Editing Percussion cap (section)

==Military firearms==
This invention was gradually improved, and came to be used, first in a steel cap and then in a copper cap, by various gunmakers and private individuals before coming into general military use nearly thirty years later.{{when?|date=July 2024}} The alteration of the military flintlock to the percussion musket was easily accomplished by replacing the powder pan and steel frizzen with a nipple and by replacing the cock or hammer that held the flint by a smaller hammer formed with a hollow made to fit around the nipple when released by the trigger. On the nipple was placed the copper cap containing Shaw's detonating composition of three parts of chlorate of potash, two of fulminate of mercury and one of powdered glass. The hollow in the hammer contained the fragments of the cap if it fragmented, reducing the risk of injury to the firer's eyes. From the 1820s onwards, the armies of Britain, France, Russia, and America began converting their muskets to the new percussion system. Caplocks were generally applied to the British military musket (the [[Brown Bess]]) in 1842, a quarter of a century after the invention of percussion powder and after an elaborate government test at Woolwich in 1834. The first percussion firearm produced for the US military was the percussion carbine version (c.1833) of the [[M1819 Hall rifle]]. The Americans' [[breech loading]] caplock Hall rifles, muzzle loading rifled muskets and [[Colt Dragoon]] [[revolver]]s gave them an advantage over the [[smoothbore]] flintlock Brown Bess muskets used by [[Antonio López de Santa Anna|Santa Anna]]'s troops during the [[Mexican–American War|Mexican War]]. In Japan, matchlock pistols and muskets were converted to percussion from the 1850s onwards, and new guns based on  [[tanegashima (gun)|existing designs]] were manufactured as caplocks.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/24491 |title=Met Museum |publisher=Met Museum |access-date=2018-11-05}}</ref>

The Austrians instead used a variant of Manton's tube lock in their [[Augustin musket]] until the conventional caplock [[Lorenz rifle]] was introduced in 1855. The first practical solution for the problem of handling percussion caps in battle was the Prussian 1841 ([[Dreyse needle gun]]), which used a long needle to penetrate a paper cartridge filled with black powder and strike the percussion cap that was fastened to the base of the bullet.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://militarygunsofeurope.eu/listing/austrian-m1842-kammerbuchse/ |title=Kammerbusche |publisher=Militarygunsofeurope.eu |access-date=2018-11-05 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181025115420/http://militarygunsofeurope.eu/listing/austrian-m1842-kammerbuchse/ |archive-date=2018-10-25 |url-status=dead }}</ref> While it had a number of problems, it was widely used by the Prussians and other German states in the mid-nineteenth century and was a major factor in the 1866 [[Austro-Prussian War]]. The needle gun originally fired paper cartridges containing a bullet, powder charge and percussion cap, but by the time of the [[Franco-Prussian War]] this had evolved into modern brass ammunition.<ref>[https://www.militaryfactory.com/smallarms/detail.asp?smallarms_id=1128 Dreyse needle gun]</ref>
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File:Rifled musket actions.jpg|Reproduction Springfield and Enfield caplocks
File:Pistol img 3011.jpg|Detail of the firing mechanism on an instruction cutaway model of a French navy percussion pistol, model 1837
File:Pistole 1842.jpg|Caplock [[horse pistol]], Swiss Ordnance 1817/42
File:Loadseq.jpg|Loading sequence for percussion revolvers
</gallery>