A Norman workshop and a gun for the king
Around 1610, in Lisieux, Normandy, the court gunsmith, artist, and luthier Marin le Bourgeois assembled a gun with a new type of lock for the young Louis XIII. The barrel, the stock, the fine metalwork—all of this had been done before. But the lock inside was different. It was with this design that the story began. story flintlock, which would remain in service with armies until the 1840s.
The rifle, made in the Le Bourgeois family workshop in Lisieux and attributed to his brother Pierre, has survived to this day and is housed in the Metropolitan Museum. It, along with contemporary descriptions, reveals the precise mechanics of the mechanism that transformed infantry combat.
What happened before this and why did it irritate the shooter?
To understand why the flintlock so quickly displaced its competitors, one must look at its predecessors. The wheellock, which appeared in the 16th century, worked like a modern lighter: a spring-loaded, knurled steel wheel rotated against a piece of pyrite, producing a shower of sparks in a pan of gunpowder. It was a beautiful but expensive solution. The mechanism was complex, required a highly skilled gunsmith to manufacture and repair, and was prone to breakage in the field, remaining almost exclusively the preserve of officers and hunters.
Intermediate designs developed simultaneously. Snaplocks and snaphauns already used flint striking a steel plate, but the powder pan cover and striking surface were separate components, which complicated the lock and reduced reliability. The Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman miquelet combined these two functions in a single component, the frizzen. It was this idea that migrated to France.
A cavalry pistol with a "Dog" lock from the English Civil War.
The dog lock, which appeared in England and the Netherlands in the early 17th century, added a secondary latch, the aforementioned "dog," a protrusion behind the heel of the hammer. The latch caught the hammer and prevented it from falling off. The solution worked, but it was a crutch on top of the main design. Most locks of this period didn't yet have a half-cock, and loading weapon had to be handled with the caution of a man handling a loaded mousetrap.
What exactly did Le Bourgeois collect?
Le Bourgeois did three things, which individually were already known, but together they formed a working system.
Visible on the outside of the lock are the hammer with a flint clamped between its jaws and the L-shaped fire starter (also known as the flint striker), which covers the powder pan. Hidden from view inside the lockplate are the toggle switch, sear, and mainspring. The trigger, via a pull rod, releases the sear, and the hammer moves forward.
The first innovation was a frizzen, an L-shaped steel plate hinged at the front and spring-loaded by a separate leaf spring. When closed, it protected the powder powder on the pan from wind, rain, and falling dust. When the flint was struck, the same plate simultaneously acted as a steel surface for spark generation and folded forward, revealing the pan. One part, two functions.
The second, internal vertical sear. This is a small lever that engages a tooth on the hammer toggle and holds it in the cocked position. The trigger, via a pull rod, disengages the sear, and the hammer is pulled forward by the mainspring. Previously, many designs either required the hammer to be held down by hand or relied on external latches like the Doglock pawl.
Third, two different teeth on the toggle switch gave the hammer two positions. Full cock: the shot is ready. Half cock: the hammer is pulled back, the frizzen can be opened, powder can be poured into the pan, and the trigger will not pull the hammer. This transformed loading from acrobatics into routine. Other European gunsmiths copied the half cock setting almost immediately, and it became the standard for all subsequent flintlocks.
The Le Bourgeois trigger itself, which in French tradition was called a coq, or "rooster," for its resemblance to a cocked head, held the flint between two jaws, through a spacer made of a scrap of leather or a thin lead plate. The spacer acted as a shock absorber, preventing the flint from shattering when striking steel.
Why do sparks fall downwards?
Chemically, a flintlock is a miniature experiment in the pyrophoric properties of iron. Flint is harder than tempered steel, called a frizzen. When the hammer is struck and the trigger slides down, the flint edge doesn't knock out red-hot pieces of steel in the traditional sense, but scrapes a thin layer of tiny steel shavings from the frizzen.
Each of these shavings is tiny in volume, but has a huge surface area relative to its mass. A large proportion of the iron in the shavings instantly comes into contact with air and oxidizes. The reaction is exothermic, and the shavings manage to heat up to a temperature at which they glow and ignite the black powder on the shelf. This is the pyrophoric effect, the same one that causes the wheel of a modern lighter to spark when exposed to a ferrocerium rod.
What follows is pure engineering in miniature. The flint, pressed against the frizzen, slides down it, pushing the plate forward. While the shavings are flying, the frizzen is already flipped up, and they land precisely on the pan. The pan is connected to the barrel by a narrow flash hole. The priming powder ignites, a beam of flame passes into the barrel, igniting the main propellant behind the bullet. Tenths of a second pass from the trigger pull to the shot, and the shooter learns not to jerk the barrel during this "lock time."
The British flagship, nicknamed Brown Bess
The most obvious embodiment of the flintlock in mass production is the British smoothbore musket known by the nickname "Brown Bess." The origin of this nickname is controversial, and sources offer no established explanation. However, the technique is described in detail. The earliest variant, the Long Land Pattern of 1722, had an overall length of approximately 1600 mm without bayonet and a barrel of approximately 1200 mm. This musket, along with its derivatives (Short Land Pattern, India Pattern, New Land Pattern), remained in service with the British army for most of the 18th and a significant part of the 19th centuries. According to various estimates, the total production of all variants of the Brown Bess over more than a century and a half was between four and seven million units, a figure unattainable by any continental equivalent. It was precisely this mass production, rather than exceptional ballistic qualities (the Brown Bess lacked these), that made it the flagship of the era: this musket fought at Culloden, Bunker Hill, Assaye, and Waterloo. The colonial armies of the East India Company carried it into the mid-19th century, and it was encountered in the hands of local irregulars even later.
The primary practical advantages of such weapons over matchlocks are measurable. A well-trained matchlock musketeer of the late 16th century fired an average of one shot per minute: the match had to be adjusted, fanned, pulled away from the pan during loading to avoid blowing itself out, and then brought back to the lock. A British infantryman with a Brown Bess, trained according to regulations, fired two or three shots per minute, and some veterans even managed four during trials. A line fired several times more bullets at the enemy per minute than a generation earlier; at the same time, the misfire rate was significantly reduced: in dry weather, a matchlock, according to various estimates, had a failure rate of 10 to 30%, while a flintlock under the same conditions had a failure rate of around 10–20%. The cost of a flintlock was significantly lower than that of a wheellock, and for the first time, state-owned production could equip tens of thousands of men with identical modern weapons without breaking the bank. The linear tactics of the 18th century, with its dense volley fire, relies directly on this economy.
An understandable engineering quibble immediately arises. Flint wears out. After 20-40 shots, the edge becomes dull, and the shooter must either turn the flint over in the jaws or replace it. The lead lining is regularly adjusted to the shape of the new flint. On a field march, a veteran carried a dozen spare flints, a wrench for tightening the jaw screw, and a screwdriver in his pouch—a true soldier's service kit of the era.
The Tula Trace and the French Pedigree of Russian Muskets
Russia adopted the flintlock through direct adoption. In 1712, Peter the Great founded the Tula Arms Factory, the site where domestic models were later assembled. French designs long served as the benchmark. The Russian infantry rifle model 1809 (also referred to in literature as the musket model 1809) was modeled on the French musket model 1777: flintlock, single-shot, muzzle-loading, smoothbore. The caliber in foreign descriptions is nominally listed as 0,70 inches, which corresponds to approximately 17,8 mm.
Russian infantry soldier's rifle, model 1828
The next significant step was the infantry rifle model 1828. It was a muzzle-loading smoothbore weapon with a caliber of approximately 17,5 mm; in the Russian system, it had seven lines (a line was equal to a tenth of an inch, or nominally approximately 17,8 mm, hence the name). The basis was again a French model, this time from 1822. It was produced in Tula, and it was precisely these rifles that survived until the Crimean War and battles like Inkerman, where they were seized by the Allies as trophies.
The Patriotic War of 1812 became a test of Tula's throughput capacity. By various estimates, by 1812 the factory was producing up to 10–13 rifles per month, compared to a significant decrease during peacetime. By the end of the war, Tula's gunsmiths had produced, according to various estimates, between 300 and 600 barrels, and a significant portion of the infantry that marched from Borodino to Paris wielded Tula-made weapons. At the same time, the factory repaired captured and damaged weapons, converting French, Austrian, and Prussian barrels to Russian mounting standards and calibers.
By the 1840s, when it became clear that the smoothbore era was ending, some seven-line rifles were converted into rifled carbine guns. The barrel was given 4–8 helical grooves, sometimes shortened, and the sights were replaced with stepped ones, resulting in a weapon capable of accurate fire at 300–400 paces (approximately 210–280 m) instead of the 100–150 paces (approximately 70–110 m) typical for a smoothbore gun. Such a conversion could not completely replace the existing stock, so by the Crimean War, the Russian infantry emerged with a mixed armament: a large number of smoothbore guns plus a limited number of carbine guns for skirmishers. Compared to the widespread use of rifled rifles (the Enfield 1853 among the British, rifles chambered for the Minié bullet among the French), this quickly had an impact, including at Inkerman.
In addition to converting barrels to rifled ones, Russian gunsmiths were also preparing a second upgrade to their rifles: the transition to a percussion cap system. The Model 1845 rifle was already a percussion rifle: instead of a flint and frizzen, it featured a fire tube with a copper cap attached. Russia kept pace with Europe in this transition, and some flintlock barrels, like those in other armies, were modified to accept caps instead of being completely replaced.
Short Land Brown Bess at the Battle of Jersey, 1781 (John Singleton Copley)
Six thousand shots and a sentence to flint
The most rigorous comparison of flintlock and percussion cap lock systems was conducted on two identical Short Land Pattern muskets from the Brown Bess family. One remained standard, the other was converted to a Manton percussion lock with Shaw copper caps. Each was fired 6000 rounds.
The percussion cap musket misfired six times. Four of these were due to faulty percussion caps, and two were due to a clogged fire tube, which can be cleared with a standard needle. The flintlock musket misfired about a thousand times in the same 6000 rounds fired. That's about 16%, or one misfire every six or seven presses—a catastrophic rate for an infantry line.
Some flintlock misfires occurred even in dry weather. In damp weather, the situation became even worse: the powder powder on the pan became damp, the spark went out, and the flint lost its edge faster. Hunters and soldiers carried leather covers for the flintlock, but even these weren't always effective. The mercury fulminate cap, sealed in a copper cap, proved virtually insensitive to moisture.
Long-term care and the second life of trunks
Technically, the verdict was passed back in the 1820s. By the middle of that decade, the percussion cap had begun to supplant the flintlock, and by the 1830s, it was adopted by almost all but the most conservative military departments. The full transition in most armies was only completed by the 1840s and 1850s: the inertia of the military's reserves, depots, and regulations proved stronger than technology.
But arsenals saved on mass redesigns. The old flintlock was removed or redesigned: a fire tube was installed in place of the pan and frizzen, a priming channel was screwed into the breech, and the hammer was adjusted to strike the primer. For example, the American Model 1816 musket and many of its European contemporaries were modernized in this way. The barrels and stocks continued to serve for another war.
The basic Le Bourgeois lock itself proved remarkably long-lived. It was assembled in a Norman workshop around 1610–1615, and was only decommissioned en masse over two hundred years later. For a mechanism consisting of a dozen parts, a flint, and a pinch of gunpowder on the shelf, this is a rare longevity.
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