Minié Ball: The Hollow-Based Bullet That Replaced the Loading Mallet

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Black powder fouled rifled barrels so quickly that soldiers sometimes carried wooden mallets to hammer bullets down the bore, which is why most infantry kept fast but inaccurate smoothbore muskets. Henri-Gustave Delvigne and others tried bullets that were rammed until they deformed into the rifling, but the effort ruined their shape. In 1849 Claude-Étienne Minié introduced an undersized conical bullet with grease-filled grooves and a hollow base fitted with an iron plug, so it dropped freely down the barrel and expanded on firing to seal against the grooves.

At the Harpers Ferry Armory, James H. Burton removed the iron plug by deepening the cavity so the powder gas alone flared the skirt, producing a lighter, cheaper bullet that became the standard round of the Civil War. Trained soldiers could now fire about three aimed shots a minute. The episode then follows the medical cost: a heavy spinning wedge of lead that rarely stayed in the body, shattered bones into fragments, and left amputation as the usual treatment.

The bullet's grease was forced outward on firing, scraping away fouling from the previous shot.
The Minié design armed the Springfield Model 1861 and the British Pattern 1853 Enfield.
Austria adopted Lorenz's compression bullet, while Britain rejected Wilkinson's version and used the Pritchett ball.
Round musket balls often deflected off bone and lodged in tissue; the conical ball cut straight through.
A private of the 53rd North Carolina, shot in the head during Jubal Early's July 1864 raid, seemed to recover before dying on the 16th day.

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