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Bullet Time Smoothbore muskets have a range of about sixty yards … meaning that if you are on a football field at one goal post and the folks shooting at you have smoothbore muskets at the other goal post, you are totally safe. The bullets will hit the ground in front of you. Now if your opponents have rifled muskets, you're in deep trouble. Even medieval archers knew that if you could make an arrow spin, your range and accuracy goes up. That's why they added feathers (fletching) at one end. It was like rifle groves on the outside. Since rifling is so much better, and it was placed inside of weapon barrels as early as 1520, why isn't it more widely used in the War of 1812? The answer has more to do with ammunition than with the guns themselves. The standard round in 1812 is literally a round ball (or several for buck and ball), not the bullet shape we are used to today. The most important part of this ball is that it is smaller than the gun barrel … 69 caliber balls in a 72 or 75 caliber barrel (A). This lets lots of gas escape around the ball (reducing range) and it keeps the ball from coming in contact with the sides of the barrel where the rifle groves are. It's the groves that give the bullet its spin and increases its range to about 300 yards. But if you don't touch the sides then no spin. So why did they make the ball too small? The reason is that it makes the weapon easier to load. Putting in a ball the right size requires you to use a hammer to get the ball in contact with the power at the bottom of the barrel. This just takes too long. The bullet shape we think of today was invented in 1832. It's designed to take advantage of rifled groves in a barrel. First it's make smaller that the barrel (B), so it's just as easy to load as a musket ball. But the bottom of the ball is thin and weak because it's curved on the inside. This means that when the powder explodes, the bullet deforms and expands (C.) This makes the bullet contact the rifle groves causing the bullet to spin and bingo … increased range and accuracy. A bullet then for a rifled gun just hasn't been devised until Captain John Norton of the British 34th Regiment invents it in 1832.
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