I am doing some research for myself for a potential upcoming novel I want to write and part of the story revolves around a gun. Form my basic research so far I have found gunpowder was invented around the 9th century in China and didn't enter in to warfare until 1000 AD. Go wikipedia.
Now, what I have not been able to find but know there should be some answers to, is what where the limitations of various civilizations from them being utilized for guns? Research? Imagination? Metallurgy? Not broke don't fix it(warfare)?
From gunpowder there are many weapons that have arisen and culminated in cannons before hand held weapons. I can surmise the cannon worked because of the sheer amount of metal to house the explosion and am guessing the thinner metals would have exploded. I guess my question boils down to why?
Now, as this is going to be in a novel, I can skip a lot of intervening time but don't want to hand wave something that I can adequately explain. Right now I don't know if I am in the right ball park or if I need to think about this from a different angle.
To the basic question, if dealing with China, why did they not have guns in 1000 AD? Why did it take until the 1500's (?) for Europe to have firearms? (I think that date is off) Why were blackpowder weapons so prevalent and why did it take so long for cartridge and bullet style guns to be the norm. Hopefully the question makes sense somewhat is not overly broad but I wanted the historical side of things so I can more accurately develop and write a story with a better understanding of the history behind it.
So this is basically a question of how firearms developed over a thousand years. Once the secret of gunpowder makes its way west, things start developing very rapidly!
The very first "guns" of the 10th century were barely even meant to throw projectiles. Chinese fire-lances were tubes (initially bamboo, later iron) that were strapped to a spear. These were small tubes filled with gunpowder that would create a directed explosion toward a target, frightening and burning them. Since gunpowder was unknown by many peoples, even simple pyrotechnics like these and rockets could have quite an effect on people they didn't kill! It was as close as you could get to basically deploying magic on the battlefield.
Eventually they got the idea that this explosion could propel a projectile as well as it could fuel a rocket and began putting stones, arrows, and other objects in the tube. Then when the power of it was clear, they would remove the spear entirely and you now have the first true hand cannon. And of course, when you're done making something you'll inevitably hear "Why don't you make it bigger?"
Guns begin arriving in Europe somewhere around the 14th century, though nobody can confirm exactly when (was it Silk Road traders or invading Mongols who had encountered gunpowder during their conflicts with China?). It takes a very short period of time in historical terms before they start developing large cannons, which were used as early as 1346 at the Battle of Crecy. Smaller hand cannons were also developed and used around the same time, with both sizes now being used to fire single projectiles the diameter of the bore instead of basically being crude shotguns.
The next major development is in making the firing process easier. At this point you're just touching a slow match or other heat source to a hole at the breech to fire the gun, which means you have to tuck the gun under your arm, sit it on a rest of some kind, or have a second person fire while you aim. Around the 1440s-1450s you see the development of the matchlock, which is simply a piece of burning slow match held in a clamp. The other side of the clamp protrudes from the bottom of the stock, where pulling it backwards pivots the match down into a pan full of powder. With only a finger to fire the gun, you can now hold it on your shoulder and aim. Snapping matchlocks were quickly developed from this where the serpentine was spring-loaded to fire nearly instantaneously, but this often snuffed out the match and was mostly used for target guns.
But the matchlock has one big issue: the match. A smoldering match is a dangerous thing to keep around gunpowder, it consumes itself when burning, and it can easily be snuffed out by heavy wind or rain. The next logical step was sparks, initially through the wheellock around 1500: a clamp holding a piece of iron pyrite is lowered onto a spinning steel wheel when you pull the trigger, creating a shower of sparks. While reliable, this mechanism was complicated and expensive and required the user to use a special key to wind up the wheel before firing. They never fully replaced matchlocks and coexisted alongside one another.
The key to getting sparks reliably and cheaply was the flintlock. This holds a piece of flint in front of an L-shaped piece of steel called the frizzen, which serves as both the pan cover and the steel for the sparks. When you pull the trigger, the cock holding the flint snaps forward into the frizzen, pushing it back to expose the pan of gunpowder to a shower of sparks. The flintlock was cheap and easy to make and reliable in all but the heaviest rain; a few similar designs like the snaphance and miquelet were developed as early as the 1550s, but these designs weren't perfected (they often had spurious features like mechanical linkages to open the pan cover and a separate piece of steel instead of one part that does both) and it wasn't until around 1630 that the flintlock became predominate.
The flintlock remained at the top for a very long time, longer than any other firing system except for primitive hand cannons. It wouldn't be superseded for about 200 years, during which time scientific research discovered fulminate salts that acted as friction and shock-sensitive explosives. In 1807, Reverend Alexander John Forsyth of Scotland determined that fulminates could be used to create a primer that could detonate gunpowder truly instantaneously, without even fractions of a second's delay between pulling the trigger and the bullet going on its way. It would take about 30 more years of refinement, but eventually we landed on the percussion cap: a tiny copper cap of fulminate of mercury that could be placed on a nipple over the powder charge.