CREATORS OF THE" AGE 'OF STEEL 53 



field rifle, a hand-made weapon, was the arm of her forces. 

 It became necessary to have these guns in large quantities, 

 and the burning question of the hour was how to make these 

 rifles by machinery. The science of projectiles was then 

 entirely empiric. Some guns shot well and some shot ill, 

 but why these were good and those bad no one knew. 

 Whitworth went before a Parliamentary committee, and 

 told it that until the data of rifling were established good 

 machine made guns would be impossible. It was necessary 

 to find out what made an effective gun by continued exper- 

 iment before anything else was done. 



England needed a million rifles. To make these by the 

 processes then in use would have taken Birmingham twenty 

 years. It was agreed that the Government should bear the 

 expenses of Whitworth 's experiments. 



A gallery was set up at Rusholme, 500 yards long, fur- 

 nished with tissue paper screens in order to track the bul- 

 lets throughout their flight, and with sliding targets. The 

 experiments began in March, 1855. The Enfield rifle had 

 a bore of 0-577-inch, and the rifling had one turn in 78 

 inches. The first result was that in every particular the 

 Enfield was found to be wrong. Whitworth made barrels 

 with one turn in 60 inches, one in 30, one in 20, one in 10, 

 one in 5, and one in 1 inch. To be brief, he determined 

 conclusively that the best rifle had one turn in 20 inches, 

 a minimum diameter of 45 inches, and a rounded hexagonal 

 instead of a circular bore. After beating all other guns at 

 short ranges the Whitworth rifle had a deviation of about 

 4-62 feet at 1,400 yards. The Enfield could not hit the 

 target at all. With a steel bullet Whitworth 's rifle per- 

 forated plates of iron half an inch thick at an obliquity of 

 fifty degrees, and easily passed through thirty-four half- 

 inch elm boards. 



Applying the same principles to artillery, Whitworth 

 devised a gun which threw two and one-fourth hundred- 

 weight of iron six and a half miles. 



To such a great superiority did he bring artillery, first 



