Set of 50 balls Minié

Balls manufactured by Davide Pedersoli & Co. according to the strictest standards.

The Minie bullet was a cylindrico-conical lead bullet, a caliber slightly smaller than the gun barrel for which it was intended. It had at the base four outer grooves filled with grease and a conical hole. As designed by Minié, the bullet had an iron pin at its base in order to advance it and, under the pressure of the gases, to seal by filling the space between it and the barrel, allowing him to come into contact with his stripes.

The ancestor of the Minié bullet was created in 1848 by the captains of the French Army Montgomery and Henri-Gustave Delvigne. Their design was made to allow the quick loading of the rifles by the mouth, an innovation that led to its generalization as a mass weapon of the battlefield. In 1826, Delvigne had invented a bullet that could be compressed and expanded to overmould the grooves of the rifle barrel. The design of the cylindro-conical warhead of the bullet was proposed in 1832 by Captain John Norton, but had not been adopted.