The Spark of Genius: Flint and Steel

^{Flintlock used in Revolutionary War.}

Captain John Smith, the friend of Pocahontas, had a long career as a mercenary soldier before he came to America. Once, commanding a few soldiers, he learned that a much larger force of Turks was about to make a night attack.

He had his troops spread out and carry a long piece of rope. At regular inter‑vals along the rope, he fastened a length of lighted match. Then his troops advanced. The Turks, seeing all those matches glowing in the dark, thought a huge force was about to attack them. They retreated.

Thus, Smith managed to take advantage of one of the matchlock’s characteristics. Years later, in Virginia, he demonstrated one of its disadvantages. In 1609, he was carrying a lighted match and seemed to have forgotten that he also had a pocketful of loose gunpowder. He put his hand, with the lighted match, into his pocket. It’s hard to believe an experienced soldier like Smith could be so careless, but he was. Fortunately, the powder wasn’t confined, so it didn’t explode, but Smith was severely burned. While he was laid up, his enemies seized him and sent him off to England to stand trial for alleged misconduct.

Gunpowder does not always have to be confined to explode. A large quantity of gunpowder – nowadays usually called “black powder” – will explode when ignited even when unconfined. Because it can be ignited by the merest spark or even by friction, black powder is a very dangerous substance. Using the matchlock meant manipulating black powder in close proximity to fire. The matchlock priming pan had a cover to minimize exposure, but even so, accidents were frequent.

The matchlock was also dangerous when the match was not lighted. A party of Spanish soldiers learned that the hard way when they approached an Indian village in what is now South Carolina. The soldiers planned to force the Indians to give them corn. Outside the village, some Indians met the soldiers and said they’d be glad to give them food, but the glowing matches made the women of the village nervous. Not wishing to alarm the villagers, the soldiers extinguished their matches and went into village. The villagers then massacred them. Only one man escaped.

Rain was an ever‑present danger for troops armed with matchlocks. A down‑pour could extinguish their matches and leave them defenseless. The matchlock also made a surprise attack at night impossible, as John Smith proved in his mock attack on the Turks. For all of these reasons, in central and western Europe (the area the Muslim Turks called “the Land of War”), there was a fervent search for some way to fire a gun without carrying fire along with it.

There was one attempt even before the matchlock was fully developed. An inventor in Dresden developed something called a Monchbuchse. It was a simple tube with a metal handle underneath it. Along the side was a leaf spring terminating in jaws that held a piece of flint. The spring pressed the flint down on a steel rasp equipped with a handle at one end. The gunner held the handle of the gun in one hand and pulled back the rasp with the other. That produced sparks that ignited the primer and fired the gun. Striking a piece of flint on steel to make sparks fall on dry tinder had long been used to start fires in Europe, but the Dresden invention was the first to use the principle to fire a gun. The Monchbuchse, however, was even clumsier than the hand cannon, so it never caught on.

Somewhere in northern Italy or southern Germany, somebody in the late 15th or early 16th century came up with a more practical gun. This was the wheel lock. It had a jaw that pressed a piece of iron pirates (the “fool’s gold” of gold prospectors) on a roughened steel wheel. The wheel revolved in the priming pan.

The wheel was connected to a crank, attached to a short chain that was connected to a strong leaf spring. The gunner loaded his weapon, put powder in the pan, and wound up the wheel with a wrench. When he pressed the trigger, a shower of sparks fell in the pan. Ignition, unlike that for the slightly later flintlock, was almost instantaneous. Pyrites were used instead of flints, because pyrites are softer.

Continued use of flint would wear out the roughened steel wheel quickly.

The wheel lock had two disadvantages because the mechanism was more complicated than that of any weapon ever seen before. It was expensive, and it was liable to break down. It was expensive because precision machining was unknown in the 16th and 17th centuries. Wheel locks were all handmade by the most skilled of craftsmen, and they were more prone to failure than the simple matchlock.

Expense was the biggest drawback. Even so, wheel lock pistols were wel‑comed by the cavalry. Although matchlock pistols were made in Japan, such weapons were not popular in Europe. Matchlock muskets and arquebuses were dangerous enough when used by slowly walking infantry. A matchlock on a galloping horse was something few European warriors wanted. Loading a wheel lock pistol on a trotting or galloping horse would be a nightmare. European cavalry, largely descendants of Europe’s knightly class, could afford wheel locks.

They adopted the new weapon and developed a new tactic. It was called the caracole: a column of cavalry, each man carrying two to six pistols, would ride up to a formation of pikemen and, just out of pike range, fire their pistols, and ride to the rear of the column, reloading as they rode.

At its introduction, the caracole was devastating. Then the infantry learned to move musketeers up in front of the pikemen and fire musket volleys before the cavalry got within pistol range.

Meanwhile, the infantry were still using the cheap and vulnerable matchlock.

The idea of producing sparks with a single sharp blow instead of a spinning wheel seemed to occur in many parts of Europe soon after the introduction of the wheel lock.

From Scandinavia came the Baltic or Swedish snap lock. The flint in this gun fitted on a long curved device that corresponds to the cock of the better‑known flintlock. A leaf spring pushing up on the heel of the cock drove it into the pivoted steel and struck sparks. Sometimes the steel was attached to the pan cover, so that it opened just as sparks appeared. More often, it had to be opened separately.

From the Netherlands came the snaphaunce, its name derived from the Dutch words for snapping hen. This looked much like the standard flintlock. It had a mainspring inside the lock plate and flint‑holding cock that looked like the flintlock’s. The priming pan cover, however, was not attached to the steel.

In crude specimens, it was opened manually before firing; in most, levers connected to the cock pushed it open as the flint fell.

Spain contributed the miquelet. This had a huge cock powered by an external mainspring. It drove the flint against a short, straight steel that was connected to the pan cover, like the fully developed flintlock. The miquelet looked clumsy, but it was extremely reliable – the most reliable of any of the flintlock variations.

The individualistic Scots developed their own version of a flint‑fired gun. It had a lateral‑moving sear like the snaphaunce, and in early versions the steel is not connected to the pan cover. Later guns had the steel and pan cover in one piece like the flintlock but retained the lateral sear. One peculiarity of the Scottish weapon was its lack of a trigger guard.

The weapon that Americans think of when they hear flintlock was developed in France, probably by Marin le Bourgeoys, a gunsmith of Lisieux, sometime between 1610 and 1615. It combined the best features of the snaphaunce and the miquelet and rapidly spread all over Europe and the Americas. Instead of the lateral seal of all the other “firelocks” (including the wheel lock), le Bourgeoys invented a vertical sear. This made a half‑cock position – a great safety feature – possible and made the action more durable. After le Bourgeoys, improvements on the flintlock were mostly details, such as making the pan cover fit the pan so closely the gun could fire in a driving rain. The flintlock was used on smoothbore muskets, rifles, pistols, and shotguns, practically unchanged from le Bourgeoys’s invention for two centuries. Its simplicity, durability, and utility in all kinds of environments made possible, among other things, the settlement of America and the independence of the American colonies.