Matchlocks to Assault Rifles: Part 3, The Flintlock Smoothbore Musket

This article is the third in a series of ten. In Part 1 I looked at the first “handgonnes”. In Part 2 I described the matchlock musket, the weapon with which the majority of musketeers were armed in the English Civil War of the 1640s and other conflicts of around the same time like the Thirty Years War which was just coming to a close in Europe.

The problem with the matchlock was that it depended on a match, a length of thin rope impregnated with flammable chemicals. This had to stay alight but with a gentle red glow rather than a flame (holding a flaming rope being a bad idea when you were loading your gun with loose gunpowder!). The match could easily be put out by a gust of wind and it also had to be adjusted in the jaws of the lock arm as it burned down.

Better lock mechanisms were available even before the English Civil War, but because they needed more intricate parts they were custom made and expensive. These better mechanisms were the wheel-lock and the first flintlocks. Both of these used a chunk of mineral hammered against a steel part to generate sparks on demand rather than needing a constantly burning match. The wheel-lock mechanism brought a chunk of iron pyrites against a small spinning steel wheel and was the favoured firing mechanism for pistols for the cavalry in the English Civil War, it being almost impossible to keep a burning match cord alight when charging about on the back of a horse! But they were too expensive to equip everyone.

The flintlock came along when it was realised that a piece of flint striking steel at an oblique angle generated enough sparks to fire a gun without having to have a spinning wheel. This was similar to the way that fire lighting kits worked, except that in a fire lighting kit the flint and the steel were held by hand, so it wasn’t much of a leap of innovation to apply it to firing guns, yet the impact on the effectiveness of firearms was profound.

Continued on page 2