The ball thus went
easily down to the shoulders of the chamber containing the charge.
Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves.
But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the
chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world
to an erratic and fruitless career.
In 1828 a second Frenchman took the tube in hand. Colonel Thouvenin
abandoned the chamber, and filled up much of the place it had occupied
with a cylindrical steel pillar, or _tige_, which projected from the
breech-plug longitudinally into the barrel. This formed a little anvil
whereon the bullet was to be beaten into the grooves. But the bottom
was flattened, and the powder acted only on the periphery of the ball
instead of the centre, tending thus to give it an oblique direction.
Here Delvigne picked up the weapon for another trial. He accomplished
far the most important advance yet seen--an advance relatively as
great as Watt's separate condenser in the steam-engine. He retained
the _tige_, but he _changed the spherical ball into a cylinder with a
conical point_, as we now have it. In this he, in effect, reached the
ultimatum of progress as regards the general form of the projectile.
He assimilated it to Newton's solid of least resistance. That primeval
missile, the arrow, had for unnumbered centuries presented to the
eyes of men an illustration of a simple truth which scientific formula
succeeded, scarce a couple of centuries since, in evolving.
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