The Infantryman's Small Arms: From the Wheellock to the AK-74

The wheellock, developed in Europe around 1500, spun a spring-loaded steel wheel against pyrite to throw sparks into the pan, so a soldier no longer had to keep a burning match lit. Its cost kept it mostly in the hands of cavalry and officers, and Maximilian I banned it across the empire in 1517 and 1518 because it could be fired without warning.

The blunderbuss was a short muzzle-loader with a flared barrel, in use from the seventeenth century into the early nineteenth. It fired loose shot at close range, and the flared mouth mainly sped reloading aboard a moving ship or coach, which is why naval boarding parties and mail coach guards carried it.

Organized use of the hand grenade grew in European armies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when early iron or ceramic spheres of gunpowder were lit with a slow match and thrown by specialist grenadiers. The weapon faded as cheap reliable fuses were hard to make, then returned with the trench warfare of the First World War.

The Mosin-Nagant was adopted by the Imperial Russian Army in 1891 and stayed the standard Russian and Soviet infantry rifle for more than half a century. It kept the rimmed 7.62x54mmR cartridge, was valued for simplicity in mud and cold, and was the rifle of Soviet snipers such as Vasily Zaitsev at Stalingrad.

The Lee-Enfield joined James Paris Lee's rear-locking bolt and detachable box magazine to rifling developed at Enfield, and the British Army adopted it in 1895. Its ten-round magazine and smooth bolt let trained British soldiers of the First World War fire fifteen or more aimed rounds a minute, the so-called mad minute.

The Gewehr 98 was adopted by the German Army in 1898 with a controlled-feed action, stripper-clip loading and the 7.92x57mm round. It was Germany's standard rifle through the First World War, and its action influenced rifles such as the American M1903 Springfield.

William Mills patented and made his grenade in 1915, and the British Army adopted it that year. Its lever and pin released a spring-loaded striker once the grenade left the hand, a pattern most later hand grenades still follow, and its ridged casing was meant mainly for grip rather than for controlling fragmentation.

The M1 Garand, adopted by the United States Army in 1936, was the first standard-issue semi-automatic rifle fielded by a major army. It gave American infantry a rate-of-fire advantage over the bolt-action rifles of most other armies in the Second World War, and the M14 replaced it in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The AK-74 was developed by Mikhail Kalashnikov's design bureau as the successor to the AK-47 and AKM, chambered in the smaller 5.45x39mm cartridge for a flatter trajectory and less recoil. It saw widespread combat in the Soviet war in Afghanistan and remains in service across former Soviet states.