GUNS: Everything You Need to Know (Special)

human history is littered with fantastic and wonderful inventions that have gone on to revolutionize the world we live in and change the lives of everyone within it for the better the car the computer the compass the list is absolutely endless but there is one world shaping invention with a much more buried Legacy in the right hands it has ended the Spree of many mad criminal fed countless families and cut short the reins of many a tyrants but in the wrong hands it has ended the lives of many millions on the battlefield driven innumerable species into Extinction and perpetrated no end of genocides we're talking of course about the gun an invention with a solitary purpose to kill and yet despite its checkered history the gun is an icon of Fascination few inventions of ricocheted through history quite like it and equally if your inventions have been nearly as long lasting to understand the gun is to understand Humanity in its design you will find the latest and greatest Industrial Technologies of any period in its development you will find politicking both grandiose and humble and in its development and use you find find the Zeitgeist of society So today we're gonna begin unraveling this complicated story by giving you dear viewer a concise overview of the complete history of the gun from its earliest Origins to the present day so let's dally no further and get straight into it because well it's going to be a long one and if you like deep Dives like this let me know in the comments let me know if you have any other suggestions for here on Mega projects and uh maybe we'll just make those let's get cracking foreign [Music] [Music] how and when gunpowder was invented as the historical references needed to be absolutely sure simply haven't survived it is however possible to be reasonably certain that it was an ancient Chinese invention as for a great many centuries gunpowder or substances suspected to be gunpowder are referenced exclusively by the Chinese most Scholars agree that it emerged in the second Century A.D as in 142 A.D weibo Yang the father of alchemy referenced a mixture of three powders that would fly and dance violently in his Canton Chi a Taoist text on the subject of alchemy Bo Yang did not specify the chemical composition of this powder so it is impossible to be certain what he was actually referring to but as few chemical explosives other than gunpowder employ a mix of three substances this is generally assumed To Be A Primitive form of gunpowder convert references to gunpowder appear in the 9th Century A.D firstly with an 880 reference in Tai Shang shenzhou jinju and secondly with the mid-century reference in the Gen 1 these texts finally give us a chemical formula with the former text giving it as a combination of six part sulfur to six part salt beta to one part Bert wart herb Recreations of this formula have confirmed that it is indeed gunpowder albeit a form lacking the explosive potential of formulas that would emerge later on now it's generally assumed that this early gunpowder was not employed as an explosive weapon and instead remained primarily a pyrotechnic device used for aesthetic and entertainment purposes in a manner similar to Modern fireworks this assumption is primarily based on the aforementioned lack of explosive potential of those early powders and the descriptions of those early alchemic Pioneers such as weibo Yang eventually however the military applications gunpowder became rather apparent and slowly but surely Chinese innovators began to turn it into a weapon of War this process is assumed to have begun sometime around the 11th century as in 1044 A.D Wu jing jong Yao a Chinese compendium of all matters military was written and in it can be found a catalog of many early Chinese gunpowder weapons some practical such as smoke bombs fire arrows and grenades and some less practical such as the Divine flying fire Crow an aerodynamic winged rocket bomb note however that as much as the Wu jing jong Yao is our earliest surviving source for these early gunpowder weapons the weaponization of gunpowder is assumed to have begun much earlier as the array of Weaponry described is far too broad-ranging and well developed to have been the effort of just a single innovator now for our purposes today what we're most interested in from this text is the Primitive gun the so-called fire Lance called the ho Jiang in Chinese early farlancers spread throughout China in the 10th and 12th Century A.D and consisted of a tube usually bamboo containing gunpowder and a slow match strapped to a spear or other pole on weapon once ignited the gunpowder tube would eject a stream of flames in the direction of the spearhead initially these early fire Lancers were employed as a shock weapon used to reduce the morale of an enemy combatant before the operator engaged in melee combat these bamboo fire lances soon evolved and eventually became a lethal weapon in their own right the bamboo Barrel was replaced with a metal one making it significantly more durable and able to withstand a higher chamber pressure and Advantage Chinese innovators made full use of by increasing the salt beater content of their gunpowder mixtures to increase the force of the blast they then added projectiles typically either shards of pottery or iron pellets upon firing the gunpowder propellant ejected the projectiles along with the flame making it the lethal weapon that they needed the spearhead was also later discarded as strategists began to defend solely on the Range damage of the weapon eventually the far Lance evolved so much that it required a new name to reflect its changes and it was called the hand Cannon the date of the hand cannons emergencies something that's hotly contested with some claiming that the weapon appears on the 1128 AED Dazzle Rock carvings and thus the weapon must have emerged at about that time others point out that this depiction is likely just enough Quirk as the weapon depicted would have been far too heavy for a single soldier to handle as depicted and furthermore the first confirmed use of violances never mind more advanced hand cannons in combat was only four years later at the 1132 Siege of Diane further eliwood chengui the commander of the well-equipped Defenders have opted to use file answers if hand cannons had been apparently available now what is known for certain is that hand cannons were in widespread Chinese use by the late 13th century with their first confirmed use in combat being during the putting down of the Rebellion by the Mongol Prince 9 in 1287 they also appear a year later in 1288 when gun soldiers or Chong Zhu are described as carrying hand cannons slung on their backs the late 13th century is also the period of the oldest extinct gun that being the Xanadu gun this gun which is 34.7 centimeters in length and weighs 6.21 kilograms fortunately proves remarkably easy to date 1298 courtesy of an inscription which not only contains the era name and date but also a serial number of manufacturing information suggesting that gun production was already standardized and systemized by that date so the late 13th century is also the time when guns started to spread out of China first it spread to Mongolia as confirmed by the nihong koku jogushi a 1300 dated text which describes the use of hand cannons by Mongolian Juan Dynasty troops during both their 1274 and 1281 invasions of Japan the Japanese appear to have promptly adopted the hand Cannon for themselves following the invasion with Japanese guns being referenced in the hachim and godolkan of 1360 and tahiki of 1370. guns appear to have reached the rest of Asia slightly later than they reached Japan and Mongolia sources for the Indian subcontinent are pretty sparse but evidence dates the beginning of gun and Canon production to sometime around the mid-14th century career appears to have first come into contact with guns in 1372 and started production of its own examples in 1377. it would appear as though guns reached South Asia later still with the earlier surviving references to the use of guns in Anam dating to 1390 when they were employed in the killing of Champa king chi bonga later still was Java which had its first encounter with guns during Zhang hee's 1413 Voyage the island the origin of the gun in the Middle East and the Islamic world even harder to pinpoint San al-arama a Syrian Arab chemist and engineer during the mamluk sultanate described his own use and experimentation with fire lancers and it is widely assumed that these were initially imported over the Silk Road rather than developed indigenously what is not known is if later hand cannons were initially imported from China in a similar manner or whether they were refined indigenously whatever it was hand cannons called midfa in Arabic were in reasonably widespread use across the Islamic World by the early to mid 14th century with their use by the nazrid military in their besieging of elsha being described in 3031. the Moors first employed them at the siege of algiserus in 1343 in limited numbers although little evidence detailing their production methods remains fortunately the spread of the gun is somewhat easier to trace throughout Europe although it is still impossible to say for certain how the technology she was first introduced to the continent guns appear to have first emerged in the second quarter of the 14th century with their first use in combat being in 1331 when two mounted German Knights are described as having used hand cannons in combat European guns of this age are exceedingly rare among archaeological finds which would suggest that they were very much in their infancy but guns appear to have exploded a popularity in Europe throughout this period becoming firmly cemented into European militaries by the mid to late 14th centuries famously guns played a prominent role in the 1346 Battle of Cressi with accounts of the battle discussing everything from small caliber hand cannons to large boar cannons and bombards and even organ guns later medieval wallyguns with many small caliber arm barrels set up in parallel on a carriage or platform [Music] with the hands cannon in widespread circulation across much of the world by the close of the 14th century it soldiered on as the world's gun of choice for a century or so when it then evolved into something more recognizable as a gun today the aquabus an aqua bus is typically defined as a late medieval and Renaissance period shoulder-fired Man portable smoothbore firearm away the stock resembling that of a rifle and a barrel diameter of less than half an inch this definition is not perfect though as it misses a bit of nuance but it does serve the purpose for our video today it's also worth noting that the transition from hand cannons to the Arca bus was not an overnight one the process was long and slow with small incremental changes that eventually built up until it was a completely different weapon it got along a barrel for accuracy it got a stock so it could be better aimed and so on and so forth but rather than wasting precious time on these more mundane and self-evident changes this video is already long enough letters instead focus on the one really important thing that changed here and that's the ignition system hand cannons were typically operated by holding it in one hand and lowering a slow burning match into a touch hole to ignite the gunpowder this system was far from perfect as it was very clumsy so this was is replaced by something more refined the match lock system this was a system in which a slow burning match is held in a clamp at the end of a small curved lever called a serpentine the pulling of the lever or trigger in later models lowered the burning match into the flashpan which was pre-loaded with gunpowder this gunpowder then ignited and burned down through a small touch hole which in turn ignited the main powder charge in the breach of the gun the trigger itself I would typically be spring-loaded or held under some type of tension allowing the process to be repeated again once the firearm had been reloaded this was a game changer and with it in place the aquabus took the familiar form that we all know it by today it was not perfect however as with its sub half-inch board amateur the archibus was often found lacking in stopping power particularly against heavily armored opponents and so archibuses began being made with greater board amateurs to shoot bigger projectiles eventually a new term appeared to describe these bigger board Aqua buses muskets by the mid to late 16th century the aquabus itself would fall out of favor and the bigger heavier musket would remain the go-to gun of the world for centuries to come the next major Evolution would be yet again with ignition system as well the match log was certainly Leaps and Bounds ahead of what came before it was still a system that had very major flaws the match would often be completely extinguished in the rain rendering the gun completely inoperable and needless to say having a lit match around gunpowder was an idea that was neither big nor particularly clever what was needed was a system that could generate its own ignition Source on demand and the solution was found in that which mankind has been using to start fires for Millennia Flint which replaced the lip match in the new Flintlock system the flintlock system holds a piece of flint in a set of drawers mounted on the end of a hammer to fire the hammer is pulled back by the operator where it is then retained by Spring tensioning pulling the trigger then disengages the Seer retaining the hammer at which point it swings forward striking the Flint into a piece of metal called a prison this in turn creates a small spark which ignites a preload of powder below his in the flashpan which then as with the match lock before it travels through a small touch hole to ignite the main powder charge and discharge the firearm unfortunately with Flintlock we're beginning to get to the period in history in which invention was better documented so we have more of an idea of when and how it emerged as compared to previously discussed systems so the initial Pioneer of the idea of using a piece of flint to generate ignition has unfortunately been lost to time but what we do at least know is who was the first to take this idea and create a practical and viable system from it when I was Frenchman Marion La Bourget who created the flintlock system that we know today sometime between 1610 and 1615. his primary Innovation which finally made Flintlock systems verbal was the creation of a half cocked mechanism in which the firearm could be loaded but kept safe as a second earlier set seer helberhammer in a position that if released would not have enough velocity to create a spark when struck against the prison the advantages of his system were pretty obvious to everybody the Flint blocks could be reloaded roughly twice as fast as match logs which typically were made safe by removing the match altogether during reloading and they were more weather resistant when compared to match locks not only due to the emission of the lit match altogether but also through the use of the prison as a lid to keep the priming powder dry and with such advantages it is hardly surprising that the flintlock slowly diffused across the world and became the most common ignition system over the course of the next hundred years or so until it itself would be superseded by another significant Leap Forward in ignition systems in the early 19th century the cap lock it's worth noting however that the choices in ignition systems were not limited solely to match lock and Flintlock in the pre-industrial erasers as other systems such as the wheel lock which span a spring-loaded steel wheel against a piece of pyrite to generate Sparks and ignite gunpowder in a pan existed but as these systems either didn't catch on or were just used on extremely high-end weapons we're not going to dwell on them too much as I've already said this video videos already extremely long [Music] now no centuries saw as great a leap in Firearms technology as the 19th century at the start of the century the slow and cumbersome Flintlock was King and by the close of the century we had machine guns and automatic pistols technologies that have stayed fundamentally unchanged and remain in use to this very day the century of innovation would be kick-started by a revolutionary new invention that would transform ignition systems the percussion cap the percussion cap and the cap lock firing system that employed it completely replaced the flintlock system its advantages were vast whereas Flintlock and matchlock Firearms before them had been largely at the mercy of the weather with the former being unable to keep its slow burning match lit in the rain and the latter having difficulties creating a spark with an overly wet prison the car block had no such difficulties and could reliably fire in any weather this was a complete Game Changer but before we dive into the history of the percussion cap let's take a moment to talk about out what one actually is for simply a percussion Gap is a small cylinder of typically brass or copper which is open on one end and sealed on the other inside the cylinder is a modest amount of shock sensitive explosive material this cap is then placed on a hollow metal protrusion over the breach of the Firearms Barrel which in turn sits underneath a hammer this then strikes the percussion cap when the trigger is pulled igniting it and tending a spark down through the hollow protrusion into the breach igniting the main powder charge and firing a weapon the percussion cap was invented in 1807 in Scotland when Reverend Alexander John Forsyth first patented the design Reverend Forsyth actually had no military applications in mind when he first created his invention he simply wanted more effective firearm for hunting foul he had noticed time and time again that whilst hunting with Flintlock arms the short puff of smoke and Fizz of powder that preceded his weapons discharge often startled the birds that he was hunting his invention was intended to Simply make discharge more expedient and deprive the birds he wished to eat for his dinner of their half a second warning but under announced him it completely revolutionized Firearms all together I am sorry Lord I took a while for this invention to fully catch on partly because Reverend Forsyth was exceedingly protective of his patent which hampered further experimentation until it expired but also because innovation in Firearms was being majorly hampered by an ongoing little event called the Napoleonic Wars now this might initially sound a bit contradictory because as historian ajp Taylor famously pointed out War has always been the mother of invention but in this particular War the senior command of the British Military and more importantly the British treasury I was far more interested in continuing to pump out venerable designs such as the British land pattern musket rather than taking the time to reinvent the wheel while Napoleon was glaring at them menacingly from across the Channel with the resolution of the bolionic wars and the expiry of Forsyth patterns in the early 19th century however it didn't take long for the entire world's militaries to take a very keen interest in the percussion cap and its obvious military applications the first military cat blocks were initially converted from other Flint logs gunsmiths typically modified them by removing the prison and prison spring cutting away the pan changing the to a percussion hammer and drilling out the original vent hole to install a drum a protruding hole was then installed in the side of the drum to complete the conversion sometimes the drum was a simple round piece other times it was given more flamboyant designs this typical method of conversion could be seen on this 1798 dated British land pattern musket and as you can tell all in all it was a pretty seamless conversion other methods of conversion also existed with a relatively common alternative method being cutting the top half off of the flintlock cap the section that contained the Jaws for holding flint and Forge welding a hammer in its place this method was typically considered a bit crude and unrefined and generally was not favored by any but the most tight fisted of Shooters an even rarer and cruder still conversion method involved simply welding steel into the flintlock's jaws and jury rigging a seat for the percussion cap eventually however these old converted designs began to reach the end of their service lives and typhus to militaries the world over finally made the effort to build dedicated cap lock firearms from the ground up examples include the British pattern 1853 Enfield and the American Springfield model 1855. note this transition to ground-up cap lock Firearms also coincided with multiple other inventions that were also incorporated into their designs such as early bullets but don't worry we're going to get to all of that in good time foreign guns date back almost as far as the gun itself after all it is basic logic to assume that the utility of a gun can only be improved by increasing the amount of metal coming out of the business end of it and therefore how many people it could kill until the 19th century however the technology to make effective fast firing weapons on a large scale just did not exist and it wasn't until the Advent of many small and incremental improvements in arms design in the aforementioned Century that reliable and dependable fast-firing guns really came into being that did not dissuade ever optimistic innovators from trying however at earlier history is littered with many interesting bursts ultimately failed attempts to produce a pastor firing gun now there is a purpose to studying these technological dead ends Beyond pure intellectual curiosity by taking the time to look at these failed fast-firing Firearms we remind ourselves that technological Evolution much like biological evolution is not a clear-cut process upwards every idea that succeeded had to fight to prove its viability and was built upon a mountain of failures that preceded it it's a vital thing to understand if we're to have a thorough understanding of the evolution of firearms which this video intends to do now one such early attempt it was the puckle gun designed in 1718 by James puckle this puckle gun was a manually operated Flintlock revolving Cannon its firing mechanism was similar to that of a conventional flintlock musket after each shot a crank on the rear of the threaded shaft that ran through the cylinder would be turned allowing the cylinder to be rotated by hand to the next chamber rotating the cylinder would cause a slot and stud mechanism to close the firing pan on the previous chamber and open the next ready to be primed the crank was then screwed tight again locking the tapered end of the chamber into the barrel to form a gas tie seal the plinlock mechanism was then primed and the weapon fired by operating a long trigger lever which extended down to about the level of the operator's waist to reload the crank handle could be unscrewed completely to detach the cylinder or which could then be replaced with a fresh one the Pocket Gun achieved an average of nine rounds per minute during testing a decent for such an early attempt but despite this seeming success in the design the pokugun was a commercial failure and today is little more than a curious footnote in the history of firearms the problem in a nutshell was that despite being seemingly revolutionary on paper it was something of a piece of in reality I mean sure it was theoretically capable of a decent rate of fire for the time of around nine rounds per minute but it was slow to reload unreliable and required absolute Precision to operate correctly and look no one was buying what James puckle was selling and so his gun was a Monumental flop our next failed fast firing firearm the Ferguson rifle represents an interesting deviation from the pokugun whereas the pokugun failed because it was crap the Ferguson rifle was actually a phenomenal and revolutionary weapon but it failed because of Politics the Ferguson rifle was the first breach loading rifle to be adopted by the British military it operated through use of a clever screw breach mechanism in which one full 360 degree rotation of the trigger guard would drop a portion of the breach and expose the chamber for easy reloading clever as still the breach was shaped to be exactly the right shape for one 615-inch British carbine ball and the appropriate amount of powder and closing the breech would push away any excess powder where it could then be pushed into the powder pan without the need for further fiddling with the powder flask it was a phenomenal weapon for the period capable of making six to eight accurate shots a minute with little risk of excessive powder fouling thanks to clever Innovations by its inventor major Patrick Ferguson the merits of the rifle were immediately obvious and after witnessing a demonstration of the rifle's capabilities in 1776 King George III personally sponsored its further development and ordered the major Ferguson be sent to the 13 colonies with 200 the rifles to assess his capabilities on a real Battlefield where it did really really well accounts from the 1777 Battle of Brandywine Creek described Ferguson's 200 Riflemen are simply cutting through the Enemy Lines like a knife through butter unfortunately definitely for major Ferguson however certain conservative strategists in the British military particularly Sir Henry Clinton objected greatly to this upstart officer using his patronage from the King to push his wacky new ideas when traditional line infantry tactics had been serving the military just five centuries thank you very much accordingly Clinton seized the opportunity to disband Ferguson's unit whilst he was away from the front line recovering from a shattered arm and against his wishes Ferguson was posted to the 71st Regiment of foot upon his recovery where he was subsequently killed at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780 and with him died his rifle's main Advocate and well it was subsequently just buried and forgotten thus the Ferguson rifle proved that the evolution of firearms is not dictated solely by the inherent merits of the weapon but also by the politics and prejudices of society and hierarchies into which it might be born now look we could easily easily dedicate a whole video to these evolutionary dead ends but alas said already this video is already really long so now that we've explored two key forms of failure via the pucker gun and the Ferguson rifle let us close this chapter with just a really quick fire of other failed attempts at producing faster firing firearms that are while being less archetypal are still pertinent first up Colt's new model revolving rifle this was an answer to a question that shouldn't have been asked Colt's new model revolving rifle was the consequence of Samuel Colt noticing the success of his handheld revolvers and simply scaling up the design to produce a rifle produced from 1855 to 1863. the rifle was a commercial failure on account of its tendency to chain fire and blow itself up and the fact that the gaps in its Chambers had a nasty habit of venting scorching hot gas directly onto the forearm of the operator not nice next up the guy caught 40 shot chain pistol which was developed by Henry geinart and Pauling gay in 1879. the guy caught chamber still contained 40 separate Chambers internally linked on a chain pulling the trigger would crank this chain forward one notch and fire a unique 6.5 millimeter caseless round from the chamber this gave the operator 40m shots lined up and ready to go before the pistol had to be stripped and have its 40 Chambers reloaded it was a commercial failure however due to the sporadic availability of its unique 6.5 millimeter caseless rounds as well as the inconvenience of having to strip the pistol and reloaded and the fact that its modest size round was deemed as lacking stopping power next up there's the volcanic pistol which was originally produced from 1855 to 1856 and it was an attempt to circumvent the limitations of traditional muzzle loaded pistols and early revolvers with a lever action pistol fed from a tubular magazine that fired proprietary caseless ammunition this seemed like a sound idea but the sporadic and expensive supply of its unique ammunition as well as the difficulty of operating a lever action on such a short weapon and made the pistol a commercial failure thank you the next big innovation of the 90s entry was smokeless powder smokeless powder was an improved formula for gunpowder that had a number of benefits over the black powder that had dominated Warfare and remains all would unchanged for centuries prior the improvements of smokeless powder were abruptly apparent first it burnt significantly more cleanly than old-fashioned black powder and so produced significantly less smoke and fouling went fire leading to easier and less frequent cleaning regimes secondly smokeless powder has significantly more explosive energy than black powder and extra power is released when the powder is ignited resulting in a higher chamber pressure and consequently projectiles that travel further and faster as a nice bonus smokeless powder emerged concurrently with improvements in Metallurgy meaning that stronger breaches to contain this heightened chamber pressure could be made without particularly increasing the weight of the weapon over its black powder equivalents the real ramification of smokeless powder have a was not these immediate benefits but the new innovations that would be facilitated by it following its invention in 1884 by Paul villier a French chemist the world now a powder that made self-loading and automatic Firearms viable because it had more power to better operate actuating mechanisms and wouldn't render an action quickly and operable due to fouling they didn't take the industrious victorians long to recognize these new potential benefits and sure enough in the Years following the invention and proliferation of the smokeless powder practical machine gun self-loading pistols and automatic rifles would begin appearing in their droves now that we know about 19th century improvements in powder let's take some time to have a look at the improvements in the projectiles that the aforementioned powder was partnered with oh now at first it might seem odd that it has taken us this long in today's video to focus on the humble bullet as strictly speaking anything which is propelled out of the muzzle of a firearm with the intention of ruining somebody's day is a bullet making the bullet as old as the firearm itself this is absolutely true but the 19th century is the period in which bullets began to evolve into the familiar form that we know them today and in addition they changed little before the 19th century and have changed little since the end of the 19th century so well this seems like the most appropriate place to discuss them at the start of the 19th century the bullet oh is quite the crude and primitive thing with their most advanced form being the paper cartridge in which the powder the projectile and possibly some kind of lubricant were all held together by paper which was then sealed with beeswax lard or Tallow the logic behind this design was simple enough keep everything together in one package and the operator then saves time on having to load them all individually this system worked great for centuries having been invented as early as 1586 6 but it still had very real limitations limitations that would be overcome in the 19th century we should know that attempted improvements in bullet design were nothing new and since the invention of the gun numerous habits had been made to improve them but for the purposes of this video we don't need to dwell on them too extensively a notable early Pioneer in the 19th century was Captain John Norton of the British army who In 1832 designed a bullet with a hollow base made from Lotus piths that upon firing expanded Under Pressure to engage with the Barrel's rifling another example of early British Innovation was The Greener bullet of 1836 which fitted the hollow base of an oval bullet with a wooden plugs that more reliably forced the base of the bullet to expand and catch the rifling both of these rounds were technically successful but as we've learned an innovation being good on paper does not guarantee its success in the Cutthroat world of firearms the former failed because the British military found it inconceivable that some newfangled bullet would be of any use when the venerable Basic Ground ball had served them well for 300 years thank you very much and the latter failed due to its cost it was made of two whole pieces I mean imagine the expense some nations were a bit more Forward Thinking than the older UK however so if we want to look at examples of successful Innovation we need to take a short trip over the channel and have a look at France which not only innovated in this period but actually embraced change Ori Gustav Delvin a French military officer invented a breach with abrupt shoulders on which a spherical bullet was rammed down until it caught the rifling grooves in 1826. this method however was pretty crude and the deformity it caused the bullet ended up mitigating any advantages gained from having it hug the rifling so tightly undeterred by this early failure he continued to innovate but now focused his attention on changing the bullet itself rather than the firearm that it came out of he soon developed cylindro conical-shaped bullets which proved to be far more accurate than the humble ball of old this in turn was further refined by Francois tamisier who added grooves which moved the resistance of air behind the center of gravity of the bullet further increasing accuracy Delvin and mercy has improvements but we're not revolutionary by themselves but they were certainly a good start the true Revolution though that would come in 1847 when French military officer Claude Etienne mini invented the mini ball a solyndroconoidal bullet with grease-filled grooves on its exterior and a conical concavity in its base Minier designed the bullet with a small iron plug and Lead skirting that would expand under the pressure of a gunpowder detonation causing the bullet to obturate and grip the rifling groups this maximized muzzle velocity by creating a good bullet to bore seal which minimized pressure loss to visualize this change all we have to do is look at this mini ball here clearly bullets were becoming something more reminiscent of what we would recognize today and this design was widely adopted too with the French British and American militaries to name just a few quickly taking it on but the bullet still had some way to go because while the projectile itself was evolving quite nicely the cartridge just wasn't at this time the integrated cartridge was King a design which contained inject all the powder and the percussion cap derived primer all in a single housing for the bullet to take the form that we know it today these improvements in bullet shape would have to be combined with an effective metallic cartridge and that came in 1845 when Louis Nicola flauber another Frenchman created the first viable metallic cartridge for his range of indoor parlor pistols this was a Rimfire design which is to say a cartridge in which the primer is contained in an extended rim on the cartridge and is ignited by the crushing of the aforementioned Rim this basic principle would undergo further refinement over the following years and eventually Centerfire designs in which the primer was placed in the base of the cartridge rather than the rim even started to appear then finally with the Innovations in both bullet shape and cartridge construction combined the world had its modern bullets which proliferated across the world in the mid-19th century with the British adopting the early boxer metallic Center par cartridge in 1867 and all of the world's major militaries also adopting the technology around that same time the final evolution that we need to be aware of came in 1886 when France adopted its eight millimeter LaBelle round which was the first round to combine the aforementioned Innovations with the copper jacketed bullet what we would call full metal jacket rounds today which consisted of a soft core usually LED encased in an outer shell or jacket of harder metal this allowed High muzzle velocities and also prevented damage to bores from hard steel or armor-piercing core materials this was the bullet's final form and they've essentially remain unchanged to this very day this final form of bullet proliferated quickly and over the coming years all of the world's militaries adopted some variety of this design with the Germans adopting the 7 by 57 millimeter Mauser in 1892 the British adopting the 303 rimmed in 1889 and the Americans adopting the 3006 Springfield in 1906. foreign can be an ambiguous term but typically it refers to any firearm that has a rifled bore a bartstock is operated with two hands and is chambered for a caliber no larger than 20 millimeters rifling itself refers to a system of two or more spiraling grooves that run along the length of a Firearms Barrel which engrave into the projectile being fired and so Force the projectile to spin as it travels out of the barrel thereby making it significantly more accurate examples of this firearm type include the big such as the Lati l3920 millimeter anti-tank rifle the small such as the 22 M4 Survival Rifle the old such as the Patton 1800 infantry rifle and the new such as the L8 5a3 given this great diversity in rifles particularly in their age it may seem odd that we've chosen to condense them all into a single section here so let me explain why we're doing that before we go on a little further rifles and rifling are nothing new and we can trace the history back to the 15th century when Gaspard colnera Viennese gunsmen began adding rifling to his previously smoothbore Firearms a rifled Firearms remained exceptionally rare for most of their history their manufacture was lengthy and expensive and their rifling was prone to getting clogged by powder fouling and oh what's more they were exceptionally difficult to load if the bullet was not sized correctly for these reasons rifles typically remained The Preserve of the rich and the well-to-do classes as hunting rifles for most of history and it wasn't until the 19th century the technology advanced sufficiently enough to make their production cheap enough to be variable for widespread use and that is the reason that we've condensed them into this section several rifling machines were invented in the mid-19th century that helped make rifles cheaper and more accessible one was invented by Francois Jules Manco a French gunsmith in the employer French president and later King Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1852 and another example is that invented by Charles William Lancaster a British gunsmith in the employee of the royal Arsenal in 1850. the military applications of this expedent reliable and cheap rifling technology were obvious and the mid-19th century consequently saw a mad scramble from all of the world's major powers to adopt a standard issue rifle as quickly as possible for example the United Kingdom adopted the Pat in 1853 Enfield in 1853 France adopted the pattern 1851 rifle in 1851 and the U.S adopted the Springfield model 1855 and wait for it 1855. now you might have noticed that the aforementioned rifles look remarkably similar to their smooth ball 4Runners and indeed this is one of those times that we can in fact judge a book by its cover this first generation of service rifles was essentially just the old designs and Concepts hastily retrofitted with rifling to facilitate prompt production and adoption but there is an exception to this trend Prussia was significantly ahead of the curve when it came to Modern rifles and in 1841 adopted the dracer needle gun a breach loading bolt action single shot rifle to call this rifle revolutionary would be an understatement this was a period in history when most major Powers were still using some form of musket and Prussia had adopted a mass-producible rifle capable of making up to 12 aimed shots a minute over great distance shockingly however the world military Elite of the time did not seem to appreciate how great of a revolutionary leap this gun was both the British and French armies evaluated it at the exact same time as it entered Russian service with the British concluding that it was too complicated and delicate for service use in the French concluding that the muzzle loading pattern 1851 was a more effective Battlefield Implement on account of its Simplicity the prussians were underserved however prototype Tracy needle guns had been combat tested during the German Revolutions of 1848 to 1849 to great effect and consequently they knew that they had a winning design eventually however the old guard of the world's militaries with their old and outdated ideas retired and soon enough most of the world's major military Powers were pursuing similar designs with all due haste as fresher more open-minded officers took to Hell France adopted the chair spot its first bolt action rifle in 1866 and the UK adopted the Martini Henry a lever action rifle in 1871 replacing their now very outdated musket derived rifles with rifles that could match the rate of fire of the dracy mule gun now at this point let's take a moment to clarify and explain two new terms that we've just introduced namely bolt action and lever action will start with bolt action a bolt action mechanism combines the firing pin a spring and an extractor in a locking breech block the spring-loaded firing pin slides back and forth inside the bolt which itself rests in the breech block the bolt is moved back and forth and partially rotated in the receiver by a projecting handle one or more lugs at the front or rear of the bolts or at both fits into the slots in the receiver and lock the bolt firmly in place against the base of the cartridge chamber when the rifle is to be fired as the bolt is thrust forward it pushes a cartridge into the chamber and the piece the trigger releases the sprung driven firing pin inside the bolt after firing the extractor on the head of the bolt removes the spent cartridge and ejects it at which point the firing sequence can be repeated a lever action rifle by contrast is operated through the use of a lever mounted on a pivot underneath the rifle this lever operates an inner mechanism which when opened will pull the breech block out of battery ejector spent casing if the rifle has been fired and lift a new round out of the magazine should the rifle happen to be fitted with one closing the lever reverses this cycle closing the breech block and pushing a new round into the chamber ready for firing the breech block moving backward will usually the Hammer as most lever action rifles have their external Hammer positioned in such a position so that it will be pushed back and subsequently be cocked by the moving breech block but the rifles mentioned thus far namely the Prussian Tracy needle rifle British Martini Henry in the French chatbot were all single shot rifles so in between every single shot the operator had to open the breach and manually insert a new route soon however a new type of rifle would emerge on the shoulders of the single shots the repeating rifle capable of repeating discharges between each ammunition reload this was achieved by pairing one of these new actions with a magazine came capable of holding multiple rounds both lever action and bolt action repeating rifles were developed and proved popular but the latter went on to be significantly more widespread becoming the go-to military firearm by the end of the 19th century that's not to say that the repeating lever action was shunned altogether by the world's militaries however as some examples such as the 1860 Henry rifle and Winchester Model 1895 would go on to see limited Military use by the Americans and Russians respectively but their issuing was typically a limited Affair even the British who had adopted the single shot Martini Henry lever action rifle in 1871 would abandon lever action in favor of the bolt action with the adoption of the Lee Medford 1888 bolt action magazines came in several different forms the British favored large 10-round detachable box magazines in their Lee Medford and Lee Enfield repeating rifles the Germans opted for five round magazines initially going for an external Magazine with the Garver 1888 but later going for an internal Magazine with the gather 1898. the Russians adopted a five-round internal Magazine with their Moes in naggard just despite their subtle differences all of these magazine designs were uniform in so much as they opted for a now relatively Orthodox springved magazine directly below the bolt a notable exception to the trend was the French who instead opted for an eight-round internal tubular magazine in their label model 1886. foreign Firearms or semi-automatic Firearms as they're now more commonly known a repeating Firearms whose action automatically loads another round into the chamber and prepares it for subsequent firing without any input from the operator after being discharged but will not continue to fire should the trigger remain depressed such Firearms had long been the dream of designers in their Everlasting pursuit of faster firing Firearms but had long since been completely out of their reach due to the Primitive technology of their periods in the late 19th century however thanks to smokeless powder while they were suddenly very possible to demonstrate just how vital smokeless powder was to the development of self-loading firearms let's look at the Malacca M 1885 designed by Austrian Ferdinand Von Malika in 1885. now it was technically the first self-loading firearm produced in that the mechanism was perfectly functional in ideal conditions but since he used black powder cartridges it was prone to jamming from excessive powder residue and regularly failed to cycle thanks to the low pressure of black powder gases smokeless powder had been invented the year prior of course and when Von Malika Incorporated it into his self-loading designs it worked thus the manliker m1891 was history's first true self-loading rifle top loading pistols would soon follow and the first successful example the Salvador dormas was created by the also Austrian Archduke Carl Salvador in 1891. this was Then followed by shotguns with the first self-loading shotgun the Browning Auto 5 being developed by John Browning in 1898. now given the obvious Leap Forward that self-loading Firearms represented you would probably imagine that the world's militaries scrambled to adopt them with all haste once the technology had proven viable but well actually no the story is quite the opposite in fact and instead the world's militaries dragged their heels significantly the story of why they didn't of course does change from Nation to Nation each has its own motivations and politics driving the decision-making but broadly speaking the delay in adoption was driven by Antiquated military strategists who were stuck in the colonial line infantry mindset said and thus couldn't see the potential of this new weapon type Mexico would actually be the first nation to put a self-loading rifle into service when it adopted the Mondragon m1908 in 1908. they did not adopt it as a service rifle however and instead it was issued only on a limited case-by-case basis this pattern of limited and modest adoption would remain the trend for a while to come France adopted the fusel automatic model 1917 in 1917 but again it was on a limited scale the UK tentatively introduced limited numbers of the farquaha Hill rifle in 1918 but like France was focused on pumping out as many of its tried and tested old bolt action service rifles as possible so production and service remain limited the end of the first world war didn't help the fate of the self-loading rifle much either as now despite being fully aware of their utility cost-conscious governments were far too concerned with peacetime penny pinching to consider a radical new service rifle the exception to this trend was America which adopted the M1 Garand as its service rifle in 1936 and thus was the only nation to have a self-loading service rifle going into World War II limited adoption of newer more advanced self-loaders continued across the world however as the inevitable merits of the technology inevitably won minor victories over bureaucracy and doctrinal Prejudice accordingly Germany adopted limited numbers of the gefair 41 and gather 43 in 1941 and 1943 respectively and the Soviet Union adopted limited numbers of the svt-38 and spt-40 in 1938 and 1940 I really don't need to keep saying this note however the key word there is limited and as stated previously these rifles didn't become the service rifles of their respective Nations such radical Transformations would have to wait until the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War when militaries across the world finally dropped their 19th century designed rifles in favor of newer more advanced designs which will absolutely be getting to later [Music] the 19th century proved to be a revolutionary Century for pistols just as it had been for rifles they started this entry like this crude and clumsy muzzleloaders that took significant time to load were inaccurate on account of generally being smooth bored and were prone to misfire in extreme wet condition thanks to their Flintlock mechanism in stark contrast they ended the century like this still lacking some refinements certainly but mechanically essentially exactly the same as what we still use to this day much of the pistols development in the 19th century was a result of technological innovations that we've already covered so we're not going to waste time going back on them again and we'll just give them a passing mention instead we're going to dedicate the bulk of this section to Innovations specific to pistols the two key aforementioned developments of note are percussion caps and rifle which is previously mentioned both appeared in the early 19th century these two innovations turned the pistol into this a firearm a which could now reliably fire in all weather conditions and far much more accurately to boot but otherwise it was still the crude thing that it had been for centuries capable of only firing a single shot and it had a lengthy reloading time but this refined crudity was not long for the world as the mid-19th century would see the rise of the revolver the first major change to handguns for centuries like most of the 19th century innovations that we've already discussed the robolver was not actually a product of the 19th century per se but rather it was an idea that had existed for many centuries but there was only able to truly come into fruition as a result of the centuries of industrial Innovations the earliest known revolvers are from the 16th century in Germany but these early designs were a far cry from or how we would imagine a modern revolver being crude difficult to use and prohibitively expensive to make and as such they were a little but gimmicks for the well-to-do classes available Forerunner to 19th century revolvers came in the form of pepperbox pistols multi-barreled Firearms which operated a single coaxly revolving mechanism these enjoyed a reasonable degree of commercial and to a lesser extent military success in the late 18th and early 19th century because while they had a significant detriment in the length of time it took to load multiple individual barrels the ability to rapidly fire successive shots proved valuable in many situations true revolvers were invented in 1836 when Samuel Colt patented the first example these early revolvers worked through the use of a ratchet and pull mechanism on it which rotated the cylinder by cocking of the hammer this provided a reliable and repeatable way to index each round and did away with the need to manually rotate the cylinder a quick glance shows that clearly revolvers were starting to slowly take their modern form but they still had a long way to go for starters they were muzzle loading cap locks which required the operator to pour black powder into each individual chamber Ram a bullet down on top of it and then place a percussion cap at the end of each chamber this basic system remained in place for some time with the Colt 1851 Navy revolver of U.S Civil Warframe using this cap and ball system system as it became known the next major innovation in revolvers was the incorporation of self-contained metallic cartridges these significantly increased the speed with which they could be loaded as now everything needed for firing was incorporated into a single handy package it didn't need to be loaded individually the first example of such a revolver was the leper show model 1854. this corresponded with a rise of double action designs first successfully introduced with the British moment Adams revolver in 1856. double action here refers to the pulling of the trigger which in this revolver type performs two or double actions namely both raising and lowering the hammer previously all revolvers had only been single action where depressing the trigger would only lower the hammer but not raise it which had to be done manually with this series of Innovations revolvers were essentially as refined as they would ever be and even to this day revolvers are derivatives of this very formula with more recent Innovations typically only being small refinements and quirks in their design and operation with revolvers perfected the next step of the handguns development was the self-loading pistol a repeating single chambered handgun that automatically Cycles itself to eject a spent cartridge and subsequently insert a new one into the chamber now we've already mentioned these in passing already of course but let's dedicate a little bit of time to them now top loading pistols were a significantly later development than revolvers and did not begin to emerge until the 1880s they were developed in the wake of early machine guns as they proved the viability of recoil operated mechanisms and now all they had to do was shrink it down and apply it on a much smaller scale several early self-loading pistols emerged in the 1890s with the first being the Austrian Salvatore Dormers pistol which was first patented on the 11th of July 1891. this was followed shortly by the also Austrian Schoenberger larman 1892 which was patented on the 25th of November 1891. now contrary to what you might First Imagine these early self-loading pistols did not exactly take the World by storm and both were in fact total commercial failures no storm at all being they were completely rejected by the Australian military and failed to secure any commercial interest at all only 50. Salvador dormises and 39 Schoenberg allowments were manufactured before they were abandoned by their inventors the first successful design would come a few short years later with the German borchart c93 which was designed in 1893 and released commercially in 1894. this clever design borrowed heavily from the maxim guns toggle lock system and also Incorporated a locking mechanism external from the pistol which actuated upwards in a manner supposedly modeled after the motion of the human knee while cycling notably it also fed from a cutting-edge detachable box magazine which would eventually become the standard magazine design for all self-loading pistols the c93 was a modest success commercially only selling around 3000 or so examples but it was a success nonetheless and it proved the viability of self-loading pistols to the world the world's militaries naturally took notice of this and many adopted self-loading pistols of their own in the coming years Germany itself became the first nation to adopt a self-loading service pistol as following the success of the c93 it began procuring the Mauser c96 in enormous quantities from 1896. other examples to be adopted include the JC model 1907 of the Australian Army the fnm 1900 of the Belgian Army the Webley self-loading pistol of the British army the Ruby pistol of the French Army and the Beretta model 1915 of the Italian Army note however that the widespread adoption of the self-loading pistol did not spell the end of the revolver which persevered on for a very very long time even as itself loading usurper became the norm for example Germany continued to issue ITS m 1879 or ice revolver in limited quantities throughout world war one to supplement its stocks of self-loading pistols Russia and plate of the Soviet Union kept the Nagant M 1895 revolver as its primary sidearm until the adoption of the TT pistol in 30. the UK in particular as it is often to do dragged its heels on modernization particularly hard and kept various patterns of the Webley revolvers in inventory until the 1980s with the aforementioned Webley self-loading pistol only being issued in limited numbers and later the Browning high power being slowly adopted from 1935. the outbreak of the first world war marks the end of the bolt action rifle as the in Vogue weapon of many of the world's militaries by 1914 the bolt action rifle had become a fantastically refined and deadly Battlefield Implement for sure capable of accurate deadly far outer ranges that would have been unimaginable a century prior up to 600 yards when being fired from the shoulder or route to 3 000 yards when being fired on mass in volleys but these rifles time in the spotlight was coming to an end their hyper-long ranges which had their roots in the demands of line infantry tactics from the 18th and 19th centuries when soldiers theoretically stood neatly across from each other in straight lines and took pot shots at each other demanded every yard of extra range that could be gotten out of a rifle but this was no longer how wars were fought combatants in the first world war were getting closer and closer to one another with engagement ranges in this conflict typically being anywhere from 100 to 300 yards it didn't take long for the military strategy to solve the period to recognize this fact and soon enough a shorter range but passed a firing weapon began to be demanded initially this demand was met by machine pistols pistols that could far fully automatically with self-loading pistols now relatively common among the world's militaries it proved easy to Simply de-restrict pistols already in inventory give them a bigger magazine maybe a stock for good measure and then push them into service to fill this need for a short range faster firing weapon the Austrian repetier pistol m1912p16 is typically cited as the first such example of this being a pistol that was originally designed in 1912 and updated for automatic firing in 1916. it used a 16-round fixed magazine loaded via 8 Round stripperclips and a new detachable shoulder stock for extra accuracy now most accounts suggest that machine pistols were competent enough little things that served their purpose well and were generally well liked by troops equipped with them particularly Italian arditi and German stormtroop and shock troops who employed them to great effect but they were only ever stop Gap measures and consequently throughout the war an effort was made by many nations to create a dedicated pistol caliber fully automatic weapon specifically for the type of up close and personal Warfare that had become so prevalent in the first world war those efforts were finally rewarded with the coming of the German MP18 the world's first true submachine gun in 1918 and the only submachine gun proven to have been used on the battlefield in World War one it was quite a simple thing by modern standards it had operated from a basic open bolt design in which its bolt and the associated working parts were held to the rear of the weapon by assyr linked to the trigger to pressing the trigger lowered the Seer which pushed the bolt forward under spring pressure where it would then pass the magazine pick up around and fire it at the end of the bolt throw when a fixed firing pin would hit the primer of the cartridge pressure from the recall of the firing would then throw the ball backward at which point it would either lock back onto the Seer if the trigger was not depressed or repeat the cycle all over again if it was despite the relatively simple nature of the mp18's operating mechanism it was actually a fantastically lavish weapon with no expense spared on its production its receiver was milled from a single Billet of high carbon steel all of its metal work was expertly machined and finished finished its stock was a single piece of Highly polished hardwood and it had a host of extra features not critical to the operation of the gun such as a perforated Barrel jacket needless to say other submachine guns soon followed in the wake of the MP18 Italy had the Beretta m1918 and ovp 1918 and America had the Thompson these early submachine guns followed the exact same formula as the mp-18 highly expensive and very well engineered the Submachine gun's popularity would only continue to grow as time went on but the approach to their design would change rapidly production pressure before and during World War II created a need for simpler submachine guns that could be churned out at a faster rate and from this pressure the second generation of pressed steel or otherwise erratically simplified submachine guns was born with examples being the British sten gun the Soviet PPS and the American M3 grease gun this then gave way to a third generation of submachine guns after World War II when designers could take their time and really think about their designs and incorporate new Innovations as well as production methods into their designs rather than simply trying to make a mass producible metal tube that went bang examples from this generation would include the Heckler and MP5 and if you compare that to the MP40 its second generation 4Runner the difference is night and day the MP5 is Select far it incorporates polymer construction onto its design the MP40 by comparison was a metal tube that goes bang bang [Music] defined as a sub loading gun chambered for a rifle cartridge and primarily intended for automatic fire from a bipod or Mount machine guns were nothing short of a revolution in Firearms design as they gave an individual operator a level of lethality and Firepower that would have been The Preserve of fantasy only years prior the term machine gun itself can be divided up into several more specific categories to better reflect the vast variation and diversity of designs and specifications that can be found in machine guns with the first being light machine guns a light machine gun is what you would probably imagine as the typical machine gun such as a pqm or Bren gun also called manned portable machine guns or handheld machine guns this category refers to fully automatic rifled weapons which deliver a significantly greater volume of fire than self-loading and manually operated rifles while using the same rifle caliber cartridges such as 7.62 by 54 millimeter r or 303 caliber in this instance light does not refer to specific weight per se but rather the ability of the machine gun to be carried and operated by a single individual in contrast heavy machine guns also referred to as crew portable or crew operator machine guns are machine guns which deliver a similar volume of far from the same rifle caliber cartridges as light machine guns but in a platform heavy enough to not be realistically transportable or operable by a single individual consequently heavy machine guns are typically intended to be fired from fixed positions as an extra note owing to their lack of portability heavy machine guns are also typically belt fed as to better increase their volume of fire and do note however not all heavy machine guns do have to be belt-fed and not all light machine guns are magazine fed with there being plenty of exceptions for both such as the RPD or Soviet design light machine gun fed from a belt and the Hotchkiss m1930 a frenched side heavy machine gun that is fed by a magazine also of notes are the subcategories of Auto cannons and submachine guns the former simply refers to a heavy machine gun with a barrel diameter in excess of 20 millimeters typically found on aircraft and armored vehicles and the latter well we already covered them now as we discussed earlier in today's video The Challenge of creating a fast firing weapon was not something new to the 19th century indeed it appears to have been a desire as old as the gun itself the 14th century hulon Jing manuscript describes a chinese-developed man portable and multi-barreled farlands also ottoman gunsmith through the Renaissance in early modern period created multi-barreled artillery pieces and then in the early 18th century navies across the world were using multi-barreled volley guns to sweep the decks of enemy vessels before boarding the logic was simple and it isn't difficult to see why the idea of a faster firing firearm was such an aspirational thing to those early gunsmiths if one bullet makes one enemy combat and fall over lots of bullets is gonna make lots of them fall over but these early attempts were crude things with their potential severely being limited by the Nas and Technology of their day and although they were often times useful these technological limitations typically often gave these weapons major drawbacks and severely restricted their use in combat 18th century polygons for example were great for rapidly clearing the deck of an enemy ship but that volume of fire came from multiple barrels Each of which needed to be loaded individually or which the operator absolutely did not have time to do in combat so you were getting off one volley and then you were discarding it for the remainder of the battle now as we've already seen when technological progress absolutely exploded in the 19th century the sophistication in Firearms exploded alongside it and slowly throughout that Century mankind began to loom ever closer to a truly practical truly useful rapid-firing weapon in 1861 Richard Jordan Gatling invented his namesake the gatlinger this was a fascinating design as it exploited ever advancing manufacturing techniques to essentially get around the fact that reciprocating bolts had yet to be invented its operation was centered around a multi-barrel system which cycled around a common shaft and had for the time Advanced synchronized fire and reload sequences which fart ejected and reloaded cartridges perfectly in time as the multiple barrels were rotated by a hand crank this system proved to be a fantastic Innovation and the galing gun could sustain a rate of fire of 200 rounds per minute which was incredibly fast for the period although designed purely to facilitate faster firing this rotating barrel system also had the unexpected bonus of allowing the barrels to cool down between firing thus allowing more sustained firing now make no mistake the Gatling gun was a huge leap forward in Firearms technology but a machine gun it was not this was down to its method of operation it was hand cranked and since it was operated manually it strictly speaking was not automatic thus it was not considered to be a true machine gun the first true machine gun came in the 18 80s with the maximum gun the first prototype of which was completed in 1884. the Real Genius of the Maxim gun was in its recoil operated firing system which used The Recoil energy of a discharged round to drive the breech block rearwards ejecting the spent cartridge and chambering the next round a process that would be repeated so long as the trigger remained depressed thus creating an automatic sequence of fire this completely eliminated the hand-operated mechanism at the aforementioned Gatman gun and others such as the mitral use and Gardener guns this Innovation also gave a significantly higher rate of fire than its contemporaries of 600 rounds per minute as the rate of fire was now no longer dictated by how fast the operator can move their arm but rather how quickly recoil can drive a breech block back which it turns out is really fast the max have gun proved rather popular to say the least and following its introduction more or less every major and minor military on Earth scrambled to either purchase or the gun for themselves with a list of eventual operators of the Maxim gun truly being too large to expediently cover here the maxim and later equivalent guns such as the French Hotchkiss model 1914 and the Italian Fiat ravali Modelo 1914 became the gold standard machine guns until 1914 when the outbreak of World War One with its rapid and fast-paced nature made the need apparent for a newer and lighter classification of machine gun one that could be carried and fired by a single operator the aforementioned light machine gun particular Nations and designers had actually had this idea significantly earlier than World War one with a notable National example being Denmark who adopted the Madsen machine gun all the way back in 1902. prior to World War One however the overwhelming Orthodoxy of the day was firmly against such designs and notably designed such as the 1911 Lewis gun had a real issue securing customers prior to the onset of the war but eventually the harsh realizations regarding the nature of Modern Warfare ensured that demand for such designs was absolutely insatiable this first wave of light machine guns proved to be significantly more diverse than its heavier older brother and rather than the dominance of one particular design accompanied by a few quirky indigenous exceptions to the rule a multitude of different designs appeared as the whole globe scrambled to secure their own light machine guns there is of course the aforementioned Danish Madsen gun which oh went on to see huge Commercial Success worldwide and the Lewis gun which despite his initial sales issue also went on to see worldwide Commercial Success other designs of this first wave included the American b1918 Browning automatic rifle the French and the German Bergman mg-15na machine gun the interwar development of machine gun saw a refinement of the heavy and light dichotomy that existed at the close World War one with conflict over Nations across the world took the time to go back to the drawing board and either refine or completely replace their first world war period machine guns the United Kingdom dropped the Lewis guns in favor of the more advanced check zb26 derived Bren gun and further improved its Maxim derived Vicar's gun the Soviet Union then introduced the year of machine gun and further refined its PM 9010 Maxim gun France replaced its shorehouse in favor of the FM 2429 and Hotchkiss m1922 machine guns while it further refined its Hotchkiss m1914 heavy machine gun in Japan further refined its type 3 heavy machine gun and introduced the type 11 and type 99 light machine guns this was not limited to large military Powers either Czechoslovakia despite having only been founded in 1918 got straight on board with this trend and promptly introduced the zb26 and zb53 light and heavy machine guns there was an exception to this trend however a single nation that in the interwar period looked at the light and heavy machine gun dichotomy and saw an alternative approach and that nation was Germany which looked at the mg-13 light machine gun and the mg08 heavy machine gun and wondered if it was possible to produce a machine gun that could fill both roles and as it turns out it totally was and thus the general purpose machine gun concept was born the mg34 in 1934. the mg34 was a fantastic firearm it was an air-cooled belt-fed recoil operated Man portable machine gun which fired 7.92 by 57 millimeter rounds at a rate of roughly 850 rounds per minute little expense was spared in its production being made almost entirely from milled and machined steel and built to exceptionally high standards but what we're really interested in here is how it could be adapted for both use as a light and a heavy machine gun this was achieved primarily through its use of a Laffer tripod to which could be mounted sophisticated Optics and it kept the mg34 stable on the ground during prolonged firing secondary to this was the mg34s barrel which could be changed exceptionally quickly only a few seconds and therefore eliminated the need for a heavy and clunky water cool barrel system for sustained firing the result was a machine that really could do basically everything the concept was refined still further with the introduction of the mg42 in 1942 the mg42 was a simple vacation and a refinement of the earlier mg34 idea which heavily Incorporated stamped manufacturing into its design to halve its production time and upped its rate of fire to around 1200 rounds per minute but other than that it followed the exact same principles of universality as the mg34 with quick barrel change capability and a heavy tripod to adapt it for prolonged sustained firing both the mg-34 and mg42 caught the attention of the world Germany had been defeated in World War II of course but one thing that was not up for debate was the brutal efficiency of its machine gun Doctrine and thus in the early Cold War World basically all of the world's militaries rushed to incorporate the general purpose machine gun into their own Doctrine the mg-42 itself proved sufficiently impressive that it would live on long after the end of World War II Pakistan Yugoslavia West Germany Norway Croatia Israel Somalia and Algeria all used either wartime Surplus stock or newly produced mg42s in their post-war militaries a number of nations also modernized and further refined the mg-42 post-war West Germany produced the mg3 from 1959. this was an mg-42 rechambered for a 7.62 by 51 millimeter Nato round which it still uses to this day Austria produced the mg74 from 1974 and mg-42 also re-chambered for the Nato round but with a reduced rate of fire which it still also uses to this day Switzerland produced the mg7103 from 1965 a modernized version of the very late war mg45 and Switzerland also still uses this gun today other nations did not directly copy the mg-42 but instead simply copied parts of it into their own designs with examples being the American M60 machine gun the belt feed mechanism of which is an exact copy of the mg42 and the Belgian FN mags the trigger mechanism of which is almost a direct copy of the mg-42s and whose beltfeed system was inspired by it but ultimately impressive though this post-war proliferation of the mg42 is what proved to be much more prolific than the mg42 itself was its design concept this idea of a general purpose machine gun would become the new go-to solution for infantry machine guns and soon enough Every Nation on Earth would come to incorporate it into their Doctrine one way or another the aforementioned Belgium FN mag would have become the gpmg of choice for over a hundred Nations including but not limited to Argentina and Chile Chad and Ghana Kuwait and Iraq Jamaica in the U.S India and Sri Lanka as well as the UK and Slovenia the Soviet Union went on to develop the PK machine gun which went to be extensively employed by both the Soviet Union its satellite states and their various successor States including but not limited to Armenia Azerbaijan Rwanda and Sierra Leone North Korea and Vietnam as well as Cuba and Fiji as worth noting that not every general purpose machine gun to emerge during the Cold War was a hugely exported multinational effort and plenty of Nations have produced interesting indigenous variations of the concept that they have largely kept themselves these examples include the South Korean Daewoo Precision Industries K3 the French AA 52 and the Chinese is qjy 88 tall intents and purposes the general purpose machine gun concept remained the go-to machine gun solution to this day but just complicate things there are some exceptions to this rule that we should pay heed to if we wish to have a fully developed understanding which we absolutely do want for starters is a heavy machine gun which was supplemented but not killed by the general purpose machine gun with the best will in the world a true general purpose machine gun is an impossibility the demands of the battlefield are simply too diverse and unpredictable for there to ever be a machine gun that can do everything and consequently the heavy machine gun has lived on in roles that demand a bit more Firepower and where a lack of Mobility is not necessarily a problem such as mounted on vehicles or as an emplacement gun for example American empty brownings can still be found on the roofs of Abram tanks and Humvees as well as on the decks of U.S Navy vessels the Soviet dshk disappeared from its infantry carriages but still saw widespread application on vehicles being found on the roofs of t-55 and t-72s used by the Soviet Union their allies and various success Estates it has also continued to be used as a fixed-place gun notably during the iran-iraq war and during the ongoing Russia Ukrainian War not only did the heavy machine gun not die but neither did the light machine gun although noticeably in terms of Doctrine the light machine gun went through something of a Renaissance As the general purpose machine gun concept began to proliferate across the world's militaries and need remained for something lighter and altogether handier something which only required a single operator but that fired the same cartridge often from the same magazine as the standard infantry rifle but was capable of a greater volume of far than a typical infantry rifle and thus the squad automatic weapon or light support weapon was born the logic is pretty sound having a section or Squad level Gunner firing the same round as their rifle firing counterparts reduces logistical concerns on the Strategic level and having it far from the same magazines as the standard infantry rifle means that ammunition can be shared around the unit during particularly difficult engagements examples of squad automatic weapons include the Belgian FN Mini-Me which although primarily belt fed can be fed from magazines as and when the situation requirements demanded which has been used by before 45 Nations including Brazil and the United States senegala Mali Norway and the UK as well as Thailand and Nepal another particularly prolific example is the Soviet rbk oh which has seen service not just with the Soviet Union and its current and satellite States but across the post-soviet world and developing World a particularly interesting example is the British l86 LSW this particular example being interesting on account of how much of a heap of crap it was but alas we don't have time to go into this today for those that are interested with direct Q2 our video on the sa80 platform for more on that one and with that the story of the machine gun is finished and we have just one more type of weapon to examine today and that's the assault rifle foreign ly the definition of assault rifle can be quite the controversial thing so before we dive into the history this is our definition for today it's a rifle capable of being discharged in both self-loading single shot and automatic firing modes at the behest of the operator that fires a shortened intermediate-sized rifle cartridge so the assault rifle was the consequence of the evolving nature of warfare this had been noted in the first world war that firefights typically occurred surprisingly short ranges and as a result the submachine gun had been developed this was a great Innovation certainly but for the Germans in the second world war it wasn't quite enough and was still found wanting under their Doctrine the machine gun did the heavy lifting in a firefight and consequently rifles and submachine guns only really existed to keep the machine gun crew alive this was great up until when the aforementioned inventory had to move and suddenly that heavy-hitting machine gun was unable to provide any far while repositioning leaving the combatants signif efficiently vulnerable for a short time consequently they sought a new weapon type one that gave their troops currently carrying Rivals and submachine guns a bit more far apar during these vulnerable moments their solution was the stern Giver 44. the rifle that could do it all they could match the volume of fire of a machine gun with a rate of fire of five to six hundred rounds per minute it could be used at longer distances as a single shot self-loading rifle and be switched to automatic fire when the fight got up close and personal its magazine was able to be changed quickly when a higher volume of fire was needed it even used a proprietary cartridge which kept the same size bullet head as the traditional 7.92 by 57 millimeter but used a significantly shorter cartridge because that much power simply wasn't necessary at typical engagement ranges the strongerver 44 which was introduced in 1944 arrived far too late in the war to change Germany's favors strategically but on the smaller tactical level its results were simply devastating one of the first units to have their old rifles fully replaced with storm cover 44s are reported that the weapon revolutionized their Mobility on the battlefield because whereas before they would have to repeatedly move and wait as their lumbering machine guns caught up with them now they didn't they were able to continually push advances keep on moving and make significantly more progress during firefights because now their Firepower wasn't significantly reduced whenever their full-size machine guns were on the move with a success story such as this you might imagine that the rest of the assault rifle story is a simple one given the fact that the whole world now uses them clearly the entire world saw how great they were and immediately adopted them right after World War II right well and for the Communist blog yeah kinda the Soviet Union adopted the AK-47 in 1949 they weren't originally entirely trusting in the assault rifle concept although they certainly acknowledged its Merit so they saw the AK-47 as a meaty submachine gun with Soviet squads also being equipped with self-loading SKS rifles the idea being that they would then have the necessary tools for both long and close range engagements eventually however the SKS are found to be unnecessary and was largely dropped leaving the AK-47 and its Offspring which were more than adequate for most Battlefield situations as the Soviet service rifle and a later that of the entire communist Bloc when they followed in the USSR steps for the Catalyst World things didn't quite go like that in the west there was significant resistance to the assault rifle concept and instead battle rifles such as the M14 FAL and G3 which fired full-sized rifle cartridges but otherwise functioned as assault rifles or invoke Instead This was the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the stronger 44 by much of the West's military Elite who found it to be unreliable and prone to Breaking during post-war testing and rather than attributing it to the rush design of the gun and the fact that early adopted technology always has some Kinks to work out they instead attributed the blame to the very concept of an assault rifle and consequently scorned it much of this pressure came from the American suit military Elite post-world War II was largely in favor of keeping full-length rifle cartridges and use NATO drives for military standardization to force this choice on unwilling allies eventually however wisdom did Prevail and after Decades of lumbering around unnecessarily large and heavy rifles firing unnecessarily large and heavy rounds that punched out to Rangers simply not needed on 99 of the modern Battlefield these battle rifles began to be phased out in favor of true assault rifles America ironically the nation that forced battle rifles on the western world was the first one to jump ship on the idea phasing out at 10 14s in favor of M16s in 1967. France soon followed suit and phased out its mas-49 in favor of the Famas in 1978 the UK phased out its l1a1 SLR in favor of the sa-80 family of weapons in 1985 and Germany finally phased out the G3 in favor of the G36 in 1997. foreign purposes Firearms technology has all but stagnated since the end of World War II the firearms that proliferate around the world today are essentially just refinements of Technology's principles and ideas which have already existed for decades if not centuries in some cases take a brand new shiny FN mag machine gun fresh from the factory is it really that different from one of hero Maxim's early Maxim guns now to a point sure yeah it's a bit different but also no not really equally take a brand new and shiny Heckler and MP7 is it really much different to its great Granddad the MP18 I mean sure it's got an improved bullet design it fires from a closed bolt and there's some fancy weight saving polymer materials rather than good old wooden steel but in core terms no it's not that different the bass idea and base principles behind it are all things that have existed for over a century now but while in many ways Firearms have stagnated this hasn't stopped some in the Firearms world from dreaming big and envisioning another revolution in gun design these attempts have largely been unsuccessful but nonetheless they represent a very important part of firearms history so now let us dedicate some time to looking at some ways in which people have attempted to revolutionize Firearms design in recent history one such recent Innovation is caseless ammunition this strictly speaking is not a new innovation because if you recall we have already discussed caseless ammunition in the 19th century such as the rocketball but this ammunition was a commercial failure at the time and for all intents and purposes it disappeared late in the 19th century A Century of progress brought fresh interest in the concept however and in the late 20th century multiple attempts were made to revive the concept with the most famous example being the German Hector and G11 and its proprietary 4.73 by 33 millimeter caseless cartridge the theory behind this was simple enough the cartridge is essentially dead weight that every Soldier has to carry it serves no purpose but to contain a bullet's propellant and when a fully loaded Soldier is carrying potentially hundreds of them it can add up to a surprising amount eliminating the cartridge altogether would therefore reduce the carrying load of a soldier making them more Nimble and effective on the battlefield and as a bonus it would ease the logistical strain of bullets because they could now be made smaller take up less space and therefore take up less vehicles in transport now this sounds like a brilliant idea and yet if you look at this photo of some bundesver signal troops you will notice that they are not holding g11s or in fact any rifle even vaguely reminiscent of it instead they're holding Heckler and g36s much more conventional rifles that would not be too unfamiliar to their stormgiver 44 wielding forerunners in the beer marked the G11 and in fact its entire concept proved to be a dead end and despite the concept showing such promise and potential the caseless ammunition concept has now been all but defeated in the marketplace of ideas and lays dead and dormant but why certainly it's not because the G11 was an objectively bad rifle by any stretch or that the idea of caseless ammunition itself was intrinsically flawed as by all available data the G11 appears to have been quite the competent little package the 4.73 by 33 millimeter caseless round developed by Dynamite Noble chemical and weapons company based in troisdorf in Germany used the propellant chemicals to form a solid block surrounding the bullet this succeeded in greatly lightening the weight of ammunition and as a bone has increased the rate of fire since no energy had to be wasted operating an ejection mechanism this ammunition always paired up with a gas operated rotating breach action controlled by a recall buffer system and it could fire in single shot fully automatic 540 rounds per minute or shoot a so-called hyper burst of three rounds at a cyclic rate of 2100 rounds per minute the G11 also Incorporated a series of Innovations to improve its operation for example in the aforementioned hyper Burst Mode The g11's Recoil buffer prevented a strong recoil impulse from the three rounds greatly improving accuracy over normal for lotto fire the buffer essentially stored the recall until after the third bullet left the barrel making it surprisingly Acura has given its monstrous rate of fire all of this compounded to create a rifle that was more accurate more efficient and potentially more deadly than any rifle of its time so to come back to the original question why did this seemingly incredible rifle fail in a word Politics as we have already seen in this video the commercial success of a firearm is not solely linked to the objective merits of it as it should be in a sane World instead oh so often the adoption or failure of a prospective military firearm is decided by the subjective whims of politicians and it is these fickle and malevolent creatures who brought the hammer down on the G11 the development of the G11 it began in the late 1960s either 1967 or 1968 depending on who you ask when NATO launched the idea of adopting a second standard small caliber ammunition three perspective competitors were then shortlisted one American another Belgium and finally what would become the German G11 the NATO interest never went anywhere and none of the designs were chosen to go forward for further development but the initial German proposal aroused the interest of the West German government who commissioned deal iwka Mauser and Heckler and cockta developed the concept further giving them complete freedom and development the Hecker and team reviewed their options and promptly decided that the only way to get a significant improvement over existing arms designs was a complete top to bottom redesign of the very concept of an assault rifle thus the G11 slowly began to take shape over the ensuing decades in 1968 an advanced optic was settled on in 1970 a top fed magazine was decided on in 1973 the design of the caseless ammunition was finalized and so on and so forth until the rifle eventually took shape the web war was first field tested in 1976 and what began was a very long and drawn-out back and forth between Heckler and NATO and the German government as the rifle was never outright rejected but continually sent back with further suggestions for improvement because of this drawn out back and forth the G11 had plenty of time to become a very refined and sophisticated firearm and by the closing years of the Cold War all appeared ready for it to finally secure a contract for serial manufacturing and to revolutionize the world of firearms but this contract never came due to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 funding for the G11 completely dried up in 1990. and with that all hope of ever securing a contract died and the G11 was formally canceled that same year now we chose to discuss the G11 today for the exact same reason that we chose to discuss the Ferguson rifle earlier in the video because it is incredibly important to remember that the evolution of firearms is not dictated solely by the Merit of the weapons the fate of firearms and particularly state-produced Firearms is often not governed by a simple battle in the marketplace of ideas but instead is dictated by the subjective values of geopolitics and individual human opinion as a secondary Point analysis of the G11 and its failure also serves to prove our earlier recession that Firearms technology has largely stagnated since the end of World War II with grand world-changing Revolutions in design now largely being a thing of the past and with recent developments instead being much more humble evolutions and refinements have long established ideas and Designs another such attempt at revolutionizing firearm design came from the Soviet Union and latterly Russia in the form of the an-94 designed in the Years 1980 to 1994 the an-94 was an ambitious project intended to replace the venerable AK-74 as the standard issue service rifle in the Soviet Union and laterally Russian Federation it was to be a revolution a total top to bottom reimagining of what an assault rifle could be the key Innovation was the an-94s so-called recoil shifted pulse system a system which simply put allows the an-94 to Fire Two Rounds before The Recoil of the first round impact the operator thus allowing two rounds to reliably land at the same point if that does sound a bit confusing don't worry it is and don't worry about how it works just focus on what it does it allows two rounds to be fired at exactly the same point reliably and repeatedly it is a system that works well and is no gimmick soldiers issued with an an-94 certainly rated highly with some sighting the an-94's recoil shifted pulse system doubling the effectiveness of the an-94 compared to the AK-74 now it's unclear exactly what is meant by this I.E does it double the amount of shots landed compared to the AK-74 or double The lethality compared to an AK-74 but regardless of specificity it is a glowing testimony Dr David bulletin of small arms reviews claims that the an-94 is 1.5 times more effective than the American m16a2 on the basis that the hit probability of an an-94 was 1.5 times higher than the aforementioned m16a2 in comparable situations almonds analyst Max popinker claimed that the a-94 is accurate enough for a sufficiently trained operator to leave only one hole on a paper Target at 100 yards when firing a burst for the rifle but despite the quality of the n94 it's a failure it was approved for serial production and accepted into servers by the Russian military in 1997 but was never produced in numbers meaningful enough to equip even a single division of the Russian military much less become its new service rifle and today it serves only as a special purpose weapon used by Special Forces and Elite infantry units in very specific situations so now again the question becomes how did such a quality rifle fail in a nutshell it was too complicated and it was too expensive neither the Russian government nor Kalashnikov who marketed the rifle commercially have been particularly forthcoming in explaining the reasons for the rifle's limited production run but it can be reasonably ascertained from the few sources we do have that it was simply too expensive for the cash-strapped Russian military the Russian military is nothing if not pragmatic and throughout the many modernization drives it has undergone since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has always focused its limited resources on the most dire and in need areas the AK-74 is fine and still serves its purpose perfectly well so the an-94 was pushed to the Wayside in favor of more direly warranted projects furthermore the an-94 appears to be too complicated for its own good however how confusing it was when we just talked about how the thing worked in super basic terms or whatever turns out it was just as complicated for the Russian conscripts who got handed it during training to the point that they couldn't even reliably strip and reassemble it for maintenance so what does the an-94 teach us about the apparent stagnation of modern Firearms technology like the G11 it failed because it was too expensive but unlike the G11 the an-94 also failed specifically because it was too complicated demonstrating that Firearms designers Can Dream as big as they like but their ideas will always be Shackled by the cold and unrelenting pragmatism of reality now before we close it's worth noting that there are significantly more failed attempts to revolutionize Firearms than just the two examples that We examined here today we chose the specifically of how big their designers dreamed which frankly makes for more interesting content there are of course many more humble failed Innovations in contemporary Firearms so for your interest let's take a quick moment to examine a couple more examples some Innovations fail because they're simply complete junk an example of this would be the USFA zip 22 a supposedly revolutionary ballpark polymer pistol that couldn't get through a single magazine without jamming and required the operator to put their hand dangerously close to the muzzle in order to it this one failed because it was then there's the brand 10 a semi-automatic pistol chambered for 10 millimeter Auto that was made by dornhouse and Dixon Enterprises Inc from 1983 to 1986 for a brief period this pistol was the darling of the pistol World reviewers raved over its accuracy its power and its reliability for a brief fleeting moment it appeared as though the world might have another Glock on their hands an upstart that kicks its way into the market shapes up the old order and earns itself a place among the big boys but then dawnhouse and Dixon Enterprises Inc messed up they didn't produce nearly enough pistols to satisfy the initial surge in interest and the few Shooters who could get their hands on one found it impossible to secure a spare magazine and by the time they'd managed to sort out these supply issues well the interest had died off [Music] and so our history our long history of the gun draws to a close although it may not feel like it we really have only covered the tip of the iceberg today each category of firearm that we discussed today has thousands of models that we couldn't possibly fit into the confines of this video and each of them has its own Vision behind its creation its own goals it was intended to achieve its own politics that guided its creation and its own controversies that tried to drag it down so if anything we've discussed today has taken your fancy we wholeheartedly encourage you to go digging for yourselves to see what you can find and well that's what truly makes Firearms a fascinating thing to study not the foul and wicked acts that they can be used for but the surprising microcosm of humanity that is found in their Tales [Music] thank you

Channel: Megaprojects

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Id: GqX2utKCc2w

Length: 91min 20sec (5480 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2023