The idea of the all-in-one cartridge was not a new one, even in the 1850s, for Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, had already issued orders in the early 1600s that his army was to carry shot and powder wrapped together in a cartridge. Two hundred years later men were still biting off the paper to pour the powder, then ramming paper and ball into the barrel.
One development, which originated in the United States and was later emulated by Heckler and Koch in the late twentieth century, was the self-consuming cartridge. A number of inventors, including Samuel Colt and Christian Sharps, laid claim to the idea, but no matter who had the idea first, it was a good one. If the whole of the powder envelope was consumed at firing, no residue would be left to add to the fouling of the barrel. The paper wrapper for the cartridge was therefore soaked in nitrates, making it very combustible. The whole cartridge was dropped into the muzzle (or the chamber of breech loaders) and then rammed with rod (or finger). Only ignition was now needed for the whole item to be consumed. The one problem was the perennial one: paper cartridges were easily damaged. To solve this Sharps came up with the linen cartridge, fired from the Sharps breech-loading rifles and carbines. The cartridge was loaded whole into the breech, and on closing the breech block, it then cut into the rear of the cartridge, exposing the propellant powder. To avoid powder spillage the muzzle needed to be lowered, but this was not difficult. When so loaded, the Maynard tape primer provided instant ignition, and so the process of reloading was much simpler and straightforward than it had been. Naturally, this Sharps system proved very popular among civilians and the military.
The composite cartridge could not have appeared without two things: there was a need for a compact primer, and metallurgy and engineering needed to be able to produce an effective cartridge case. The first problem had been answered with the invention of the percussion cap, which was easily redesigned to form the primer in cartridges. The drawing of brass, perfected by the mid-nineteenth century, solved the other problem, although there were many stopgap products that performed adequately if not magnificently. This allowed manufacturers to make a cartridge of metal that combined igniter, propellant, and bullet in one unit; this in turn led to improved mechanical reloading systems.
Combustible paper cartridges had been in use for some time and were first made as a complete item by Johannes Samuel Pauly, who invented the brass-headed cartridge. Unfortunately the primer in Pauly’s original design was too easily knocked out by handling, and the cartridge itself was too vulnerable to the elements, but the first step had been taken toward the composite metal cartridge. By 1829 Clement Pottet had invented his metallic cartridge, which had a base depression for a fulminate primer, but this was not perfected until 1855, when Pottet introduced threading into the primer pocket to allow the primer to be screwed into the cartridge.
In the meantime, however, to eliminate problems in handling and from the effects of the weather, cartridge designers tried to put the primer within the body of the cartridge itself, and Casimir Lefauchaux patented his pin-fire cartridge in 1832. This cartridge was fired by means of the hammer striking a pin set into the cartridge at the base and was arranged on being struck to come into contact with the cap that was embedded within the body of the cartridge itself. The cap was set on the opposite side of the cartridge case to the pin, so that there was firm resistance from cartridge and breech when the pin was struck.
Although this type of cartridge survived in use until quite late, it was superseded by that of Johann Nikolaus (von) Dreyse, who not only invented the needle gun but also the cartridge to go in it. This was the Dreyse cartridge, in which the primer was fixed at the base of the bullet, ahead of the propellant charge. The “needle” of the rifle was in fact the firing pin, which had to penetrate the propellant charge completely before it could fire the cartridge. At almost the opposite end of this concept was that of John Hanson and William Golden, who applied for a patent for a cartridge in 1841 with no propellant charge. Their cartridge relied upon the fulminate primer to fire the cartridge and act as the propellant in itself. Due to the former cartridge having to be fully penetrated before ignition (soon attended by problems as needles bent, weakened, or broke) and the latter being too weak, they fell by the wayside.
However, once more in France, a new idea surfaced, in which the primer covered the whole base. This was the Flobert cartridge of 1849 (from Nicholas Flobert of Paris) and was in fact the first rimfire. In no time the Americans appeared on the scene in this field, and Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson refined the cartridge so that there was a distinct rim around the base of the cartridge, within which was contained the primer. This was the first improvement, to which they then added a propellant charge, lacking in the Flobert design, which was, however, entirely suitable for civilian fair ground and so-called “lounge” rifles. This was an exceptional advance, but had the fault that the strength of the hammer hitting the rim had to be great enough to compress the cartridge case metal to explode the primer. For this reason military high-power cartridges could not be made this way, but the principle remains in many small bore .22-inch rifles in use up to today.
The way forward had been shown; the arrival of a paper cartridge with a brass head into which was fixed a central percussion cap, similar to Pottet’s patent of 1855, was the start of the final development phase. The cartridge was first introduced in England by George Henry Daw of London and became the type of cartridge used in the first British general service breech loader, the aptly named Snider rifle, invented by the American Jacob Snider and adopted by the British Army for a short period from 1867.
The threads of cartridge design and rifle loading systems were drawing closer at this period, with all modern military thought being devoted to the breech-loading weapon and a suitable cartridge to fire in it. Cartridges of a sort were available, but the primer problem was twofold: it was not always securely fixed and it was a one-shot-only concept, in that primers could not be reloaded. Further, brass cases were expensive, which meant that government treasuries were happier with weapons that did not leave large amounts of wasted brass on ranges or battlefields.
The final step was taken by Charles William Lancaster of England, who produced a drawn metal cartridge, followed by George W. Morse of the United States (who offered a breech loading carbine to the U.S. Army in 1857, which was underpowered by firing a primer-only cartridge), and then almost simultaneously by Colonel Hiram Berdan of the United States (who resigned his commission in 1846 to concentrate on firearms design) and Edward Mounier Boxer (commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1849, and forced to resign from the British Army in 1869 after legal wrangles over his patents). The latter pair of officers designed primers for center-fire cartridges with internal “anvils” and soft outer faces, between which was the fulminate igniter. The firing pin struck and dented the outer face of the primer, thus compressing the fulminate against the anvil, causing it to ignite the propellant charge via flash holes into the cartridge case.
