Bang, Bang: A Brief History Of Firearms Quiz

Answer: China

The Chinese developed an explosive black powder in the 9th Century. Within a few centuries they had developed a 'weapon', a tube that fired a spear. The Heilongjiang hand cannon is thought to date to the latter part of the 13th Century.

Answer: Matchlock

The matchlock meant that a gun could be fired with one hand. The mechanism consisted of a "S" shaped arm that held a burning taper. When this was lit and the "serpentine" lowered it ignited a pan of priming powder that ignited the main charge.

These guns were slow and clumsy and, as you can imagine, pretty useless when you were reliant on a naked flame in the wind and rain. The matchlock was a big advance as earlier guns were fired by holding a burning wick to powder in a touch hole.

Answer: France and Spain

While the first firearms in Europe dated to the 14th Century, the longbow and crossbow remained the main long distance weapons for the next hundred years.

In the early 16th Century, France and Spain fought a series of battles in what is now Italy. The first weapons were used at Marignano (1515), Bicocca (1522), and Pavia (1525).

The Battle of Pavia was the decisive encounter Major contributors to this were Spanish arquebusiers - users of the first firearms with triggers - who inflicted heavy losses on the French. It did not help the French cause that King Francis I at one stage led a charge of heavy cavalry right across the line of fire of his own cannon - which were unable to engage the enemy. Francis was taken into captivity.

Answer: Samuel Colt

We are ignoring the inconvenient fact that some early pistols had double barrels.

Samuel Colt was granted a patent in 1836 for a revolver that could be fired several times without reloading. This did not create the huge demand that perhaps he hoped for and he sold very few - until the war of 1846 between the USA and Mexico when the US Army ordered 1,000 revolvers.

The first Colt Patterson revolvers had five rounds in the chamber. Although they had a claimed range of about 65 yards, good luck with hitting anything at that distance. Indeed, 25 to 30 yards is a more realistic range with any handgun.

Answer: Brown Bess

The first musket as we know it developed from the arquebus and first appeared in 1475. The Brown Bess came into use in 1722 and was to be the mainstay of British forces for more than a century afterwards.

It was a smoothbore flintlock. These were muzzle loaders; the cartridge was dropped down the front of the barrel, and packed there with wadding using a ramrod.

Loading after each shot was time-consuming, but British infantry were trained to fire five rounds a minute. Other forces were doing well to get three a minute. The effective range of the gun was about 100 yards, but British soldiers were trained to hold their fire until the enemy was 30 yards away. As can be imagined in the days of charges by a densely packed column of infantry, such rapid, and close, fire was devastating.

Answer: Christopher Spencer

Many early 'long arms' were muskets, with a smooth bore. Rifling, putting grooves into the barrel, made them much more accurate.

While there were early attempts to develop repeating rifles using lead balls and powder, it was in 1859 that Spencer developed his lever-action repeating rifle. After he walked into the White House in 1863 and showed it off to Abraham Lincoln, it was widely used by the Union side in the American Civil War.

The Spencer held up to seven metal cartridges in the stock. These were expelled using a lever after every shot was fired. One disadvantage was that the hammer had to be cocked after every shot.

The Spencer had an effective range of 500 yards and a trained user could fire up to 14 rounds a minute. This weapon gave the Union side a distinct advantage. The Confederate troops were at that time reliant on hunting rifles and muskets. However, the Confederates had access to the LeMat pistol, which could hold nine rounds in its chamber and was the most lethal handgun in the conflict.

Spencer, Winchester, and Wesson, along with Benjamin Tyler Henry, were closely involved with the development of firearms. Henry had a patent for a repeating rifle from 1860 and it, too, was used by Union soldiers in the Civil War. Ironically, the War Department was not initially keen on these weapons, it thought soldiers would be encouraged to use too many rounds and this would be expensive.

Answer: Hugo Borchardt

By the latter part of the 19th Century, handguns with bullets held in a rotating cylinder had become widespread. In 1893 Borchardt refined some of the principles of the Maxim gun to produce a hand-held weapon. It was the first to have bullets contained in a reloadable magazine in the butt.

The gun was a bit ahead of its time and did not come into widespread use. Still, working on it was to be a good use of time for one of the employees...a certain Georg Luger.

Luger, an Austrian, went on to develop the range of handguns that bore his name and were introduced into the German Army in 1908. The Luger Pistol was sometimes known as the Parabellum Pistol.

Answer: Lee Enfield Rifle Mk III

Proficient users could fire up to 15 rounds a minute, a rate that caused some German troops to think they were being fired upon by a machine gun.

Many of the rifles held a 10-round clip of .303 bullets. The bullets were ejected using a short-throw bolt that was more efficient than other lever models - such as the famed Winchester. A Lee Enfield had an effective range of about 550 to 600 yards. Not only did they have a rapid rate of fire, the Lee Enfield, in proficient hands, was extremely accurate. Lee Enfield was the British Army's standard rifle from 1895 until 1957.

When they entered the war, most US infantry were armed with the Model 1903 Springfield Rifle. German troops commonly used the Gewehr 98 (aka Mauser 98.)

Answer: Kalashnikov AK-47

Taking account of all derivatives, around 150 million AK47s have been produced. Some experts have placed it as the best combat rifle ever made.

Simplicity was the key to the design and use of the AK47. It could be mishandled and mistreated, and still relied upon. The AK47 had a theoretic firing rate of 600 rounds a minute, not that you could get 600 rounds into a magazine. In semi-automatic use, a rate of 40 rounds a minute could be expected.

Note, the ArmaLite AR-15 entered service with US forces as the M16. Some commentators believe the M16 was a more accurate rifle, although its 5.56 round had less "stopping power" that the heavier Kalashnikov 7.62. The AK47 was also easier to clean and maintain, especially in untrained hands.

Answer: Hiram Maxim

Maxim's gun was not the first effective rapid fire weapon, that was the Gatling gun that was first deployed during the American Civil War. Purists will argue it was not truly a machine gun since the rate of fire was dependant on how fast the operator could crank a handle. Indeed, even Gatling was beaten by James Puckle, who created a gun in 1718 that fed rounds from a revolving cylinder in the chamber.

In 1883, Maxim patented a gun that used the recoil of one bullet to initiate the firing of the next. Maxim first took his invention to the War Department in Great Britain, which promptly dismissed the concept and sent him away.
Maxim went to Germany, where the military leader saw the value of the gun and 12,000 were ready by the start of World War One. Four years later, the Germans had 100,000.

Note: For those who want to engage in the Gatling vs Maxim debate, do an internet search for "automatic machine gun" and Maxim will come up. The source here was britannica.com.