Читать книгу Star-land: Being Talks With Young People About the Wonders of the Heavens онлайн

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And now I must direct your attention to something apparently quite different. When the battle of Waterloo was fought, the great victory was won with the aid of the old-fashioned musket, a smooth-bore gun which was loaded at the muzzle with a good charge of powder, and then a round bullet was rammed down. “Brown Bess,” as the musket was called, was a most efficient weapon at close quarters, and indeed at any distance when the bullet hit; but there was the difficulty. The round bullets, rushing up the tube and out into the air in a somewhat vague manner, had a habit of roaming about, which was quite incompatible with the accurate shooting of our modern rifles.

One great improvement in small arms consisted in giving to the bullet a rapid rotation about an axis which is in the line of fire. This is what the rifle accomplishes. The grooves in the barrel of the rifle twist round, and though they only give half a complete turn in the length of the barrel, yet the speed of the bullet is so great that when it flies off it is actually spinning with the tremendous velocity of about one hundred and fifty revolutions a second. Even with the old-fashioned round bullet, the rifling of the barrel effected great improvement in the accuracy of the shooting. The introduction of the elongated bullets was another great improvement, while the adaptation of breech-loading enabled a bullet to be used rather larger than that which could have been forced down the barrel, and thus it was insured that the grooves should bite into the bullet as it hurries past and impart the necessary spin.