The Evolution of Naval Armament

To attempt to trace in any detail the evolution of the sailing warship is a task, it must be at once admitted, far beyond the scope and intention of the present essay.

On the question of the date at which the discovery of gunpowder took place writers have held the most divergent views. The opinion of the majority has been that its properties w...

The greatest of the world’s inventions appear to have had a very casual birth. So much an affair of chance has been their first manifestation, that science has not been called i...

We have traced the smooth-bore cannon through the successive stages of its evolution. It is now proposed to give, in the form of a biographical sketch, an account of the incepti...

AT the monthly meeting of the Carron Company, a Scotch iron-founding and shipping firm, which was held in December, 1778, the manager informed the board that, in order to provid...

the small charge of powder, gave the Smasher ballistic results far superior, relatively, to those obtained with the long gun. Its lack of ranging power was admitted. But for clo...

From the small truck, _trochos_, or wheel on which it ran, the four-wheeled carriage which served for centuries as a mounting for the long guns of fighting ships has come to be...

The chief function of land artillery in its earlier days was the destruction of material. The huge engines of the ancients were of value in effecting from a safe distance what t...

While the evolution of smooth-bore ordnance owed little if anything to the prior development of small arms, the evolution of rifled ordnance which took place in the middle of th...

No aspect of old naval warfare is so difficult for the modern reader to visualize, perhaps, as that which displays the essential weakness of the sailing warship: its impotence i...

The year 1860 marks the most dramatic, swift, and far-reaching change which has ever befallen war material: the supersession of the wooden ship-of-the-line by the modern battles...