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Written by: David Minshall
Introduction > Leutmann’s bullet
The early 19th century development of ammunition for muzzle loading longarms is well documented, with particular emphasis on work in France. The military smooth-bored musket and round ball ammunition saw general issue well into the 19th century, before finally being supplanted by the rifle firing a hollow based self-expanding bullet.
Work in France during the 1820s and 1830s developed means of expanding a round ball into rifling grooves after loading. Both Captain Delvigne and Colonel Thouvenin used a restriction at the bottom of the bore against which a ball could be heavily rammed to expand it, but each method resulted in deformation of the ball. Colonel Poncharra introduced a modification to the Delvigne system whereby a wooden sabot was placed beneath the ball with a greased patch. In 1837 the British adopted the Brunswick rifle with its two groove rifling and firing a spherical ball with a projecting belt around it – this enabled a mechanical fit with the rifling, without the need of expansion.
Benjamin Robins (1707-1751), in a paper before the Royal Society in 1747, had suggest the use of elongated bullets of an egg-like form in rifles. It is however not until the first half of the 19th century that significant progress was made in developing alternatives to the round ball projectile. In Great Britain, for example, W.W. Greener, Captain J. Norton, Colonel Jacob (while based in India) and the gunmaker Henry Wilkinson all experimented with / promoted expanding forms of, or mechanically fitting, bullets.
It is however to France that we must return to mark the development of the hollow based self-expanding bullet, before its more general adoption. Delvigne recognised that such bullets would expand to fill the rifling grooves by the explosion of the powder charge and obtained a patent for his hollow bullet in 1841. A solution of the principle of gaining consistent expansion was brought about in the late 1840s, with Captain Minié’s addition of an iron cup to the cavity at the base of the Delvigne bullet.
And the rest is history… well not quite!