small arms

One of the two main divisions of firearms: guns that can be carried by hand. The first small arms were portable handguns in use in the late 14th century, supported on the ground and ignited by hand. Today's small arms range from breech-loading single-shot rifles and shotguns to sophisticated automatic and semiautomatic weapons.

The matchlock, which evolved during the 15th century, used a match of tow and saltpetre gripped by an S-shaped lever, which was rocked towards the touch hole with one finger, enabling the gun to be held, aimed, and fired in much the same way as today. Front and back sights, followed by a curved stock that could be held against the shoulder (in the hackbut or hookgun), gave increased precision. The difficulty of keeping a match alight in wet weather was overcome by the introduction of the wheel lock, in about 1515, in which a shower of sparks was produced by a spring-drawn steel wheel struck by iron pyrites. This cumbersome and expensive mechanism evolved into the simpler flintlock in about 1625, operated by flint striking steel and in general use for 200 years until a dramatic advance, the ‘percussion cap’, invented in 1810 by a sport-loving Scottish cleric, Alexander Forsyth (1769–1843), removed the need for external igniters. From then on, weapons were fired by a small explosive detonator placed behind or within the base of the bullet, struck by a built-in hammer.

The principles of rifling, breech-loading, and the repeater, although known since the 16th century, were not successfully exploited until the 19th century. It was known that imparting a spin made the bullet's flight truer, but the difficulty of making the bullet bite the grooves had until then prevented the use of rifling. The Baker rifle, issued to the British Rifle Brigade in 1800, was loaded from the front of the barrel (muzzle) and had a mallet for hammering the bullets into the grooves. The first breechloader was von Dreyse's ‘needle gun’, issued to the Prussian army in 1842, in which the detonator was incorporated with the cartridge. Breechloaders were used during the American Civil War and were in general use by 1870, being quicker, and sweeping the barrel out after each firing. An early rifle with bolt action was the Lee-Metford of 1888, followed by the Lee-Enfield, both having a magazine beneath the breech, containing a number of cartridges. A modified model is still used by the British army. US developments favoured the repeater (such as the Winchester) in which the fired case was extracted and ejected, the hammer cocked, and a new charge inserted into the chamber, all by one reciprocation of a finger lever. In the semiautomatic, part of the explosion energy performs the same operations: the Garand, long used by the US army, is of this type. Completely automatic weapons were adopted during World War II. Improvements since then have concentrated on making weapons lighter and faster-firing, as with the M-16, extensively used by US troops in the Vietnam War.