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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 ...
The Kalthoff repeater was a type of repeating firearm that was designed by members of the Kalthoff family around 1630, [1] and became the first repeating firearm to be brought into military service. [2]
The term, however, remained and musket became a generic descriptor for smoothbore gunpowder weapons fired from the shoulder ("shoulder arms") into the mid-19th century. [18] 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 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).
Despite this, it was the British practice to include a new flint in each box of 20 rounds of ammunition for the Brown Bess musket. [7] Contemporary American military manuals suggested a flint could last for around 50 shots, but the American military followed the British practice of supplying soldiers with one flint per 20 rounds.
The Model 1816 musket was originally manufactured at the Springfield and Harpers Ferry armories along with independent contractors between 1816 and 1844. Around 700,000 were made, more than any other flintlock in U.S. history. [4] The Model 1816 was originally manufactured as a flintlock musket.
Diagram of a Springfield Model 1855 Musket's lock mechanism. The small plate with the eagle on it is the cover for the Maynard tape system. Maynard's new system still required the musket's powder and Minié ball to be loaded conventionally into the barrel, but the tape system meant that the percussion cap no longer needed to be manually loaded onto the percussion lock's nipple.