page_title: Musket
section_title: Replacement by the rifle
hierarchical_section_title: Musket / Replacement by the rifle
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Balle à culot et coupe verticale de cette balle
context_page_description: A musket is a muzzle-loaded long gun that appeared as a smoothbore weapon in the early 16th century, at first as a heavier variant of the arquebus, capable of penetrating heavy armor. By the mid-16th century, this type of musket went out of use as heavy armor declined, but as the matchlock became standard, the term musket continued as the name given for any long gun with a flintlock, and then its successors, all the way through to the mid-19th century. This style of musket was retired in the 19th century when rifled muskets became common as a result of cartridged breech-loading firearms introduced by Casimir Lefaucheux in 1835, the invention of the Minié ball by Claude-Étienne Minié in 1849, and the first reliable repeating rifle produced by Volcanic Repeating Arms in 1854. By the time that repeating rifles became common, they were known as simply "rifles", ending the era of the musket.
context_section_description: The musket had a smoothbore barrel and lacked rifling grooves in the barrel that spun the bullet, contributing to its accuracy. By modern standards, muskets are extremely inaccurate. Owing to this lack of accuracy, officers did not expect musketeers to aim at specific targets. Rather, their objective was to deliver massed fire into the enemy line.
  Although rifling as a practice preceded the musket, it was primarily secluded to specialist weapons and limited in number. The disadvantage of the early rifle for military use was its long reloading time and the tendency for powder fouling to accumulate in the rifling, making the piece more difficult to load with each shot. Eventually, the weapon could not be loaded until the bore was wiped clean. For this reason, smoothbore muskets remained the primary firearm of most armies until the mid-19th century. However, as early as 1611, rifles were already seeing limited usage in some parts of Europe such as Denmark.
  The invention of the Minié ball in 1849 solved both major problems of muzzle-loading rifles. The Crimean War (1853–1856) saw the first widespread use of the rifled musket for the common infantryman and by the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865) most infantry were equipped with the rifled musket. These were far more accurate than smoothbore muskets and had a far longer range, while preserving the musket's comparatively faster reloading rate. Their use led to a decline in the use of massed attacking formations, as these formations were too vulnerable to the accurate, long-range fire a rifle could produce. In particular, attacking troops were within range of the defenders for a longer period of time, and the defenders could also fire at them more quickly than before. As a result, while 18th century attackers would only be within range of the defenders' weapons for the time it would take to fire a few shots, late 19th century attackers might suffer dozens of volleys before they drew close to the defenders, with correspondingly high casualty rates. However, the use of massed attacks on fortified positions did not vanish overnight, and as a result, major wars of the late 19th century and early 20th century tended to produce very high casualty figures.
  Although they were more accurate than a smoothbore musket, the problem of training soldiers was still unresolved. Ordinary soldiers had the same training as in the early 19th century, so they could not unlock the potential of the rifles. This led to the fact that the tactics did not change until the last quarter of the 19th century. Most surprisingly, the losses were much lower than during the Napoleonic Wars or the Seven Years' War. In most of the battles of the American Civil War, the casualties were only 2% (and about 10% of the wounded).
  In the late 19th century, the rifle took another major step forward with the introduction of breech-loading rifles. These rifles also used brass cartridges. The brass cartridge had been introduced earlier; however, it was not widely adopted for various reasons. In the U.S. Army, generals thought their soldiers would waste ammunition, so they kept muzzle-loading black powder rifles until after the American Civil War. The introduction of breech loaders meant that the rifling of a weapon was no longer damaged when it was loaded, and reloading was a much faster process. Shortly afterwards, magazine loading rifles were introduced, which further increased the weapons' rate of fire. From this period (c.1870-1879) on, the musket was obsolete in modern warfare.
caption: Minié balls
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