minié rifle was an rifled musket used by the infantry of a number of countries in the mid-19th century. A version was adopted in 1849 following the invention of the Minié ball in 1847 by the French Army captain Claude-Étienne Minié of the Chasseurs d'Orléans and Henri-Gustave Delvigne.
To keep the ball in place once the weapon was loaded, it would be partially wrapped in a small piece of cloth. [61] However, the smaller ball could move within the barrel as the musket was fired, decreasing the accuracy of musket fire [62] (it was complained that it took a man's weight in lead musket balls to kill him). [63]
During the American Civil War, an assortment of small arms found their way onto the battlefield.Though the muzzleloader percussion cap rifled musket was the most numerous weapon, being standard issue for the Union and Confederate armies, many other firearms, ranging from the single-shot breech-loading Sharps and Burnside rifles to the Spencer and the Henry rifles - two of the world's first ...
The cylindro-conoidal bullet is a type of muzzleloading firearm projectile with a convexly cone-like front end ("nose") and a cylindrical rear body, invented by Captain John Norton of the British 34th Regiment in 1832. It had a cavitied base, so when fired, the thin concavity wall ("skirt") would expand outwards and seal up the bore diameter.
The Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle-musket (also known as the Pattern 1853 Enfield, P53 Enfield, and Enfield rifle-musket) was a .577 calibre Minié-type muzzle-loading rifled musket, used by the British Empire from 1853 to 1867; after which many were replaced in service by the cartridge-loaded Snider–Enfield rifle.
The smoothbore barrel and inaccurate round ball were also being replaced by rifled barrels and the newly invented Minié ball. While older muskets had an effective range of about 50 to 100 yards (46–91 m), the Model 1855 had an effective range of 400 yards (370 m) and was deadly to over 1,000 yards (910 m).