Sealed patterns, marked with a red wax seal and kept in the Tower, survive from the 18th century onwards. Infantry swords were for the most part discarded but patterns were provided for troopers’ cavalry swords and weapons for specialist bodies. Officers still carried privately purchased weapons that conformed to Ordnance patterns. Until regarding 1710, for the duration of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), the Board of Ordnance had normally purchased finish weapons from private contractors. Then it started out to place distinguished contracts for the dissimilar stages of manufacture and assembly, so that it had more outstanding control. Most gun barrels and locks were made in and around Birmingham.
London gun-makers, for the most part in the Minories near the Tower, added the stocks and finished the weapons. The Tower was the central depot. The Ordnance provided the contractors with elaborate specifications, including specimens or patterns, and inspected and proved (tested) their work at the Tower, where it was then stamped or engraved with the Ordnance mark. During the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) such was the demand for weapons for Britain and her allies that an organisation similar to the Tower’s was set up in Birmingham, for the finish give rise to and proving of weapons. In London the Ordnance itself took on the production and assemblage of components, with a factory on Tower Wharf as well as at Lewisham.
After the war all these operations closed down, but the Ordnance then set up a new factory at Enfield Lock.The Board constantly considered ideas for new or bettered military weapons. But, perhaps surprisingly, it was the sportsman, rather than the soldier or inventor, who for the most part inspired the inventions which were to transform military firearms by the mid 19th century. These included the percussion cap, a cylindrical copper cap containing explosive fulminate that was detonated by a hammer. The Rev. Alexander Forsyth experimented with fulminate in the Tower in 1806, but the man ordinarily credited with the invention of the percussion cap is an English artist, Joshua Shaw. In 1839 the Board at long last decisive to convert weapons in store to Pattern 1839 percussion muskets for Regiments of the Line, but in 1841 a fire at the Tower destroyed tremendous quantities of flintlocks, which speeded up the introduction of the new percussion firearms.
Other inventions included rifling the barrel (cutting a spiral groove inside to make a bullet spun for truer aim) and breech-loading. The Ordnance, however, was wary of change; a soldier in the heat of battle necessitated a firearm that was robust and reliable. It was not until 1867 that the breech-loading rifle, in the form of the Snider, became popular issue, twelve years after the functions of the Board of Ordnance were taken over by the War Department.
