MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS OF 
90 
before its too short ranged guns could be brought into action on the 
advancing columns. - * 
To supply this great want in warfare, involved a complete reformation in 
the architecture of Artillery, which had been almost at a stand-still since 
the time of the Tudors, for although modifications had been occasionally 
made in the manufacture of ordnance, any one who examines the old guns 
in the Tower of London, or in the Museum of Artillery at Woolwich, may 
see that they are of the same genus as modem smooth-bores, and even 
notice some specimens quite as soundly and as artistically cast as any of 
those of the present century, nay more, he may infer that our modern cast 
guns can scarcely be superior to their prototypes in range-power, or 
susceptibility to rifling. 
Why rifled guns were not produced before . 
It is, however, worthy of note, that this stagnation in the construction 
of ordnance was not to be attributed to ignorance of the theories of 
gunnery, but to the backward state of metallurgy and mechanism, for 
professional as well as amateur artillerists have even at remote periods 
understood the value of rifled guns, but their endeavours to obtain them were 
rendered abortive by the want of suitable materials and proper machinery. 
The following is a list of the principal home and foreign inventors and 
inventions of the pre-rifle-ite period. 
I have selected almost all the names of the English inventors out of nearly two 
hundred whose proposals are described in “ MS. notes on the various designs for 
elongated projectiles for smooth-bore and rifled guns, which have been from time 
to time considered by the Ordnance Select Committee down to 1858,” compiled 
from the records of the Committee by Lieut.-Col. (now Major-General) A. G. 
Burrows, Eoyal Artillery. 
Eor the foreign inventors I am indebted principally to a paper by Captain 
E. A. Scott, Eoyal Navy, published in 21st number of Vol. VI. “ Journal of the 
Eoyal United Service Institution” :—■ 
In the Arsenal of St Petersburg is a gun 2| ins. in diameter and 62 ins. in length 
of bore, which was rifled in nine grooves in 1615. 
In 1661 the Prussians experimented at Berlin with a gun rifled in thirteen 
shallow grooves. 
In 1696 the elliptical bore was known and had been tried in various parts of 
Germany. 
In 1745, the date at which Eobins was experimenting in England, the Swiss 
already possessed small rifled pieces. 
1746. Munich had a rifled breech-loader made, and T. Senner was engaged in 
rifling various guns. 
1776. Ur Pollok proposed elongated shot for smooth-bore pieces. 
1790. Mr Wiggin made designs of a rifled gun and belted projectiles. 
1803-1806. Proposals by Messrs Davies, Barlow, Spencer, Eckhart, &c< were 
considered by the O.S.C. 
* At an experiment which took place at Hythe in 1857, thirty infantry soldiers armed with 
Enfield rifles, picked off in three minutes the men and horses of a dummy gun detachment 800 
yards distant. 
