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Intro

In the muzzleloader field, there are always 3 words that are very often used: musket, rifle and rifled musket. In fact, the 3 words refer to the 3 different kinds of muzzleloaders respectively so in this video/article let’s try to figure out what are the differences between the 3 kinds of muzzleloaders.

Musket

Based on the timeline, first of all let’s start from this word, musket. If we mention the word musket, we will have to mention the word arquebus first. Originally arquebus referred to "a hand-gun with a hook-like projection or lug on its under surface, useful for steadying it against battlements or other objects when firing". Arquebus often had a shoulder stock, priming pan, and matchlock mechanism in the late 15th century. So until this moment, we finally got the first kind of firearm that was equipped with a trigger system. Briefly, this is arquebus.

With more and more arquebus applied in the battles, more and more soldiers also wore heavier armors and the armors made the soldiers get better defense. Because of the heavier armors, the military of the lords might want more powerful firearms and finally they created the heavy arquebus that should appear in Europe by 1521. In the same year, the musket referred to this kind of heavy arquebus.

However, this meaning of musket should be the early explanation. So it’s still different with the word musket nowadays. The watershed between the early musket and modern musket should be the years from the 17th century and the 18th century. We know that during the years the volley firing was the most important strategy. Plus other historical factors in the military field the people gradually stopped to focus on the heavy armors, even though it was temporary until the heavy armor evolved into the bulletproof vest.

Because of the decline of heavy armor, the heavy arquebus also died out together. But the term “musket” was kept. Thus, basically we should get the modern meaning of musket at this moment. In other words, from this moment, the term musket replaced the term arquebus as a general term for “shoulder arms” fire weapons. Further speaking, gradually the term musket also moved to a word that has a looser definition. Meanwhile since most of the firearms before the 19th century were the guns that had the smoothbore barrel, nowadays we can see when communicating on the Internet, the word musket always refers to smooth-bore muzzleloaders.

Rifled Musket

Then, when the time was in the 1850s, more muzzleloaders started to use rifled barrels. But in the years, there still were many smooth-bore muzzleloaders, also known as the muskets in the army. So the people got an idea to get more guns that could have a rifled barrel and at the same time they could save money as well. Finally rifled muskets appeared, such as the Springfield Model 1855. The people used the new rifled barrel to replace the original smooth-bore barrel and added a new iron sight because the rifled barrel made the muzzleloader have better range. In addition, most rifled-muskets could use the Minie balls. Meanwhile the Minie ball tech got more and more mature so it also pushed the development of the rifled musket to gradually replace the smoothbore musket.

(*Honestly, the part of “rifled musket/rifle musket” is my speculation so there might be some mistakes that I didn’t notice. But basically the “rifled musket” and “rifle musket” were very similar categories and both were the transition from the smooth-bore musket to the real “rifled” firearms. )

Compared with the guns designed-from-scratch that had a rifled barrel, the rifled musket, as a modified muzzleloader, could not be as accurate as the designed-from-scratch rifles. But the rifled musket still was better than a smoothbore musket.

At the same time, there was another term, the rifle-musket, such as British Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle-musket. The rifle-musket is very similar to the rifled musket. But after studying some history information, I find that the rifle-musket might be a kind of originally new-designed gun. So the rifled musket was more like a modified musket that had a rifled barrel and the rifle-musket was more like a designed-from-scratch gun that also had a rifled barrel. But not only the rifled musket but also the rifle-musket, both kinds of guns were based on the old type musket. So we can see that the length of rifled muskets and rifle-muskets was as long as the length of old muskets. For example, the barrel length of Springfield Model 1855 was 40 inches or 1 meter long and the whole length was 56 inches or 1.4 meter long. The most typical musket, Brown Bess musket’s barrel length was 42 to 46 inches and 1.07 to 1.17 meter long, the whole length was around 58.5 inches and 1.49 meter long.

Rifle

Finally we can talk about this term “rifle”. In the last video/article, we talked about the famous Mississippi rifle. So this part of today’s video/article also is an expanded content for the last video/article.

In fact, in the end of the 18th century and the early part of the 19th century the rifle had been applied in battlefield or hunting scenes. Such as the Pattern 1800 Infantry Rifle, also known as the Baker rifle used by the British Armed Forces from 1801 to 1837.

At first, it was not that every soldier could get a rifle, basically only the designated men could use the rifle as a sharpshooter. In the early part of the 19th century, the world didn’t have Minie balls and didn’t have smokeless gunpowder so the rifle must be regularly cleaned. For example, the Baker rifle had a cleaning kit stored in the "butt-trap" or patch box, if the baker rifles without regular cleaning, gunpowder fouling would build up in the rifling grooves, and the weapon became much slower to load and less accurate. But it was worth mentioning that the rifle usually was shorter than the musket, rifled musket and rifle-musket.

With the time going, thanks to development of new bullet tech, like the new Minie ball, the lower reloading speed was no longer the shortcoming of rifles. Additionally in the 1860s, even though some rifles had very obvious short barrels, generally the accuracy wasn’t lost. Then the rifle entered the next stage and that was the breech-loading, repeating and smokeless powder infantry gun’s time and the longer musket, rifled-musket, rifle-musket became the old fashioned.

In fact, not all of the rifles were a kind of short muzzleloader. Actually there was a long type rifle in history and it was the famous firearm, the long rifle. The long rifle was made popular by German gunsmiths. Many German gunsmiths immigrated to America and brought the long rifle technology and rifling tech to America. The long rifle made it an ideal tool for hunting wildlife for food in the new continent. Even the long rifle helped the American people to win the American Revolution War and became an iconic firearm of the United States.