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In 1842, the Norwegian Armed Forces adopted the breech-loading caplock, the Kammerlader, one of the first instances in which a modern army widely adopted a breech-loading rifle as its main infantry firearm. The Dreyse Zündnadelgewehr (Dreyse needle gun) was a single-shot breech-loading rifle using a rotating bolt to seal the breech
A Japanese swivel breech-loading gun of the time of Oda Nobunaga, 16th century. At the time of development of the first modern breechloaders in the mid-19th century, gunpowder propellant charges for artillery were typically loaded in cloth bags, which combusted totally on firing.
Rotating the crank opens the breech of the weapon, allowing for loading. The use of paper cartridges — a pre-measured amount of gunpowder and a lead bullet wrapped in paper — also sped up the rate of fire. While not as fast as more modern rifles, which use fixed cartridges, the kammerlader was much faster than contemporary muzzle-loading ...
The Springfield Model 1873 was the first standard-issue breech-loading rifle adopted by the United States Army (although the Springfield Model 1866 had seen limited issue to troops along the Bozeman Trail in 1867). The rifle, in both full-length and carbine versions, was widely used in subsequent battles against Native Americans.
The breech was closed by a bolt similar to those of more modern rifles. Amongst the technical features of interest introduced in 1866 on the Chassepot rifle was the method of obturation of the bolt by a segmented rubber ring which expanded under gas pressure and thus sealed the breech when the shot was fired.
The 3.2-inch gun M1897 (81 mm), with its predecessors the M1885 and M1890, was the U.S. Army's first steel, rifled, breech loading field gun.It was the Army's primary field artillery piece in the Spanish–American War, Philippine–American War, and Boxer Rebellion from 1898 to 1902.
The British Army adopted it in 1866 as a conversion system for its ubiquitous Pattern 1853 Enfield muzzle-loading rifles, and used it until 1880 when the Martini–Henry rifle began to supersede it. The British Indian Army used the Snider–Enfield until the end of the nineteenth century.
The first version weighed 32 cwt, followed by the 35 cwt version which introduced a longer and stronger breech-piece. [5] A 32 cwt variant having a horizontal sliding-wedge breech instead of the Armstrong screw with vertical vent-piece was introduced in 1864 as an attempt to address the perceived weaknesses of the screw-breech design. It was ...