Bayonet

The bayonet is a blade designed to be affixed to the muzzle of a firearm, transforming a gun into a close-combat spear-like weapon, and emerged in France in the mid-seventeenth century, with early "plug bayonets" inserted directly into the barrel, a design that had the significant drawback of preventing the weapon from being fired while the bayonet was fixed. The subsequent invention of the socket bayonet in the 1680s, which attached around the outside of the barrel via a metal sleeve, solved this problem and allowed infantry to fire and then immediately present a spear point without changing weapons, a development credited with finally rendering the traditional infantry pike obsolete across European armies by the early eighteenth century. The bayonet charge became a defining tactic of eighteenth and nineteenth century warfare, valued as much for its psychological shock effect on opposing infantry as for its lethality, and bayonet drill remained a standard element of infantry training even after the rifle's increasing rate of fire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reduced its practical battlefield role.