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Concept
Musket
Summary
A musket is a muzzle-loaded long gun that appeared as a smoothbore weapon in the early 16th century, at first as a heavier variant of the arquebus, capable of penetrating plate armour. By the mid-16th century, this type of musket gradually disappeared as the use of heavy armour declined, but musket continued as the generic term for smoothbore long guns until the mid-19th century. In turn, this style of musket was retired in the 19th century when rifled muskets (simply called rifles in modern terminology) using the Minié ball (invented by Claude-Étienne Minié in 1849) became common. The development of breech-loading firearms using self-contained cartridges (introduced by Casimir Lefaucheux in 1835) and the first reliable repeating rifles produced by Winchester Repeating Arms Company in 1860 also led to their demise. By the time that repeating rifles became common, they were known as simply "rifles", ending the era of the musket.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, firearms were often named after animals, and the word musket derived from the French word mousquette, which is a male sparrowhawk. An alternative theory is that derives from the 16th-century French mousquet, -ette, from the Italian moschetti, -etta, meaning the bolt of a crossbow. The Italian moschetti is a diminutive of mosca, a fly.
The first recorded usage of the term "musket" or moschetti appeared in Europe in the year 1499. Evidence of the musket as a type of firearm does not appear until 1521 when it was used to describe a heavy arquebus capable of penetrating heavy armour. This version of the musket fell out of use after the mid-16th century with the decline of heavy armour; however, the term itself stuck around as a general descriptor for "shoulder arms" fire weapons into the 19th century. The differences between the arquebus and musket post-16th century are therefore not entirely clear, and the two have been used interchangeably on several occasions. According to historian David A.
Official source
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