Timeline of the gunpowder age

Did You Know?

• The earliest possible depiction of a cannon appears in the 12th century.
• Samuel Pepys' diary mentions a machine gun like pistol in the 17th century.

13th century

By the mid-13th century, the Song dynasty had produced fire-emitting tubes, and in 1287, the Yuan dynasty used hand cannons in battle. Bomb shells were now made with iron casings, fire lances gained reusable iron barrels and projectiles, and rockets were deployed in combat. The earliest surviving cannons come from China. The Mongols carried gunpowder weaponry to Japan, Southeast Asia, and possibly the Middle East and Europe. Europe and India obtained gunpowder by the century’s end, but only the Middle East described gunpowder weapons in any detail.

15th century

By the early 1400s, Europe was producing massive artillery pieces weighing thousands of kilograms, and this technology soon reached the Ottoman Empire. Artillery mobility got a major boost with the invention of two-wheeled gun carts, called limbers and caissons, that could be adjusted. The matchlock arquebus, the first gun with a trigger, appeared in Europe around 1475. Rifled barrels came along in the late 1400s, and the word "musket" was first recorded in 1499. Meanwhile, the Ming dynasty used rocket launchers in battle, and Korea’s Joseon kingdom developed the hwacha, a mobile rocket launcher. Chinese-style bombs were being used in Japan by at least 1468.

16th century

Matchlock firearms traveled across Eurasia, arriving in China and Japan around the mid-1500s. By the end of that century, the Ottomans, Ming dynasty, and Dutch Republic were using matchlocks to execute volley fire. The arquebus gave way to the heavier musket, designed to pierce heavy armor, and "musket" became the standard term for shoulder-fired guns until the 1800s. New ignition systems emerged: the wheellock and the flintlock. Pistols and revolvers also came into use. Ottoman soldiers began fixing bayonets to their guns. Both Europe and China created handheld breech-loading firearms. The star fort spread across Europe as a response to improved siege artillery. The Ming dynasty also applied gunpowder to hydraulic engineering.

19th century

The flintlock's reign ended when Joshua Shaw created the percussion cap. Claude-Étienne Minié's bullet turned rifles into practical weapons for soldiers, making smoothbore muskets obsolete; these rifles then proved their worth in the Crimean War. Sir William Congreve based his rockets on Mysorean designs, and the British used them to attack Copenhagen. Benjamin Tyler Henry gave the world the first dependable repeating rifle. Richard Jordan Gatling's gun could fire two hundred rounds in a minute, while Hiram Maxim built the first machine gun with a single barrel. Both China and Europe adopted cast iron molds for cannon production. Alfred Nobel introduced dynamite, a stable explosive that surpassed gunpowder in power. Smokeless powder eventually replaced traditional black powder across Europe by the century's close.