A number of inventors in the United States besides Hall had produced breech-loading small arms before the Civil War of 1861, but with the exception of Colt’s revolver and Sharp’s carbine, the latter used by the cavalry to a small extent, none were first adopted in that great conflict. Later, the Henry or Winchester breech-loading rifle and the Spencer magazine gun were introduced and did good service. But the whole known system of breech-loading small arms was officially condemned by the U.S. Military authorities previous to that war. The absence of machines to make a suitable cartridge in large quantities and vast immediate necessities compelled the authorities to ignore the tested Prussian and Swedish breech-loaders and those of their own countrymen and to ransack Europe for muskets of ancient pattern. These were worked by the soldiers under the ancient tactics, of load, ram, charge and fire, until a stray bullet struck the ramrod, or the discharge of a few rammed cartridges so over-heated the musket as to thereby dispense with the soldier and his gun for further service in that field. However, private individuals and companies continued to invent and improve, and the civil war in America revolutionised the systems of warfare and its weapons. The wooden walls of the navies disappeared as a defence after the conflict between the Monitor and the Merrimac, and muzzle-loading muskets became things of the past. Torpedoes, both stationary and movable, then became a successful weapon of warfare. Soon after that war, and when the United States had adopted the Springfield breech-loading rifle, the works at Springfield were equipped with nearly forty different machines, each for making a separate part of a gun in great quantities. Many of these had been invented by Thomas Blanchard forty years before. That great inventor of labour-saving machinery had then designed machines for the shaping and making of gun stocks and for forming the accompanying parts. Blanchard was a contemporary of Hall, and Hall, to perfect his breech-loader, was the first to invent machines for making its various parts. His was the first interchangeable system in the making of small arms. Army officers had come to regard “the gun as only the casket while the cartridge is the jewel;” and to this end J. G. Gill at the U.S. Arsenal at Frankford, Philadelphia, devised a series of cartridge-making machines which ranked among the highest triumphs of American invention.