(The development of conical-shaped shells also began a revolution in artillery as ammunition like the Parrott and James shells allowed for true rifling in cannon, giving the guns longer range and greater accuracy. The bullet was first used by General George B. McClellan. During the Civil War, however, because of the rifle-musket’s accuracy at long ranges, stationary defenders could load and fire quickly The combination of the rifle-musket and minié bullet also made the bayonet nearly obsolete. It eventually became the standard infantry firearm of Europe and America and remained so until the muzzleloading rifle-musket replaced it in the 1850s.What made the smoothbore flintlock musket so dominant an infantry weapon for so long was that it was easy to load; an experienced soldier could load and fire up to four times a minute, a rapid rate of fire for the time. It was also a time of great technological change.

Armed with a Springfield, a competent shooter could hit a 27-inch bull’s-eye at 500 yards, the best performance to date for a standard-issue infantry weapon.

For the first time in history, infantrymen could aim their weapons at a target a fair distance away and actually have a chance of hitting it. A smoothbore’s solid shot could break bones and tear through tissue, but soft lead bullets shattered bone and ripped tissue. In four long years of bloody fighting, half a million of the three million men and boys in blue and gray had been wounded in combat. In the 1870s, doctors urged an international ban on soft-lead bullets, saying they caused the same sort of damage as explosive bullets.The reign of the "king of weapons" did not last long. During Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s bloody campaign against Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the summer of 1864, for example, Union medical directors recorded only 37 bayonet wounds. In earlier years, the bayonet was often the most decisive infantry assault weapon, because the smoothbore flintlock musket’s short range allowed attackers to approach close enough for hand-to-hand fighting. As early as 1818, Captain John Norton of the British 34th Infantry began experimenting with bullet design. The base of the improved bullet expanded just as well as Minié’s but was much easier and cheaper to mass-produce. Weapons of an earlier age, such as the bayonet, became almost obsolete in this new kind of warfare, and the role of cavalry and field artillery was greatly reduced. In effect, they became the forebears of today’s mechanized infantry.Unfortunately, it took most Civil War generals too long to realize that some critical tactics they had learned at West Point or from military manuals were obsolete, particularly the frontal assault. The invention of the minie ball, coupled with the invention of the rifle-musket, allowed for faster shooting and more devastating injuries. Frontal assaults by infantry on a waiting enemy suddenly became suicidal. But in many ways the Civil War rifle-musket was a brand new weapon that boasted the best features of its predecessors. What were some other important inventions that affected the course of the war? In the earliest models, after the chamber was filled with gunpowder, Delvigne rammed a standard soft, round lead ball down the barrel and pounded it against the lip with the ramrod until it flattened just enough to grip the rifling grooves. Adding to the damage, some soldiers notched their bullets to insure they would spread out when they hit their target. The use of flags, bugles and drums to convey information still demanded keeping men close together for command control. However, with the invention of the Minie Ball, the range of rifles, rate of fire, and power were all increased greatly. The result was that the bullet fit more uniformly inside the barrel, producing more reliable and accurate fire.Norton’s bullet with Greener’s refinement eventually came before the British army for approval for use in the field, but the army’s old-school officers rejected it. The Minié ball is a conical bullet with three exterior grease-filled grooves and a conical The precursor to the Minié ball was created in the 1830s by the Wounds inflicted by the conical Minié ball were different from those caused by the round balls from smoothbore muskets, since the conical ball had a higher muzzle velocity and greater One of the more famous documented cases involving Minié ball injuries concerned a Confederate soldier wounded during A type of conical projectile for mid 19th century rifles. The bullet he invented was cylindrical in shape and had a cone on top. He discovered that the base of the blowpipe arrow was made of elastic locus pith. At 1,000 yards, he could even hit an 8-by-8-foot target half of the time. Inventors and military men devised new types of weapons, such as the repeating rifle and the submarine, that forever changed the way that wars were fought. The Minié ball is a conical bullet with three exterior grease-filled grooves and a conical The precursor to the Minié ball was created in the 1830s by the Wounds inflicted by the conical Minié ball were different from those caused by the round balls from smoothbore muskets, since the conical ball had a higher muzzle velocity and greater One of the more famous documented cases involving Minié ball injuries concerned a Confederate soldier wounded during A type of conical projectile for mid 19th century rifles. Rifle bullets, primarily the minié bullet, caused 90 percent of all these casualties. The origin of firearms began with gunpowder and its invention, mostly Civil War culture in America–both North and South–was greatly distinct from life in the antebellum years. (Minie´is properly pronounced min-YAY, but Americans pronounced the name as "Minnie. The bullet he invented was cylindrical in shape and had a cone on top. Two hundred thousand others had been killed.These staggering figures may be less surprising after considering all the macabrely ingenious killing machines taken onto Civil War battlefields–rifled cannon, multi-shot arms, crude machine guns, and repeaters, to name a few.

The flintlocks misfired 922 times (15 percent of the time), while only 36 (0.6 percent) of the percussion weapons misfired.