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"You want your "assault weapon"? 1861 Springfield with a .58 cal minnie balls has killed more Americans than any other single gun."

"Benjamin Robins, an English mathematician, realized that an extruded bullet would retain the mass and kinetic force of a musket ball, but would slice through the air with much greater ease. The innovative work of Robins and others would take until the end of the 1700s to gain acceptance.
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"Bullet" is derived from the French word "boulette" which roughly means "little ball." The original musket bullet was a spherical leaden ball two sizes smaller than the bore, wrapped in a loosely fitting paper patch which formed a tight seal so the full pressure of the expanding gas would propel the bullet. The loading was, therefore, easy with the old smooth-bore Brown Bess and similar military muskets. The original muzzle-loading rifle, on the other hand, with a closely fitting ball to take the rifling grooves, was loaded with difficulty, particularly when foul, and for this reason was not generally used for military purposes.[edit]
The bullet takes shape
As firearms became more technologically advanced from 1500 to 1800, the bullets changed little. They remained simple round lead balls, differing only in their size. Even with the advent of rifling the bullet itself didn't change, but was wrapped in a leather patch to grip the rifling grooves.

Nevertheless, many ideas were not pursued, and the history books are full of brilliant ideas that failed to catch on.

The first half of the 19th century saw a distinct change in the shape and function of the bullet. In 1826 Delirque, a French infantry officer, invented a breech with abrupt shoulders on which a spherical bullet was rammed down until it caught the rifling grooves. Delirque's method, however, deformed the bullet and was inaccurate.

Among the first "bullet-shaped" bullets was designed by Captain John Norton of the British Army in 1823. Norton's bullet had a hollow base which expanded under pressure to catch the rifling grooves once fired but the British Board of Ordnance rejected it because spherical bullets has been in use for the last 300 years.

Renowned English gunsmith William Greener invented the Greener bullet in 1836. It was very similar to Norton's bullet except that the hollow base of the bullet was fitted with a wooden plug which more reliably forced the base of the bullet to expand and catch the rifling. Tests proved that Greener's bullet was extremely effective but it was rejected because, being two parts, it was judged too complicated to produce.

The soft lead bullet that came to be known as the minié ball, (or minnie ball) was first introduced in 1847 by Claude Étienne Minié (1814? - 1879), a captain in the French Army. It was nearly identical to the Greener bullet: as designed by Minié the bullet was conical in shape with a hollow cavity in the rear end, which was fitted with a little iron cap instead of a wooden plug. When fired, the cap would force itself into the hollow cavity, forcing the sides of the bullet to expand and engage the rifling. In 1855 the British adopted the minie ball for their Enfield rifles.

It was in the American Civil War, however, that the minie ball saw the most use. Roughly 90% of the battlefield casualties in the war were caused by minie balls fired from rifles.

Big and heavy wins the race.