By the 16th century, arquebuses were already in common use in European countries. In 1521, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs, his troops were already using arquebuses. In 1522, the Ming Dynasty army captured the arquebus in the Battle of Xicaowan with the Portuguese.
In 1543, the arquebus (with the introduction of the "Nanban **" to Japan, when Tanegashima Tokiyao, the feudal lord of Tanegashima in Japan, was only 16 years old, and he became very interested in this new **, so he asked the craftsmen on the island to imitate it. After that, in just 30 years, warlords (daimyos) throughout Japan were generally armed with arquebuses for use in the melee known as the "Sengoku" at the time.
In the first 200 years after the appearance of arquebuses, the accuracy and range of shooting were very limited, hitting the enemy at a distance of 50 meters was a small probability event, so the lethal effect in the war was not as good as the bow and arrow. However, firearms, such as arquebuses, have three great advantages over bows and arrows. First of all, they have a much greater psychological deterrent effect when fired than bows and arrows, so when Western colonists confront Asian and American armies, which are still cold-armed, they are immediately frightened when they see a cloud of smoke and a loud explosion.
The second advantage was that it was much easier to train soldiers to use muskets than with bows and arrows. The third advantage is that muskets are advancing very quickly, while bows and arrows were largely finalized about 2,000 years ago, and there is no room for improvement. The arquebus was already able to reach a rate of fire of 400 550 meters per second in the later stages, and the kinetic energy generated by the bullet reached 3000 4000 joules, capable of penetrating 3 4 mm of steel plates, and the armor of the samurai could no longer stop its bullets, which the bow and arrow could not do. Therefore, the essence of the great lethality of firearms lies in the ability to send greater energy to distant places and form a huge destructive force. At the beginning of the development of firearms, China was not much behind Europe, but with the fall of the Ming Dynasty by the Qing Dynasty, which was good at riding and shooting, the development of firearms in China actually stagnated. Although during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, the soldiers of the Eight Banners were also equipped with a large number of muskets, the quality of the muskets was not significantly improved compared with the end of the Ming Dynasty.
The musket underwent four major improvements in the three centuries since it was invented to become the prototype of today's rifle.
The first improvement was from arquebuses to fintocks, and the principle of flintlock pistols was to use a revolver lighter (flintlock) to drive the flint to the anvil to produce sparks, igniting gunpowder so that the gunner did not need to carry an arquebus. Flintlock pistols appeared in the 16th century, but became widespread after the 17th century,2 because of the higher cost of flintlock machines.
The second improvement was the invention of the combustible cartridge shell at the end of the 18th century. In the early days, it was a very time-consuming thing to reload the musket case, and the flammable shell shell made ** and gunpowder together, so that the gunner only needed to carry and directly install the "sub" when firing.
The third improvement was the use of rifling (mifing) technology on the inside of the barrel of the gun. In the early days, because there was no rifling in the barrel, the route of the bullet or shell was erratic, and the accuracy was extremely poor. By the 18th century, the English mathematician Rubens mechanically proved that if a bullet flew in rotation, it could enhance stability. Under the guidance of this theory, European countries generally used the rifling technology invented as early as the 15th century in the first century, so that the bullet could rotate when it was discharged.
The fourth improvement was to improve the breech gun to a breech gun. The inventor of the breech gun was the German gunsmith Dreiser, who, while working in a Prussian gunsmith, learned the technique of detonating gunpowder with a firing pin from a Swiss craftsman, and later returned to his hometown to design breech guns. In 1836, Dreser designed a needlehead pistol that loaded ammunition from behind. At that time, the Prussian army, which was expanding its armaments, immediately realized the superiority of this new rifle, so ** immediately bought his patent and supported him to secretly develop this **. In 1841, Dreisai created this needle-fired breech gun, which was immediately adopted by the Prussian army, and this gun also received the designation M1841 because of the age of its invention. The Prussian 10th Army quickly won the Prussian-Danish War, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War.
With each improvement of the musket, its convenience, shooting accuracy, and lethality increased, especially the last improvement from breech to breech guns. The latter is much more lethal than the former. The world's first war in which breech guns were massively adopted for a long period of time was the American Civil War of 1861-1865 (the Civil War), in which 3 million troops were committed on both sides and as many as 600,000 were killed – a figure that exceeds the number of American casualties in all other wars combined. However, compared to later machine guns, the single-shot rifle was much less lethal.