European and American armies embraced the new percussion, or caplock, system because of its reliability. The British army adopted it in 1834 after comparing the results of 6,000 test rounds fired from flintlock and percussion firearms. The flintlocks misfired 922 times (15 percent of the time), while only 36 (0.6 percent) of the percussion weapons misfired. The U.S. Army followed the British lead and adopted the percussion system in 1841. The following year, American armories began building smoothbore percussion muskets and converting older flintlocks to percussion weapons. Progress was slow, however, and the vast majority of American soldiers carried flintlocks in the Mexican War of 1846 to 1848. Even 13 years later, at the beginning of the Civil War, Union and Confederate authorities issued smoothbore flintlock muskets to thousands of unlucky soldiers.

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The percussion ignition system made infantry weapons fire more reliably, but there remained the challenge of coupling easy loading with long range and accuracy. And it was here that the minié bullet entered the scene. Developed over a generation, its final design was the fruit of independent work by men from Great Britain, France, and the United States.

Great Britain took the lead. As early as 1818, Captain John Norton of the British 34th Infantry began experimenting with bullet design. Norton shaped the nose of his new bullet like a cone with a rounded point and made its cylindrical base hollow. The hollow base was the bullet’s definitive feature. It allowed the bullet to be cast a bit narrower than the bore’s diameter to allow easy loading, since when the gun was fired, the pressure expanded the base to fit the barrel’s rifling grooves tightly. The inspiration for the bullet came to Norton while he was stationed in India and observed natives using blowpipes as weapons. He discovered that the base of the blowpipe arrow was made of elastic locus pith. When the natives blew, the pith expanded to form an airtight seal against the pipe’s inner walls. It seemed a small jump from there to making a bullet with a base that would expand from the pressure of firing.

In 1836, a London gunsmith named William Greener found a way to improve Norton’s design for expansion of the bullet base. He inserted into the hollow area a wooden plug that would push forward when the gun was fired and force the bullet’s base outward. The result was that the bullet fit more uniformly inside the barrel, producing more reliable and accurate fire.

Norton’s bullet with Greener’s refinement eventually came before the British army for approval for use in the field, but the army’s old-school officers rejected it. It was an overly conservative decision that squandered the opportunity to develop this innovative design into a truly remarkable weapon.

Several years after Norton had begun developing his hollow-base bullet, French weapons experts began working on a similar design. Eventually, three French army officers would share the credit for what would become the minié bullet: Captain Henri-Gustave Delvigne, Colonel Louis-Etienne de Thouvenin, and Captain Claude-Etienne Minié.

Delvigne led the way when he designed a muzzleloading rifle to fire a new type of bullet. In 1826, Delvigne built a unique rifle barrel with an independent gunpowder chamber at its breech. This chamber was separated from the rest of the barrel by a strong lip, beyond which the powder could pass, but not the bullet. In the earliest models, after the chamber was filled with gunpowder, Delvigne rammed a standard soft, round lead ball down the barrel and pounded it against the lip with the ramrod until it flattened just enough to grip the rifling grooves. He soon discovered, however, that the pounding disfigured the ball and greatly reduced its accuracy, so he designed an elongated, cylindrical bullet with a flat base that would expand more evenly under the ramrod blows. In 1840, Delvigne even received a patent for an explosive bullet of this general design. (Imagine pounding that down a rifle barrel!) In time, Delvigne’s design proved unsuitable for general military use; the powder chamber quickly became clogged, and the bullet still ended up too deformed for accurate flight.

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