French Inventions - Weapons and Military

Weapons and Military

• Bec de corbin, a popular medieval weapon.
• Motte-and-bailey, a form of castle.
• The Pot-de-fer, a primitive cannon during the Hundred Years' War.
• Culverin, ancestor of the musket.
• Flintlock by Marin le Bourgeoys in 1612.
• Corvette, a small, maneuverable, lightly armed warship that appeared in the 1670s.
• Bayonet (from French baïonnette)
• Modern military uniform in the mid 17th century.
• Floating battery, first used during the Great Siege of Gibraltar in September 1782.
• Mass conscription or Levée en masse during the French Revolution.
• Corps by Napoleon in 1805.
• Carabine à tige by Louis-Étienne de Thouvenin (improvement of an earlier invention by Henri-Gustave Delvigne) before 1844.
• Minié rifle by Claude-Étienne Minié, first reliable (easy to load) muzzle-loading rifle in 1849. In the artillery, from 1859, the La Hitte rifled guns were a considerable improvement over the previous smooth-bore guns which had been in use, able to shoot at 3,000 meters either regulars shells, ball-loaded shells or grapeshot. They appear to have been the first case of usage of rifled cannons on a battlefield.
• First naval periscope in 1854 by Hippolyte Marié-Davy.
• Canne de combat and Savate.
• Épée, the modern derivative of the dueling sword, used for fencing.
• Chassepot by Antoine Alphonse Chassepot in 1866.
• Smokeless gunpowder (modern nitrocellulose-based) : Poudre B by Paul Marie Eugène Vieille in 1884.. It was first used to load the Lebel Model 1886 rifle (invented by Nicolas Lebel), making it the first military firearm to use smokeless powder ammunition. It is also the first rifle to use full metal jacket bullets as its standard ammunition.
• First Air force in 1910.
• Sonar, first ultrasonic submarine detector using an electrostatic method (and first practical military sonar) in 1916-1917 by Paul Langevin (with Constantin Chilowski).
• Tanks : developped at the same time (1915-1916) in France and in Great Britain. France was the second country to use tanks on the battlefield (after Great Britain). in 1916, the first practical light tank, the Renault FT with the first full 360° rotation turret became, for armour historian Steven Zaloga "the world's first modern tank".