Between 1765 and 1780, General Gribauval drastically reorganized the French artillery, separating the field, siege and fortress services; organized siege trains; made the 12-pounder the heaviest field piece and reduced the weight of all field guns and carriages; and adopted he howitzer and mortar for field and siege purposes. Gribauval's work laid the foundation for Napoleon's success. Among other great improvements, Gribauval introduced tangent sights, elevating screws and canister or case shot —innovations that were not generally adopted in other services for nearly half a cen tury. In 1782, Sir Charles Douglass fitted flint locks on the guns of the ship he commanded but as they were unsatisfactory in windy weather they were not exclusively adopted in the British navy for many years. At the beginning of the 19th century, aside from notches on the muzzle and base-ring, gunsights were not common. Dispart sights were sup plied but it does not appear that they were regarded as very useful. In 1801, gun sights allowing for range were proposed to Nelson. He said he would be glad to examine them but hoped that he would always get near enough to the enemy to render sights unnecessary. They were not fitted to his guns and for lack of them, a few days later, the British were unable to carry on a successful long range battle with the forts at Elsinore.
In 1807, an English clergyman by the name of Forsyth discovered a percussion composition but its importance was evidently unappreciated for it did not come into general use for a quarter of a century. The British navy adopted improved gun sights slowly and reluctantly until after the War of 1812. Nor does it appear that they were officially adopted in the navy of the United States. But it has been stated that many American officers devised sights of improved pattern which they used on their own guns with great success. If these statements are correct, the general superiority of American naval gunnery in the War of 1812 is readily accounted for, as well as the occasional equality or inferiority to the gunnery of the British.
After the close of the Napoleonic wars and of the War of 1812, the occurrences and inci dents of those wars were closely studied and the advantages of large guns over small ones became more appreciated. Attention was di rected to improved sighting; to gun-locks; to mounts for guns of all kinds; to improved design of guns; to the production of better gun powder, etc. The people at large, however, were weary of war and of matters pertaining to war and the adoption of the new ideas pro ceeded slowly. In 1821, General Paixhans, an artillery officer of the French army, published his celebrated work entitled the
of a single calibre of guns for each ship and that of the largest size practicable, and a sub stitution of shell for solid shot. His ideas were not fully carried out until the appearance of the Monitor in the American Civil War and the principle of a single calibre was not defi nitely adopted until the general acceptance of the all-big-gun type of battleship in 1905. The first large shell guns made from Paixhans' designs were completed about 1824. Though shell had been used in land guns of short length for several centuries, smashing or penetrating power was not sought and the walls of such projectiles were comparatively thin. Paix hans' shells were of a new type suited to the new conditions. The shell gun made its way slowly but steadily and other improvements followed in its train. In 1828 percussion locks were fitted to the guns of the U.S.S. Vandalia, but the violent recoil of the hammer prevented their general adoption in the United States navy until 1842, when Hidden patented his lock with a slotted pivot which permitted the ham mer to be drawn clear of the vent as soon as it struck its blow. The French produced an efficient percussion lock about 1832, but the British continued to use the flint-lock until 1845 when they adopted a modification of Hid den's. In the meantime, Colonel Jure of the French artillery brought out his improved gun sights in which the front sight remained fixed while the rear one was adjustable for any given range.
General Paixhans had predicted that the adoption of the shell gun would force the application of armor to ships' sides. When the shell-gun idea had become settled, he therefore proposed (1841) plans for armored ships and further predicted that the adoption of armor would force the use of rifled guns. The first armored vessels were finished in 1854 and in the same year the French completed several 6.5-inch cast-iron rifles. These were tried out in actual service in the Crimean War and were so much superior in range, destructive power and general efficiency to the old smooth-bores that rifled guns were at once adopted not only by the French navy but by the navies of all the European powers; and experiments with rifled guns for land service of all kinds were soon undertaken. The difficulty of loading via the muzzle tight-fitting projectiles possessed of adequate means of effecting rotation re newed the attempt to solve the problem of breech-loading. In 1845, Cavalli, in Italy, and in 1846, Wahrendorff, in Austria, brought out sliding-wedge breech-blocks of much merit and they would probably have been developed to success had the breech-loading rifle then been generally regarded as inevitably the gun of the future. The Wahrendorff design was practically identical with that adopted and still used by Krupp. The result of the breech loading experiments, 1855-60, resulted in the satisfactory development of the sliding wedge system by Krupp in 1860-61 and the interrupted screw system by the French about the same time. The latter was originally an American invention which the French improved and both the French and Krupp systems were rendered practicable by the use of the Broadwell nn which was invented by an American officer of that name.