Matchlocks to Assault Rifles: Part 3, The Flintlock Smoothbore Musket (Page 2)

This is page 2 of a two-page article. For the first page, click here.

By now, some guns had a cover over the priming pan to keep out damp and stop the wind blowing away the priming powder. Another key innovation in the flintlock mechanism was to have use part of the pan cover as the steel against which the flint struck, opening the pan at the very instant of firing and generating firing sparks at the same time. This was achieved by having an L-shaped pan lid. On pulling the trigger, the sprung arm holding the flint would come crashing down, striking the upright leg of the pan lid at a slant and throwing the lid open whilst showering sparks inside it.

The picture below (courtesy Wikimedia commons) clearly shows the L-shaped pan lid (hinged here in the open position) and the hammer arm with the clamp holding a piece of flint. The shallow indentation revealed by the lid is the pan where the tiny amount of priming powder would sit. The lock mechanism would be fitted to the gun so that this pan sat alongside the small touch-hole bored in the gun barrel.

Figure 1: mechanism of a flintlock musket

The flintlock smoothbore musket started coming into military use in the 1660s and was pretty much universal in European armies by 1700. This was the weapon of the infantry of Frederick the Great of Prussia, of the American War of Independence and of the wars against Napoleon. With the invention of factory mass-production it became a relatively cheap way to equip the mass armies of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, though the lock mechanisms always needed final assembly and adjustment by hand.

It should be remembered that this was a smoothbore muzzle-loading weapon. With no rifling spirals cut into the inside of the barrel (smoothbore) the musket ball tumbled out the barrel without a consistent spin shot-to-shot, making it not a particularly accurate weapon. Being muzzle-loading meant that it was loaded by inserting the main gunpowder charge and the musket ball at the muzzle end of the barrel. With the gun held vertically during loading, gravity would bring the powder and ball down to the breech end of the barrel, though they had to be rammed down hard with a ram-rod to make the charge compact for consistent firing. And since the weapon had to be held vertically for this stage of loading there was no way it could be done lying down (or even kneeling, given the length of most muskets), making it less than ideal for firing from concealed positions.

What was the range and accuracy of a flintlock musket? Well the weapon was physically capable of firing a lead musket ball out to well beyond 250 yards but one didn’t have any real chance of hitting even a large group of men at that distance. Effective range for a volley wasn’t much over 100 yards as beyond that too many of the musket balls would either fly over the target or plough into the ground. As the Napoleonic Wars progressed, the British in particular developed the tactic of waiting until the enemy was within 50 yards then firing one or at most two volleys before charging their now-disordered enemy.

Another factor against accuracy in long-range fire fights was the dense cloud of gunpowder smoke than soon built up in front of units after several shots. In an extended fire fight, opposing lines of infantry might be reduced to firing blind into the banks of smoke between them.

It was the rifle that revolutionised long range accuracy, but before I cover that (in part 5) I want to step back to the time the flintlock was introduced and discuss the importance of another weapon that came along at the same time: the bayonet (Matchlocks to Assault Rifles Part 4).