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Whitworth Rifle
The Whitworth rifle was an English-made percussion rifle used in the latter half of the 19th century. A single-shot muzzleloader with excellent long-range accuracy for its era, especially when used with a telescopic sight, the Whitworth rifle was widely regarded as the world's first sniper rifle. The Whitworth rifle saw extensive use with the Confederate sharpshooters in the American Civil War, claiming the lives of several Union generals, including Major General John Sedgwick, one of the highest-ranking Union officers killed during the Civil War, shot on 9 May 1864, at Spotsylvania. In October 2017, a surviving example of a Confederate Whitworth rifle was auctioned with a hammer price of $161,000. The Whitworth rifle was considered to be the very best rifle of its time in terms of accuracy, when compared to other British, French, American rifles, or those produced elsewhere. History The Whitworth rifle was designed by Sir Joseph Whitworth, a prominent British engine ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Muzzle-loading Rifle
A muzzle-loading rifle is a muzzle-loaded small arm or artillery piece that has a rifled barrel rather than a smoothbore. The term " rifled muzzle loader" typically is used to describe a type of artillery piece, although it is technically accurate for small arms as well. A shoulder arm is typically just called a "rifle", as almost all small arms were rifled by the time breechloading became prevalent. Muzzle and breechloading artillery served together for several decades, making a clear distinction more important. In the case of artillery, the abbreviation " RML" is often prefixed to the guns designation; a Rifled breech loader would be "RBL", or often just "BL", since smoothbore breechloading artillery is almost nonexistent (except in tank guns). A muzzle loading weapon is loaded through the muzzle, or front of the barrel (or "tube" in artillery terms). This is the opposite of a breech-loading weapon or rifled breechloader (RBL), which is loaded from the breech-end of the barrel. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sniper Rifle
A sniper rifle is a high-precision, long-range rifle. Requirements include accuracy, reliability, mobility, concealment and optics for anti-personnel, anti-materiel and surveillance uses of the military sniper. The modern sniper rifle is a portable shoulder-fired weapon system with a choice between bolt-action or semi-automatic action, fitted with a telescopic sight for extreme accuracy and chambered for a high-ballistic performance centerfire cartridge. History The Whitworth rifle was arguably the first long-range sniper rifle in the world. Designed by Sir Joseph Whitworth, a prominent British engineer, it used barrels with hexagonal polygonal rifling, which meant that the projectile did not have to bite into the rifling grooves as was done with conventional rifling. His rifle was far more accurate than the Pattern 1853 Enfield, which had shown some weaknesses during the recent Crimean War. At trials in 1857, which tested the accuracy and range of both weapons, Whitworth's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Queen Victoria
Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days was longer than that of any previous British monarch and is known as the Victorian era. It was a period of industrial, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. In 1876, the British Parliament voted to grant her the additional title of Empress of India. Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (the fourth son of King George III), and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. After the deaths of her father and grandfather in 1820, she was raised under close supervision by her mother and her comptroller, John Conroy. She inherited the throne aged 18 after her father's three elder brothers died without surviving legitimate issue. Victoria, a constituti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Rifle Association Of The United Kingdom
The National Rifle Association (NRA) is the governing body for full bore rifle and pistol shooting sports in the United Kingdom. Registered as a United Kingdom charity, its objectives are to "promote and encourage marksmanship throughout the King’s dominions in the interest of defence and the permanence of the volunteer and auxiliary forces, naval, military and air." The formal purposes of the charity are to promote the efficiency of the armed forces of the Crown, or the police, fire and rescue or ambulance services. The National Shooting Centre at Bisley is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the association. History The National Rifle Association was founded in 1859, 12 years before its better known American namesake. The Association was originally based on Putney Heath & Wimbledon Common. Its founding aim was to raise the funds for an annual national rifle meeting (now known as the Imperial Meeting) "for the promotion of marksmanship in the interests of Defence of the Realm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Long Range Shooting
Long range shooting is a collective term for shooting disciplines where the distance to target is significant enough that shooter has to put effort into calculating various ballistic factors, especially in regards to the deviating effects of gravity and wind. While shooting at shorter ranges, a shooter only has to slightly adjust the sights to compensate for limited bullet drop at most, but when the range is extended, wind drift will be the first factor affecting precision to the extent that it must be taken into serious account. Some would argue that long range shooting starts where assessment of wind, distance and various atmospheric conditions are equally important for the results as pure shooting skills - meaning that even if one conducts a technically perfect shot, the shooter will miss the target because of incorrect calculations, neglecting to take some elements into consideration, or merely due to unpredictable downrange conditions. It is widely accepted withi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Percussion Lock
The percussion cap or percussion primer, introduced in the early 1820s, is a type of single-use percussion ignition device for muzzle loader firearm locks enabling them to fire reliably in any weather condition. This crucial invention gave rise to the cap lock mechanism or percussion lock system using percussion caps struck by the hammer to set off the gunpowder charge in percussion guns including percussion rifles and cap and ball firearms. Any firearm using a caplock mechanism is a percussion gun. Any long gun with a cap-lock mechanism and rifled barrel is a percussion rifle. Cap and ball describes cap-lock firearms discharging a single bore-diameter spherical bullet with each shot. Description The percussion cap is a small cylinder of copper or brass with one closed end. Inside the closed end is a small amount of a shock-sensitive explosive material such as mercuric fulminate (discovered in 1800; it was the only practical detonator used from about 1850 to the early 20th cen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crimean War
The Crimean War, , was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 between Russia and an ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia. Geopolitical causes of the war included the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the expansion of the Russian Empire in the preceding Russo-Turkish Wars, and the British and French preference to preserve the Ottoman Empire to maintain the balance of power in the Concert of Europe. The flashpoint was a disagreement over the rights of Christian minorities in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, with the French promoting the rights of Roman Catholics, and Russia promoting those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The churches worked out their differences with the Ottomans and came to an agreement, but both the French Emperor Napoleon III and the Russian Tsar Nicholas I refused to back down. Nicholas issued an ultimatum that demanded the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pattern 1853 Enfield
The Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle-musket (also known as the Pattern 1853 Enfield, P53 Enfield, and Enfield rifle-musket) was a .577 calibre Minié-type muzzle-loading rifled musket, used by the British Empire from 1853 to 1867; after which many were replaced in service by the cartridge-loaded Snider–Enfield rifle. History and development The term "rifle-musket" originally referred to muskets with the smooth-bored barrels replaced with rifled barrels. The length of the barrels were unchanged, allowing the weapons to be fired in ranks, since a long rifle was necessary to enable the muzzles of the second rank of soldiers to project beyond the faces of the men in front. The weapon would also be sufficiently long when fitted with a bayonet to be effective against cavalry. Such weapons manufactured with rifled barrels, muzzle loading, single shot, and utilizing the same firing mechanism, also came to be called rifle-muskets. Royal Small Arms Factory developed the Pattern 1853 Enfie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polygonal Rifling
Polygonal rifling ( ) is a type of gun barrel rifling where the traditional sharp-edged "lands and grooves" are replaced by less pronounced "hills and valleys", so the barrel bore has a polygonal (usually hexagonal or octagonal) cross-sectional profile. Polygonal riflings with a larger number of edges have shallower corners, which provide a better gas seal in relatively large diameter bores. For instance, in the pre-Gen 5 Glock pistols, octagonal rifling is used in the large diameter .45 ACP bore, which has an 11.23 mm (0.442 in) diameter, since it resembles a circle more closely than the hexagonal rifling used in smaller diameter bores.Barrel History History [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hammer Price
In auctions, the buyer's premium is a charge in addition to the hammer price (i.e. the winning bid announced) of an auction item, or lot. The winning bidder is required to pay both the hammer price and the percentage of that price called for by the buyer's premium. It is charged by the auctioneer in addition to the commission which has always been charged by auction houses to sellers. One hundred per cent of the "buyer's premium" is retained by the auction house and is not shared with the item's seller. Major auction houses have levied the buyer's premium for several decades, particularly in fine art auctions, with percentages in the region of 10–30%. In real estate auctions in many European countries, the buyer's premium, if charged at all, is much less (2–2.5%). More recently in the UK, however, foreclosure properties have been offered without fee to the seller, but with a buyer's premium of 10%. The buyer's premium has been characterized by auction houses as a necessary c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Battle Of Spotsylvania Court House
The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, sometimes more simply referred to as the Battle of Spotsylvania (or the 19th-century spelling Spottsylvania), was the second major battle in Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Maj. Gen. George G. Meade's 1864 Overland Campaign of the American Civil War. Following the bloody but inconclusive Battle of the Wilderness, Grant's army disengaged from Confederate General Robert E. Lee's army and moved to the southeast, attempting to lure Lee into battle under more favorable conditions. Elements of Lee's army beat the Union army to the critical crossroads of the Spotsylvania Court House in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and began entrenching. Fighting occurred on and off from May 8 through May 21, 1864, as Grant tried various schemes to break the Confederate line. In the end, the battle was tactically inconclusive, but both sides declared victory. The Confederacy declared victory because they were able to hold their defenses. The United States dec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Sedgwick
John Sedgwick (September 13, 1813 – May 9, 1864) was a military officer and Union Army general during the American Civil War. He was wounded three times at the Battle of Antietam while leading his division in an unsuccessful assault against Confederate forces, causing him to miss the Battle of Fredericksburg. Under his command, the VI Corps played an important role in the Chancellorsville Campaign by engaging Confederate troops at the Second Battle of Fredericksburg and the Battle of Salem Church. His corps was the last to arrive at the Battle of Gettysburg and thus did not see much action. Sedgwick was killed by a sharpshooter at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House on May 9, 1864, making him and Major Generals James B. McPherson, Joseph K. Mansfield, and John F. Reynolds the highest-ranking Union officers to be killed in the war. He is remembered for an ironic remark among his last words: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." Early life and education Sedgw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
