ays to get more results from every shot, or to deliver more shots with one effort. One of the weapons that was developed through this mentality was the Billinghurst-Requa Battery Gun. This gun consisted of twenty five .58 caliber rifle barrels which were loaded simultaneously with a clip of cartridges. With the pull of a string, a percussion cup fired; this lit powder in a track which fired all of the cartridges. This gun was dubbed the "covered bridge gun" because this gun could demolish an attack of the enemy across a bridge in an instant. Many times, it wasn't the number of men fighting or their weapons that handed a battle to one side of the line or the other, but it was simple intelligence. Guns do not have to work to scare people, so "Quaker Guns" were created to look real to the enemy, but in fact, it was just a decoy. At Yorktown, Virginia, 1862, ten thousand bluffing Confederates used Quaker Guns to stall Yankees ten times their number for an entire month. Hand Grenades were common and effective in the Civil War, for they allowed destruction to be a simple "throw" away. There was a great variety of hand grenades during the Civil War times; some had one plunger where once it hit something, the plunger would detonate an internal percussion cap. Others had as many as fourteen nipples of its inner powder chamber, so that it could be triggered no matter how it landed. If a steady hand was not in control of such weapons, the results were potentially catastrophic. These weapons contained explosive and highly flammable compounds, making them a threat to any person. To beat your enemy from the inside takes true talent, but in the civil war, it happened, indeed. Gabriel James Rains took bombs to an entirely new level when he invented the coal-lump bomb. These bombs had the appearance of lump of coal, and when they were placed on their enemy's ships, the bomb would be tossed in with the normal coal. Shortly thereafter, th...
