Chuck Wills et al. - The illustrated history of guns : from first firearms to semiautomatic weapons

Liliput Pistol

Luger with Drum Magazine

Spanish Cannon

Browning High-Powered Pistol

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-557-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-003-7

Printed in China

The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms.

Genghis Khan

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

Ludwig von Mises

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Mao Zedong

Apache

Coehorn Mortar

C ONTENTS

F OREWORD

From the first rock held with intention in the hands of Paleolithic man all the way through to the twenty-first century assault rifle, weapons have been an integral component in human history. Early weapons, however, from that Paleolithic inventor through the first 1200 years AD, were effective primarily in hand-to-hand combat, save for the use of bows and arrows and catapults of various designs. The invention of gunpowder brought radical change in weaponry and warfare. The first documented battlefield use of gunpowder artillery took place on January 28, 1132, when it was used by Song General Han Shizhong to capture a city in Fujian, China. In Europe, the first mention of gunpowder's composition in express terms appeared in Roger Bacon's De nullitate magi at Oxford, published in 1216. Later, in 1248, his Opus Maior describes a recipe for gunpowder and recognized its military use: We can, with saltpeter and other substances, compose artificially a fire that can be launched over long distances... By only using a very small quantity of this material much light can be created accompanied by a horrible fracas. It is possible with it to destroy a town or an army.

The direct ancestor of the gun is the fire lance, a black-powder-filled tube attached to the end of a spear and used as a flamethrower (quite different to the Byzantine flamethrower); shrapnel was sometimes placed in the barrel so that it would explode out together with the flames. The earliest illustration of a gunpowder weapon is the depiction of a fire-lance on a mid-twelfth century silk banner from Dunhuang, China.

Battle-Ax Gun

The proportion of saltpeter in the propellant was increased in due course to maximise its explosive power. To better withstand that explosive power, the paper and bamboo of which fire-lance barrels were originally made came to be replaced by metal. To take full advantage of that increased power, the shrapnel was replaced by projectiles whose size and shape filled the barrel more closelyeffectively the first bullets. With this, we have the three basic features of the gun: a barrel made of metal, high-nitrate gunpowder, and a projectile which totally occludes the muzzle so that the powder charge exerts maximum propellant force, allowing for the projectile to be fired in a roughly targeted direction.

Duckfoot Pistol

The earliest depiction of a gun is a sculpture from a cave in Sichuan, China, dating to the twelfth century, which shows a figure carrying a vase-shaped bombard with flames and a cannonball coming out of it. The oldest surviving gun, made of bronze, has been dated to 1288it was discovered at a site in modern-day Acheng District of China.

By the later fourteenth century, hand-held firearmshand cannonsmade an appearance. When metal projectiles could pierce armor, chain mail became a necessity, yet often was a poor defense against gunpowder and metal. Soon hand-to-hand combat was used only as a last means of defense.

As deadly as these early weapons were, it would be several centuries before technological advances allowed hand guns to fire more than one projectile at a time. Guns did not cause the obsolescence of other weapons; knives, swords, and other implements were still needed in combat. To overcome the deficiency of single-fire weapons, combination weaponsthose that could perform more than one functionwere developed. Single-fire guns were fitted with bayonets, and the fighting ax contained a gun in the handle. If the shot missed the target, its user had an alternate defense source. Combination weapons continue to be manufactured today. A recent example would be a cellular phone that contains a small .22 caliber pistol that could be used for assassinations or easily smuggled through security screening by terrorists.

Thompson sub machine gun

Multi-shot weapons appeared in the nineteenth century; early examples, called pepper-boxes, shot from five to twenty times. Perhaps the most famous multi-shot weapon was the Gatling gun, capable of firing up to 800 rounds per minute, whichhad it been introduced earliermight have meant an earlier triumph by the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War. The twentieth century saw its share of multi-shot weapons; one of the best known was the Thompson sub-machine gun used by the likes of Roaring Twenties gangsters Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. Once it was adopted by the military, the multi-shooting machine gun changed warfare. With one-shot guns, advancement toward an enemy could be accomplished during reloading. With machine guns, movement on an open battlefield became more deadly, and gunplay was performed from entrenchments and behind barricades.