“The fate of the battle of Inkerman in November, 1854, was decided by two eighteen-pounder guns which by almost superhuman efforts were got up late into the field, and these, by their superior range, were effectual in silencing the Russian fire. Mr. William Armstrong was amongst those who perceived that another such emergency could only be met by imparting to field-guns the accuracy and range of the rifle; and that the impediment of weight must be removed by substituting forged instead of cast-iron guns. With his earliest design for the realization of this conception, he waited on the Secretary for War in December, 1854, to propose the enlargement of the rifle musket to the standard of a field gun, and to substitute elongated projectiles of lead instead of balls of cast iron. Encouraged by the Duke of Newcastle, he put together his first wrought-iron gun in the spring of 1855.”[126] The manufacture of this gun marked a new era in ordnance. Repeated trials followed its completion; with the result that in 1858 the Armstrong gun was officially adopted for service in the field,--the epoch-making Armstrong gun: a tube made of wrought-iron bar coiled in a closed helix and welded at a white heat into a solid mass; turned to a true cylinder and reinforced by outer tubes shrunk on to it; rifled with a large number of grooves; breech-loading, a powerful screw holding a sliding vent-piece tightly against the face of the breech; firing a lead-coated projectile in whose plastic covering the rifling engaged as soon as it started its passage through the bore; and mounted on a field-carriage in such a way that the gun could recoil up an inclined slide and return by gravity, and in such a way that its motion both for elevating and for traversing was under the accurate control given by screw gearing.