What was the name of the gun that was cast iron and had the large reinforcing band at the rear. I think it was called a rifle and the name was of the inventor (an Army Officer?) thanks.
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What was the name of the gun that was cast iron and had the large reinforcing band at the rear. I think it was called a rifle and the name was of the inventor (an Army Officer?) thanks.
The inventor and name-sake was Capt. Robert Parker Parrott. He resigned from the Army and became Superintendent of West Point Foundry, Cold Spring, NY in 1836. He invented his rifled gun and the shells it fired in 1860, patented them in 1861. The tube was cast iron with a forge-welded wrought iron breech reinforce band.
The Parrott Rifle, while hardly the best rifled artillery piece of the Civil War...had the advantage of being easy and cheap to produce, very effective, and became the main-stay of field artillery in the conflict as a result.
The most common smooth bore gun was the Napoleon -- named for Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III), the emperor of France at the time. Confederate batteries tended to have both smooth bores and rifled guns, while Union batteries were mostly either smoothbore or rifled.
X2 that cannon was the parrot rifle. Think I read there was a design prob with them, that caused the rear reenforcment ring to split alot. Actually have seen a few parrot barrels on display that had the breach area had ruptured for what ever reason.
Picking nits....the most common field smoothbore was the US Ordnance M1857 Bronze 12 pdr. Technically, a Napoleon was a 6 pdr at the max. But like the terms "Shrapnel" and "Kleenex", it was morphed into a generic term for ANY smoothbore field piece...incorrectly.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vern Humphrey
Confederate batteries generally had whatever they could get their hands on.....much of it obsolescent sweepings from the various Federal Arsenals they appropriated at the start of the war. They produced a copy of the Parrott as well as the Brooke...but not many of either.
FWIW, the rifled field gun was the last addition that caused the horror show that the Civil War became, not due to any real increase in range or accuracy....but by a 3-fold increase in lethality! The rifling allowed shells to be cylindrical rather spherical, increasing the throw-weight by at least a factor of 3, effectively tripling the weapon's lethality. In addition, the fact that the rifled shell would stay oriented in a single plane allowed the first use of practical contact fusing rather than timed fuses that had typified shells in prior conflicts. To his dying day, Gen Henry Hunt, Chief of Artillery, Army of the Potomac insisted that his guns alone could have broken up Picket's Charge at Gettysburg had his 2nd Corps gunners not been ordered to engage the Confederate artillery in counter-battery fire earlier by Gen Hancock, expending all their long-range ordnance.
Only in the larger examples, generally over 6.5". There were numerous failures in the 200 pdr (8") Parrott's, but later analysis indicated that the problem was not with the gun, but the shells. The shells were prematurely detonating in the bore, fracturing the cast iron tube through the breech at the touch-hole. The 300 pdr. (10") Parrotts had similar shell failures, but they tended to blow the muzzle-area of the tubes off rather than the breech. The gunners would simply chisel the fractured areas smooth to permit loading, and continued to fire the massive rifles. In one instance on Morris Island, the muzzle was blown off the 10" Parrott rifle by defective shells three times before the gun was finally too damaged to fire! Gunners in those days were made of very stern stuff!Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Wolff
Thanks for the clarification. I had seen field pieces damaged at the rear, but have read somewhere about a design problem with them, but dont recall what size it refered to.
As for firing guns whose barrels kept getting shorter... least they wernt wasteful lol.
Used to be a gunner for the 140th NY artillery for civil war reenacting years ago (think they since merged with another unit), and we had a battery of 3 parrots. Alot easier to lug around than the napoleons, easier to keep clean, but didnt have the bark of a napoleon :)
It's true that the Confederate ARMY had whatever it could get its hands on, but it was perfectly possible to pool weapons and issue like weapons to batteries. The Union Army did that, the Confederates did not. One consequence of that was that it complicated the Confederate battlefield ammunition resupply problem.Quote:
Confederate batteries generally had whatever they could get their hands on.....much of it obsolescent sweepings from the various Federal Arsenals they appropriated at the start of the war. They produced a copy of the Parrott as well as the Brooke...but not many of either.
Without question Vern, but a lot of it went to the very foundation of the Confederacy....States Rights!
Unlike the Federal forces, the Confederate Gub'mint didn't own those guns, the STATES did, and in some cases (militia groups), the individual gunners!. Once a battery was organized and equipped by a state or a community, it was pretty much inviolate! E. Porter Alexander tried on NUMEROUS occasions to re-organize the various hodge-podge of guns in his batteries in 1862, only to start gigantic sh*t-storms with the state governors, particular John Letcher of Virginia and Joe Brown of Georgia over the attempted THEFT of state property by the central government! It was Robert E. Lee, then military adviser to Jefferson Davis that quietly told Alexander that the artillery re-organization he proposed was simply a political impossibility, and that he'd better cook up a way to work with what he had. Porter then did the best he could, organizing Batteries with as many similar weapons as he could get away with. Yes, it was a logistical nightmare....but then it was only one of many such handicaps the Confederate Armies were saddled with. This single example of military idiocy gives a great deal of validity to one of the epitaphs of the Confederacy, "Died of a Theory!"
The Parrott was well liked, but the mainstay of the U.S. field artillery and arguably the best field gun of the Civil War was the 3" Ordnance Rifle.
FWIW, 20 pdr Parrott rifle Serial No. 1 is on the square in Hanover, PA.
Jim
Am I mistaken or didn't the Confederacy nationalize the railroads? They did it to standardize the rail gauge. So much for States Rights.Quote:
Originally Posted by John Kepler
Based on my expierence & observation of both original & repro Civil War field guns firing period style ammunition at at the NSSA national matches, and at the Grayling, Mi. Long range artillery matches http://www.museumandcollector.com/grayling.html
The Parrott rifle will consistantly out shoot the Ordnance rifle. The weight of the two tubes are aproximately the same, so the belief that the Ordnance rifle was a better gun can only be because the wrought iron Ordnance rifle didn't have those occasional problems of bursting like the cast iron Parrotts did.
Performance of cannon in N-SSA competition is HIGHLY misleading due to restrictions on the construction of the projectile as well as the reduced propellant charges simple prudence forces on 140 year-old metallurgy. Not saying you're wrong....just that I've been there, done that, got the t-shirt more than 40 years ago, and learned that what works best within the rules extant may or may not mean much! Hint: the Parrott shell design ALWAYS worked better within the N-SSA rule format than any attempt at a Schenkl!
The railroads were owned by private enterprise, not the States. Nationalizing them, something the Federal government did (sort of) as well, (also considering that most of them were owned by Northern interests made confiscating them MUCH more acceptable), was one hell of a lot easier politically than touching property owned by the States!Quote:
Originally Posted by limazulu
The numbers disagree with you rather unequivocally. There were at least 6 Parrott Field Rifles for every M1861 3" Ordnance Rifle. The M1861 3" Rifle was a difficult and VERY costly gun to manufacture, requiring extensive machining, massive amounts of forge-work and many, many highly skilled man-hours to build. The Parrott, like the M4 Sherman tank of a later conflict, had the massive advantage of being more than adequate to the task at hand, and far easier to build in quantity. To quote Joe Stalin, "Quantity has a quality all it's own!". The Parrott epitomized that simple maxim!Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim K
Maybe not the best rifle of the Civil War, but based on the numbers, the most significant.
I agree with your statement regarding the NSSA (35 yrs as a member, firing cannon most of them) loads. But my observations are also based on the expierence of firing 1200 yds using service loads at Camp Grayling.:bow:Quote:
Originally Posted by John Kepler
One of the "neat" things about the Parrot Rifle was the way it was made:
The tube and breech re-enforcement band were separate castings. The tube was machined on the OUTSIDE while the re-enforcing band was machined on the INSIDE. The whole point of the mahining was so that the Interior Diameter of the re-enforcing band was slightly SMALLER in diameter than that of the rear of the tube.
Then the re-enforcing band was heated to almost a white hot (the hot metal expanded) and slipped over the rear of the cool tube. When the re-enforcing band cooled is was solidly "locked" on to the rear of the tube. Then the "Touch-hole" was drilled thru to the interior of the bore.
You gotta admit, that is a unique way to make a cannon.
Not trying to be anal, but the reinforce wasn't cast, and you've only got Parrott's process kinda right.
The main tube was cast solid and bored like most cannon and the outside turned in a lathe to final shape. The reinforce was made from a wedge-shaped billet of wrought-iron that was heated and bent around a mandrel, re-heated, and forge-welded/hammered into a cylinder. I can find no reference to the reinforce being internally bored/machined, but it's highly likely. However, the above procedure was largely the same with British rifles such as the Blakely, Whitworth, and Armstrong and the American Waird and the Confederate Brooke....but not the Parrott!
The basis of Parrott's patents revolved around how he applied the wrought iron reinforce. In Parrott's process, the bored (or at least pilot-bored) tube casting was placed in a lathe and the barrel continuously rotated. The barrel was also cooled internally during the application process with water. While under rotation, the heated reinforce (at a "bright cherry", roughly 2000 F rather than "white-hot") was pushed onto the barrel tube with a hydraulic press and then allowed to air-cool to a "red iron" temp (1000 F). Parrott's contention was that rotating the barrel while the reinforce cooled while keeping the temperature of the barrel low and also uniform, made for a much more complete and effective "gripping" of the barrel by the reinforce, while reducing the stresses induced in the finished tube.
From an engineering/metallurgical perspective, the process is valid, even if the "benefits" over more conventional application processes are probably overstated.
OK thanks. I thought each state established the rail guage and not the individual private company as the companies owned rail lines that went across state lines and had to haul freight over different gauge rails. The Conderacy wanted a standard gauge for the lines and ignored the States authority to set the gauge and standardized it.Quote:
Originally Posted by John Kepler
There were certainly more Parrott rifles than Ordnance rifles, but that is confusing quantity with quality. I don't really feel qualified to judge, but a number of artillery experts at the time (many of them on the receiving end of Federal shell fire) felt that the Ordnance Rifle was the best overall.
Jim
I can't disagree with you....though I could make a make a fairly strong case for the Wiard!Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim K
A real simple question and I (and others, Im sure) have recieved a real education on civil war cannon. Thanks, guys! I would love to go to Grayling this weekend but have to go to gdauters wedding, further north. Web site dates were very confusing!