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Mitrailleuse
A mitrailleuse (; from French ''mitraille'', "grapeshot") is a type of volley gun with barrels of rifle calibre that can fire either all rounds at once or in rapid succession. The earliest true mitrailleuse was invented in 1851 by Belgian Army captain Fafschamps, ten years before the advent of the Gatling gun. It was followed by the Belgian Montigny mitrailleuse in 1863. Then the French 25 barrel "''Canon à Balles''", better known as the Reffye ''mitrailleuse'', was adopted in great secrecy in 1866. It became the first rapid-firing weapon deployed as standard equipment by any army in a major conflict when it was used during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. A steel block containing twenty-five 13 mm (.51 calibre) centre-fire cartridges was locked against the breech before firing. With the rotation of a crank, the 25 rounds were discharged in rapid succession. The sustainable firing rate of the Reffye mitrailleuse was 100 rounds per minute and its maximum range was about ...
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Mitrailleuse Sideplan
A mitrailleuse (; from French ''mitraille'', "grapeshot") is a type of volley gun with barrels of rifle calibre that can fire either all rounds at once or in rapid succession. The earliest true mitrailleuse was invented in 1851 by Belgian Army captain Fafschamps, ten years before the advent of the Gatling gun. It was followed by the Belgian Montigny mitrailleuse in 1863. Then the French 25 barrel "''Canon à Balles''", better known as the Reffye ''mitrailleuse'', was adopted in great secrecy in 1866. It became the first rapid-firing weapon deployed as standard equipment by any army in a major conflict when it was used during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. A steel block containing twenty-five 13 mm (.51 calibre) centre-fire cartridges was locked against the breech before firing. With the rotation of a crank, the 25 rounds were discharged in rapid succession. The sustainable firing rate of the Reffye mitrailleuse was 100 rounds per minute and its maximum range was about ...
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Montigny Mitrailleuse
The Montigny mitrailleuse was an early type of crank-operated machine-gun developed by the Belgian gun works of Joseph Montigny between 1859 and 1870. It was an improved version of the "Mitrailleuse", ( en, Grapeshot shooter) invented by Belgian Captain Fafschamps in 1851 which was a fixed 50-barrelled volley gun. The Montigny mitrailleuse was designed to defend narrow defensive positions such as the moats of fortresses. The Belgian army initially purchased Fafschamps volley guns. Only later did they acquire Montigny mitrailleuses. Joseph Montigny also promoted and sold the weapon for offensive field use by placing the weapon on an artillery carriage. Specifications The weapon consisted of 37 barrels of 11 mm inside a cylindrical protective casing. Loading was performed with a loading plate containing 37 cartridges. It was inserted against the breech in one stroke and locked in with a hinged loading lever attached to the rear of the gun. The ammunition had a brass head and ...
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Montigny Mitrailleuse
The Montigny mitrailleuse was an early type of crank-operated machine-gun developed by the Belgian gun works of Joseph Montigny between 1859 and 1870. It was an improved version of the "Mitrailleuse", ( en, Grapeshot shooter) invented by Belgian Captain Fafschamps in 1851 which was a fixed 50-barrelled volley gun. The Montigny mitrailleuse was designed to defend narrow defensive positions such as the moats of fortresses. The Belgian army initially purchased Fafschamps volley guns. Only later did they acquire Montigny mitrailleuses. Joseph Montigny also promoted and sold the weapon for offensive field use by placing the weapon on an artillery carriage. Specifications The weapon consisted of 37 barrels of 11 mm inside a cylindrical protective casing. Loading was performed with a loading plate containing 37 cartridges. It was inserted against the breech in one stroke and locked in with a hinged loading lever attached to the rear of the gun. The ammunition had a brass head and ...
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Machine Gun
A machine gun is a fully automatic, rifled autoloading firearm designed for sustained direct fire with rifle cartridges. Other automatic firearms such as automatic shotguns and automatic rifles (including assault rifles and battle rifles) are typically designed more for firing short bursts rather than continuous firepower, and are not considered true machine guns. As a class of military kinetic projectile weapon, machine guns are designed to be mainly used as infantry support weapons and generally used when attached to a bipod or tripod, a fixed mount or a heavy weapons platform for stability against recoils. Many machine guns also use belt feeding and open bolt operation, features not normally found on other infantry firearms. Machine guns can be further categorized as light machine guns, medium machine guns, heavy machine guns, general purpose machine guns and squad automatic weapons. Similar automatic firearms of caliber or more are classified as autocannons, rat ...
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Kingdom Of Dahomey
The Kingdom of Dahomey () was a West African kingdom located within present-day Benin that existed from approximately 1600 until 1904. Dahomey developed on the Abomey Plateau amongst the Fon people in the early 17th century and became a regional power in the 18th century by expanding south to conquer key cities like Whydah belonging to the Kingdom of Whydah on the Atlantic coast which granted it unhindered access to the tricontinental triangular trade. For much of the middle 19th century, the Kingdom of Dahomey became a key regional state, after eventually ending tributary status to the Oyo Empire. European visitors extensively documented the kingdom, and it became one of the most familiar African nations to Europeans. The Kingdom of Dahomey was an important regional power that had an organized domestic economy built on conquest and slave labor, significant international trade and diplomatic relations with Europeans, a centralized administration, taxation systems, and an orga ...
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Jean-Baptiste Verchère De Reffye
Jean-Baptiste Verchère de Reffye (30 July 1821 – 6 December 1880) was a French artillery general of the 19th century, and superintendent of the works at Meudon. He was a former ordnance officer for Napoleon III. He also established the gun manufacture in Tarbes. Reffye mitrailleuse De Reffye developed in 1866 the Reffye mitrailleuse (named "Canon à balles"), one of the best early machine guns, which was used during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It was based on the earlier Belgian Montigny mitrailleuse of 1863. Breech-loading cannons Jean-Baptiste Verchère de Reffye took a key role in introducing rifled breech loading cannons, a marked improvement over the previous La Hitte system which had been in place since 1858. The La Hitte system used rifled weapons, but they were muzzle-loading, which had the advantage of structural strength, but the disadvantage of slowness in loading. In 1870, de Reffye developed the Reffye 85mm cannon, an 85 mm (3.35-inch) rifled breech ...
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Fafschamps
Toussaint-Henry-Joseph Fafchamps (1783-1868), sometimes spelled Fafschamps, was a Belgian Army captain. In 1851, with the Belgian gunsmith Joseph Montigny and the Fusnot company, he developed what is sometimes considered the first machine gun in history, 10 years before the advent of the Gatling gun. Specifications Fafchamps made a prototype of his machine, as well as drawings, which were remitted to Montigny. The Fafschamps gun was a manually fired 50-barrels volley gun using needle fire and paper cartridges, and was only intended as a stationary artillery piece for defensive fortifications. Fafchamps named it the "carabine multiple". Legacy Joseph Montigny further improved the weapon, completing the transportable 37-barrels Montigny mitrailleuse (also known as the "Fafschamps-Montigny mitrailleuse") in 1863. From 1859, Joseph Montigny proposed his design to Napoleon III, which led to the development of the French Reffye mitrailleuse, designed by Jean-Baptiste Verchère de Reffy ...
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Gatling Gun
The Gatling gun is a rapid-firing multiple-barrel firearm invented in 1861 by Richard Jordan Gatling. It is an early machine gun and a forerunner of the modern electric motor-driven rotary cannon. The Gatling gun's operation centered on a cyclic multi-barrel design which facilitated cooling and synchronized the firing-reloading sequence. As the handwheel is cranked, the barrels rotate and each barrel sequentially loads a single cartridge from a top-mounted magazine, fires off the shot when it reaches a set position (usually at 4 o'clock), then ejects the spent casing out of the left side at the bottom, after which the barrel is empty and allowed to cool until rotated back to the top position and gravity-fed another new round. This configuration eliminated the need for a single reciprocating bolt design and allowed higher rates of fire to be achieved without the barrels overheating quickly. One of the best-known early rapid-fire firearms, the Gatling gun saw occasional use ...
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Volley Gun
A volley gun is a gun with multiple single-shot gun barrel, barrels that shoot projectiles in volley fire, either simultaneously or in succession. Although capable of unleashing intense firepower, volley guns differ from modern machine guns in that they lack Action (firearms)#Autoloading_operation, autoloading and automatic fire mechanisms, and therefore their volume of fire is limited by the number of barrels bundled together. In practice, large volley guns were not particularly more useful than a cannon firing canister shot or grapeshot. Since they were still mounted on a carriage, they could be as hard to aim and move around as a cannon, and the many barrels took as long or longer to reload.Matthew Sharpe "Nock's Volley Gun: A Fearful Discharge" ''American Rifleman'' December 2012 pp.50-53 They also tended to be relatively expensive since they were more complex than a cannon, due to all the barrels and ignition fuses, and each barrel had to be individually maintained and clea ...
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Volley Gun
A volley gun is a gun with multiple single-shot gun barrel, barrels that shoot projectiles in volley fire, either simultaneously or in succession. Although capable of unleashing intense firepower, volley guns differ from modern machine guns in that they lack Action (firearms)#Autoloading_operation, autoloading and automatic fire mechanisms, and therefore their volume of fire is limited by the number of barrels bundled together. In practice, large volley guns were not particularly more useful than a cannon firing canister shot or grapeshot. Since they were still mounted on a carriage, they could be as hard to aim and move around as a cannon, and the many barrels took as long or longer to reload.Matthew Sharpe "Nock's Volley Gun: A Fearful Discharge" ''American Rifleman'' December 2012 pp.50-53 They also tended to be relatively expensive since they were more complex than a cannon, due to all the barrels and ignition fuses, and each barrel had to be individually maintained and clea ...
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Joseph Montigny
Joseph Montigny was a Belgian gunsmith, from Fontaine l'Evèque near Brussels, and the developer of the Montigny mitrailleuse, an early European machine gun, in 1863. The design was based on the early 1850s prototype of a volley gun by the Belgian officer Fafschamps. Montigny managed to offer his design to Napoléon III, who adopted it in 1867, with Colonel De Reffye making various improvements to the weapons. Joseph Montigny also developed various rifles and shotguns with breech loading mechanisms based on the designs of the Swiss inventor Jean Samuel Pauly Jean Samuel Pauly (1766 – c. 1821), born Samuel Johannes Pauli, was a Swiss inventor and gunsmith of the early 19th century. Parish records show that he was baptised in Vechigen near Bern, Switzerland on 13 April 1766, the son of Johann Pauli .... Notes {{DEFAULTSORT:Montigny, Joseph Year of birth missing Year of death missing Artillery of Belgium Gunsmiths ...
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American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction. Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought to a head by the victory in the 1860 U.S. presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion into the west. An initial seven southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and, in 1861, forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized U.S. forts and other federal assets within their borders. Led by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, ...
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