Between Waterloo in 1815 and 1839 there had been practically no change in the weapons of the Army. In 1839, dawned a new era of improvements in firearms; innovations followed each other so rapidly that a new and superior weapon was placed in the hands of the infantrymen every fifteen or twenty years. In 1840, came the first really important change in the infantryman's weapon for nearly a century, when the percussion-lock superseded the flint just as the flint had superseded the match, and the old "Brown Bess" with which the British soldier fought the Napoleonic Wars, was replaced by the percussion firearms, afterwards improved by being made a breech-loader. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 120 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1971 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com