The Civil War was a time of great social and political upheaval. It was also a time of great technological change. Inventors and military men devised new types of weapons, such as the repeating rifle and the submarine, that forever changed the way that wars were fought. Even more important were the technologies that did not specifically have to do with the war, like the railroad and the telegraph. Innovations like these did not just change the way people fought wars–they also changed the way people lived.
New Kinds of Weapons
Before the Civil War, infantry soldiers typically carried muskets that held just one bullet at a time. The range of these muskets was about 250 yards. However, a soldier trying to aim and shoot with any accuracy would have to stand much closer to his target, since the weapon’s “effective range” was only about 80 yards. Therefore, armies typically fought battles at a relatively close range.
Did you know? The rifle-musket and the Minié bullet are thought to account for around 90 percent ofCivil Warcasualties.
Rifles, by contrast, had a much greater range than muskets did–a rifle could shoot a bullet up to 1,000 yards–and were more accurate. However, until the 1850s it was nearly impossible to use these guns in battle because, since a rifle’s bullet had roughly the same diameter as its barrel, they took too long to load. (Soldiers sometimes had to pound the bullet into the barrel with a mallet.)
In 1848, a French army officer named Claude Minié invented a cone-shaped lead bullet with a diameter smaller than that of the rifle barrel. Soldiers could load these “Minié balls” quickly, without the aid of ramrods or mallets. Rifles with Minié bullets were more accurate, and therefore deadlier, than muskets were, which forced infantries to change the way they fought: Even troops who were far from the line of fire had to protect themselves by building elaborate trenches and other fortifications.
Rifles with Minié bullets were easy and quick to load, but soldiers still had to pause and reload after each shot. This was inefficient and dangerous. By 1863, however, there was another option: so-called repeating rifles, or weapons that could fire more than one bullet before needing a reload. The most famous of these guns, the Spencer carbine, could fire seven shots in 30 seconds.
Civil War Technology
Like many other Civil War technologies, these weapons were available to Northern troops but not Southern ones: Southern factories had neither the equipment nor the know-how to produce them. “I think the Johnnys [Confederate soldiers] are getting rattled; they are afraid of our repeating rifles,” one Union soldier wrote. “They say we are not fair, that we have guns that we load up on Sunday and shoot all the rest of the week.”
Other newfangled weapons took to the air–for example, Union spies floated above Confederate encampments and battle lines in hydrogen-filled passenger balloons, sending reconnaissance information back to their commanders via telegraph–and to the sea. “Iron-clad” warships prowled up and down the coast, maintaining a Union blockade of Confederate ports.
For their part, Confederate sailors tried to sink these ironclads with submarines. The first of these, the Confederate C.S.S. Hunley, was a metal tube that was 40 feet long, 4 feet across, and held an 8-man crew. In 1864, the Hunley sank the Union blockade ship Housatonic off the coast of Charleston but was itself wrecked in the process.
The Railroad
More important than these advanced weapons were larger-scale technological innovations such as the railroad. Once again, the Union had the advantage. When the war began, there were 22,000 miles of railroad track in the North and just 9,000 in the South, and the North had almost all of the nation’s track and locomotive factories. Furthermore, Northern tracks tended to be “standard gauge,” which meant that any train car could ride on any track. Southern tracks, by contrast, were not standardized, so people and goods frequently had to switch cars as they traveled–an expensive and inefficient system.
Union officials used railroads to move troops and supplies from one place to another. They also used thousands of soldiers to keep tracks and trains safe from Confederate attack.
The Telegraph
Abraham Lincoln was the first president who was able to communicate on the spot with his officers on the battlefield. The White House telegraph office enabled him to monitor battlefield reports, lead real-time strategy meetings and deliver orders to his men. Here, as well, the Confederate army was at a disadvantage: They lacked the technological and industrial ability to conduct such a large-scale communication campaign.
In 1861, the Union Army established the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, led by a young railroad man named Andrew Carnegie. The next year alone, the U.S.M.T.C. trained 1,200 operators, strung 4,000 miles of telegraph wire and sent more than a million messages to and from the battlefield.
Civil War Photography
The Civil War was the first war to be documented through the lens of a camera. However, the era’s photographic process was far too elaborate for candid pictures. Taking and developing photos using the so-called “wet-plate” process was a meticulous, multi-step procedure that required more than one “camera operator” and lots of chemicals and equipment. As a result, the images of the Civil War are not action snapshots: They are portraits and landscapes. It was not until the 20th century that photographers were able to take non-posed pictures on the battlefield.
Technological innovation had an enormous impact on the way people fought the Civil War and on the way they remember it. Many of these inventions have played important roles in military and civilian life ever since.
The American Civil War is one of the most studied and dissected events in our history—but what you don't know may surprise you.
Some of the advances and innovations of the Civil War included mass production of war materiel, rifling of gun barrels and the use of the Minié ball, the advent of repeating firearms and metallic cartridges, transportation railroads with armed locomotives, ironclad warships, submarines, one of the first uses of air ...
This was an important defensive development and increased the range and accuracy of muskets. The Minie bullet made defense even safer. When used in the rifled musket it spun faster, traveled further and was five times more accurate than any single-man weapon.
First, the advent of the rifled barrel extended the battlefield, giving more range and accuracy to the soldier than had ever been provided by smooth-bore weapons. Second was a new bullet that prevented the new rifled muskets from clogging with powder residue.
The Civil War was fought at a time of great technological innovation and new inventions, including the telegraph, the railroad, and even balloons, became part of the conflict. Some of these new inventions, such as ironclads and telegraphic communication, changed warfare forever.
This is the most lethal handgun of the Civil war. It was a . 42 caliber and could hold 9 bullets at once. The LeMat was actually two guns in one because it could fire a single shotgun round with a flip of the switch on the side.
Railroads moved armies faster than before, and iron ships, land mines, hand grenades, and torpedoes made their debut. As reconnaissance balloons took war to the skies, many of the essential elements of modern warfare were in place by 1865.
By the end of the Civil War, John Dahlgren, now a Rear Admiral, was responsible for the development and design of 12-pounder boat howitzers in several weight classifications (small, medium, and light), 20- and 24-pounder howitzers (some, including the 12-pounders, were rifled); 30-, 32-, 50-, 80-, and 150-pounder ...
Whereas a smoothbore musket like the Brown Bess could be expected to accurately hit a target at a distance of several dozen yards, rifled muskets were reasonably accurate at a distance of 500 yards.
The North also had greater industrial capacity. In war, this meant more and better weapons, like cannons. In fact, in 1860, Northern factories made 97% of the nation's firearms. The combined factors of manpower and weaponry might seem to imply that the Union's infantry would dominate the battlefield.
The most important technology in the civil war was the railroad and the railroad telegraph network. (It was the one aspect of the war that got the Prussians excited. The telegraph system grew up with the railroads because capitalization and profit depend on timely and efficient use of lines to move optimum tonnage.
Union soldiers had better arms, and were equipped with newer rifle muskets, which used a hollow conical bullet called a Minie ball, named after its French inventor. Once the war was well underway, the most common guns for both armies were the . 577-caliber long Enfield rifle musket and the .
The arguments against landmine use—at least on the Confederate side—dissipated relatively quickly, and mines came to be viewed as a legitimate, highly-effective, low-cost weapon and methodology of war. Landmine exploding among Union troops at Yorktown, VA. Sketch courtesy of A.R. Waud, Harper's Weekly, May 24, 1862.
Some of the advances and innovations of the Civil War included mass production of war materiel, rifling of gun barrels and the use of the Minié ball, the advent of repeating firearms and metallic cartridges, transportation railroads with armed locomotives, ironclad warships, submarines, one of the first uses of air ...
This dramatically increased the range of the guns that were used during the war, and was further supplemented by the development of rifling, which were grooves carved in the inside of cannon barrels, and this gave a projectile a spin and made the guns more accurate.
Casualty figures for the American Civil War reached staggering proportions, with more than 200,000 soldiers killed and more than 400,000 wounded. The rifle-musket and the Minié bullet are thought to account for around 90 percent of these casualties.
The Springfield rifle was responsible for the most deaths during the war. Another innovation that changed warfare at the time of the Civil war was the Minié ball or the “Minnie bullet” as soldiers in the United States called it. The cylindrical bullet was very accurate over long distances.
Photography was invented not too long before the war. As a result, the Civil War was first major U.S. war to be documented with photographs. Repeating rifles were mostly available to Union troops and gave them a distinct advantage over the South near the end of the war.
The most-used cavalry shoulder arm of the Civil War, the 1859 Sharps Carbine was a reliable and durable breechloader. Over 90,000 Sharps carbines, and a longer infantry version, were produced for Federal forces and fired during virtually every combat action in the Shenandoah Valley.
The real innovation to hand carried Civil War weapons was the rifling of the gun barrel—cutting spiral grooves inside the musket barrel. Also, a French military captain named Minie invented a conical bullet that fit into a cap; it was slightly smaller than the barrel diameter and could be loaded much faster.
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