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An even more effective man-killing round was invented in 1784 by a chap named Henry Shrapnel. He based his new projectile on an ordinary explosive shell, only instead of additional gunpowder, he packed the interior of the sphere with cast iron musket balls, held in place by a "glue" primarily made from molten sulfur. Due to its shape, the shrapnel round had the same ballistic characteristics as a solid cannon ball - it inflicted casualties very much like a canister projectile, but it had six times the maximum effective range of canister. Deployed by the British Army in 1804, shrapnel shells soon proved their worth in the Spanish campaign against Napoleon (whose army had no equivalent ammunition) - in one battle, a shrapnel-firing battery struck down enemy soldiers at a range of 2,000 yards.

With practice, a good gunner could "eyeball" the range to his target and trim the fuse accordingly. Shrapnel was most dangerous when the shells detonated about 50 yards ahead of their targets, while the projectile was still in the air. From sheer momentum, the released balls and shards of the shell casing kept on going, on their original line of trajectory but spreading out as they traveled; shrapnel shells could kill or maim soldiers who were 200 yards away from the place where they went off. The deployment of shrapnel ammunition at last permitted cannon to be used in direct support of an infantry or cavalry attack, without their first having to be dragged forward to dangerously exposed positions as had been the case during the Napoleonic wars.

The next significant step in the evolution of artillery didn't come until 1822, when a French officer named Paixhans (borrowing liberally from design drawings by an American Major named -- fittingly enough - Bomford) designed the largest-caliber shell gun ever deployed, known in America as the "Columbiad". Intended primarily for naval and coast defense applications, this design incorporated an enlarged firing chamber, which greatly reduced the chance of heavy shells being torn apart, or, worse, being detonated by the powder charge that was supposed to launch them. A battery of Columbiads could successfully engage hostile warships with explosive shells two-to-four times larger than could safely have been fired before that weapon's manufacture

Carrying the "enlarged chamber" idea even further, American naval officer J. A. Dahlgren designed some truly monstrous coastal guns (the largest one could fire shells weighing 150 pounds).

But the logistics of artillery remained daunting indeed: Six different kinds of ammunition were needed to keep a battery of 12-pounders in action all day; not to mention ammo and powder for the 6 and 8-pounders and a completely distinct array of shells for the howitzers! What was needed was a weapon that combined the better properties of both a "gun" and a "howitzer", and that could safely fire big shells at long ranges. Incremental advances in metallurgy provided much more robust shell casings which solved part of the problem, and a Swiss-born French artillerist, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (who would soon become the ruler of France) designed the first practical "gun/howitzer" and extensive tests proved the 12-pounders to be almost as good as the best conventional weapons, but conferred upon the army that used them the inestimable benefit of standardized ammunition, lighter gun carriages, and greatly enhanced range for its shells.

After he became Emperor, Louis Napoleon expedited the refitting of all French artillery units with the new gun/howitzers, and when the French expeditionary force landed in the Crimea, in 1854, all of its batteries had been modernized - the new design was soon tested under fire and proved to be reliable, accurate, and capable of inflicting severe harm on the enemy.

The last major improvement in artillery before the Civil War involved the deployment of rifled cannon, to augment the old smoothbores. During the 1850s, competing systems were developed by ordnance designers in France, Sweden, and Belgium. Extensive testing revealed each system to have its weaknesses, but the most reliable design was that submitted by a French colonel named Beaulieu - which sat, covered with dust and never read, on a shelf in the ordnance department for fourteen years! Only when Louis Napoleon demanded a comprehensive study of rifled artillery designs did someone remember Beaulieu's package! When tested against more recent designs Beaulieu's cannon demonstrated a marked superiority in range, accuracy, lethality, and robust durability; Louis Napoleon ordered Beaulieu guns for the entire French Army, and when the weapons went into action for the first time, during the Battle of Solfirino in 1859, they quickly proved their merit. In one instance, a battery of rifled guns completely demoralized a large cavalry formation at a distance of 2500 yards, causing its commander to abort the charge he had been planning to send against the French infantry.

By that date, too, most American officers had become familiar with the principles of rifled artillery and few doubted the efficacy of such weapons. Rifled pieces, however, were more complicated to manufacture and cost considerably more than smoothbores. Except for a handful of experimental models, mostly deployed in coastal forts, rifled guns did not start pouring out of American foundries until late 1861, when the need for them was both urgent and enormous.

To be continued...

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