The shotgun began as a bird hunter's fowling piece with a six-foot barrel
Before it was called a shotgun, the weapon was a fowling piece, built in sixteenth-century Europe for shooting birds on the wing, with barrels that later stretched to six feet. The word shotgun itself first shows up in 1776, in letters to and from Fort Boonesborough on the Kentucky frontier.
Most shotguns have smooth barrels without rifling and fire shells packed with small pellets, called shot, or a single heavy slug. The pellets travel through wadding and spread after leaving the muzzle, where a narrowing called a choke controls the pattern, so each shot lands as a cluster rather than a single point. Splitting the energy among many pellets means each one penetrates less. Gauges range widely, but 12-gauge and 20-gauge are by far the most common.
Early firearms such as the blunderbuss and musket could fire shot or solid balls. Britain's Brown Bess musket, in service from 1722 to 1838, had a bore close to a 10-gauge shotgun. Soldiers sometimes loaded buck and ball, a musket ball plus three or six buckshot. Once rifles with spin-stabilised bullets took over battlefields in the late nineteenth century, the shotgun became its own weapon, favoured by bird hunters, guards and lawmen and by cavalry, who valued it on horseback.
Breechloaders appeared in France and Belgium in the early 1800s. Daniel Myron LeFever of Syracuse, New York, introduced an American hammerless design in 1878, and the double-barrelled gun has changed little since the boxlock action of 1875. Wealthy sportsmen commission ornate doubles from makers like Perazzi, and some presentation pieces have sold for 100,000 US dollars.
John Browning transformed the field while working with Winchester: a lever-action repeater in 1887, the pump action in 1893, and in 1900 the Auto-5, the first semi-automatic shotgun in America. Military interest revived in 1917 when General Pershing's troops carried 12-gauge pump guns fitted with bayonets and heat shields to the Western Front, weapons that became known as trench guns.
Source: Shotgun
