Joseph Manton
| Joseph Manton | |
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Joe Manton (stood foreground) talking to Colonel Peter Hawker, 1 September 1827.
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| Born |
Joseph Manton 6 June 1766 Grantham, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom |
| Died | 29 June 1835 (aged 69) London, England |
| Occupation | Inventor, gunsmith |
Joseph Manton (6 June 1766 – 29 June 1835) was a British gunsmith who innovated in sport shooting, improved the quality of weapons and paved the way to the modern artillery shell. Joseph was also a sports shooter in his own right and a friend of Colonel Peter Hawker.
After serving his apprenticeship, he went to work briefly for his brother John, also a noted gunsmith, before starting out on his own, producing about 100 weapons annually, including both cased duelling pistols and shotguns.
In the early 19th century Manton invented the tube (or pill) lock, an improvement over Alexander Forsyth's scent-bottle lock. Rather than storing a reserve of fulminate in a container they were now single-use pellets. The hammer of the gun was sharpened; when it fell it crushed the tube, causing the fulminates to detonate.
Although more reliable than Forsyth's design and adopted by many sportsmen during the Regency period, (and a variant for the Austrian army), within a short period it was overshadowed by the percussion cap which was adopted by the armies of Britain, France, Russia and America to replace the flintlock.
The greater part of Manton's career was to be spent at loggerheads with the British Army. Manton managed to interest the army in purchasing a larger version of his wooden cup design to be used in rifled artillery. Manton worked tirelessly to improve the very inaccurate cannon, and did so by creating a new type of ammunition. Firstly, the ammunition was to be loaded in a rifled cannon. Secondly, the cannonball was attached to the wooden cup that fit into the rifled grooves of the cannon, which was in turn connected to a sack of gunpowder, thus eliminating the need for powder and shot to be loaded separately. The idea of having the powder fixed behind the shot in a disposable cartridge is one still extant today; it is the basis for modern bullet design. It also helped pave the way for breech-loading weaponry.
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