From the Baker Rifle to the M4: Shoulder Arms Across Two Centuries

The Baker rifle was adopted by the British Army in 1800 and issued chiefly to rifle regiments such as the 95th Rifles. Its rifled barrel gave better accuracy at range than the smoothbore Brown Bess, but made it slower to load, which is why it armed skirmishers rather than the whole line.

The Model 1873 is a lever-action repeating rifle that fired the .44-40 Winchester cartridge, also used in the Colt Single Action Army revolver, so a rifle and sidearm could share ammunition. Its tubular magazine gave a high rate of fire for the day, and it earned the nickname the Gun That Won the West.

The Krag-Jorgensen is a bolt-action repeating rifle with a side-loading magazine that could be topped up without opening the bolt. Denmark adopted it in 1889 and Norway in 1894, and the United States Army took up its own chambering in the 1890s as a standard service rifle.

The RPD is a Soviet light machine gun by Vasily Degtyaryov, developed in 1944 for the 7.62x39mm intermediate cartridge. It fed from a belt held in a drum, and gave the rifle squad sustained automatic fire from the same cartridge family its riflemen carried, though large-scale delivery began only in 1953.

The SKS is a gas-operated semi-automatic carbine designed by Sergei Simonov for the same 7.62x39mm cartridge, accepted in the closing stages of the Second World War and in full Soviet service by 1949. The AK-47 soon rendered it obsolete for the Soviet military, yet it stayed in use across the Soviet bloc and China.

The M14 was adopted by the United States in 1959 as a refinement of the M1 Garand action, chambered for the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge. It was meant to replace several weapons at once, but its recoil made automatic fire hard to control, and the lighter M16 replaced it as the standard rifle in the mid-1960s.

The Dragunov, or SVD, was accepted into Soviet service in July 1963 in 7.62x54mmR. It was issued at squad level as a designated marksman weapon, giving ordinary infantry units their own long-range precision, and it remains in service with many militaries and irregular forces.

The M4 is a shortened variant of the M16 family in 5.56x45mm, entering service in 1994. A collapsible stock and a flat-top rail for optics and aiming devices suit it to vehicle crews and close-quarters fighting, and it remains the primary individual weapon of United States ground forces.