Talk:Minié ball

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[edit] Naming

I saw that this article was moved to add the accent. I want to move it back.

While the inventor's name was "Minié," my experience is that American usage is ovewhelmingly "minnie ball" or "minie ball", and that the ACW was the only significant conflict in which the invention was used, and references to it are ovewelmingly likely to be from such articles. It is not uncommon for American English to spell the name of an eponymous invention differently than the inventor spells his own name, and I think that is the case here. The debate over accents in proper names in Wikipedia titles aside, I think that this is an instance of overcorrection that forces the majority of articles to link via the redirect (which will be turned into a piped link, and then someone will "correct" the link), or to use a spelling that is foreign to the era and area under discussion, which misleads the reader.

Since article naming issues seem to provoke edit wars, I want to try to develop a consensus first. Was actual evidence of usage considered, or was the move reflexive? Robert A West 18:11, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

I saw it spelt as such in the novel The Guns of the South, and went to find it on Wikipedia out of curiosity. Not finding it at "Minié ball," I tried "Minie ball," found it, did a Google search and saw many others are spelling it with the accent mark (unfortunately Google is "smart" enough nowadays to include accentless variants in searches for terms containing accent marks, so you have to sift through accentless spellings to find them), so I moved the article.

Well, there certainly should have been a redirect from Minié ball to Minie ball at minimum. I am surprised there wasn't. Robert A West 23:46, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

I do notice that Google turns up 19,900 results for "minie ball" and 21,500 for "minié ball", so I'm thinking the difference there is the accent-only spellings. So it's rare, but by no means unheard of. Considering I came to the article looking for information about it in the first place, I can't say which spelling is correct, but there's some evidence of usage.

  — J’raxis (T) 01:14:22, 2005-08-14 (UTC)

Thanks. I will put it on my list of "Things to look at when I get a chance." The lack of references is really more troubling. Robert A West 23:44, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Technical issue, design of original minie ball:

If memory serves the "original" minie ball had a tiny iron plug in the base to force expansion and it was only after the Crimean War experience that the armorers found that gas pressure from powder explosion alone would reliably expand the bullets skirt to fit the rifling. This would be pre-civil war, I think..

Can anyone verify this? I am reluctant to change the article right now but would like to call this to someones attention since it is of historical interest

Thanx

WarLord 23:25, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I found this article:

[1]]Weaponry: The Rifle-Musket and the Minié Ball

This article was written by Allan W. Howey and originally published in the October 1999 issue of Civil War Times Magazine.

snipped...

Delvigne's developments inspired Minié, who had served with the French Chasseurs in several African campaigns, to do further work toward making an efficient, effective bullet. In 1849, he came up with one that more closely resembled Norton's than Delvigne's. Like Norton's bullet, Minié's had a hollow cylindrical base and a rounded conical nose. Minié also incorporated a plug in the bullet's hollow base to assist expansion, just as Greener had done to Norton's design. Instead of a wooden plug, however, Minié used an iron cup, which in effect served the same purpose as Thouvenin's metal post. The explosion of the gunpowder would drive the iron cup forward and expand the bullet's base to fit the rifling grooves snugly.

By this point in the story, it should not be surprising to learn that the French army never adopted the new bullet. It took the British army to use it in their new 1851 Enfield rifles, paying Minié 20,000 pounds for his patent. The army also had to pay Greener 1,000 pounds, after he won a patent infringement lawsuit over the bullet's plug design. The bullet as it would be used by the soldiers in blue and gray was now virtually complete. It had also acquired the name that stuck among English-speaking troops--minnie ball, even though the captain's French surname was properly pronounced min-YAY and his innovation was not a ball but a cone-shaped bullet.

In the early 1850s, James H. Burton, a master armorer at the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, gave the minié bullet the form it would take into the Civil War. By lengthening the bullet slightly and thinning the walls of its hollow base, Burton was able to dispense with the iron plug. The base of the improved bullet expanded just as well as Minié's but was much easier and cheaper to mass-produce. By the mid-1850s, the fully evolved minié bullet made it possible to build an infantry weapon as easy to load as the old smoothbore musket but with the accuracy and range of a rifle. The term rifle-musket reflected the weapon's lethal combination of attributes.

U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, adopted the rifle-musket and minié bullet for the U.S. Army in 1855. An improved version of the rifle-musket--the 1861 model built by the federal armory in Springfield, Massachusetts--became the principal infantry weapon of Northern soldiers in the Civil War.

snipped...

I do not know if this reference would violate a copyright but it would seem persuasive that a modification to the article is needed.

thanx

WarLord 23:55, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Made changes to article to reflect the iron plug in original minie design. Someone needs to check the typo situation. An addition worth thinking about would be an illustration of the paper cartidge that the soldiers carried and tore apart to load the guns...

thanx

WarLord 03:00, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge discussion comments

• Keep separate articles -- The Minie ball should have its own article, and not be merged with the Minie rifle article, due to the Minie ball's separate historical significance during the U.S. Civil War. The Minie ball was widely used in .58 cal rifles that were not Minie rifles. It would be analogous to talking about .30-30 cartridges and insisting on only focusing on Winchester's rifles and discounting subsequent use in Marlin rifles. Many users will be interested only in the Minie ball that was used in more than the Minie rifle. There is a good reason to keep the two articles separate. Yaf 03:58, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
• Concur since it has been a few months, I am removing the merge proposal. Wendell 15:45, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dubious

Minié rifles could not have been issued in 1846 if the rifle itself was developed only in 1849. Duly noted in the Minié rifle article. GregorB (talk) 21:44, 13 February 2008 (UTC)