Williams cleaner bullet
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The Williams cleaner bullet, also known as "cleaner bullets", refers to three different types of bullets that were used by the Union Army during the American Civil War in the standard .58 caliber rifle muskets. There was a fourth developed for use in the Union Repeating or "Coffee-Mill" gun. The inventor was Elijah D. Williams of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who filed an application for his patent on May 30, 1861.[1][2] It was issued almost a year later, on May 13, 1862, but field trials on his "improved" bullet had already begun.
The concept of the design was that the discharge of the musket would drive the concave disks forward thus expanding the lead bullet against the interior walls of the rifled barrel earlier in the barrel than a bullet like the various plugless Minié types of bullets.[3] Those took time to expand causing more gas to escape before a perfect seal was made and causing an accumulation of fouling at the base of the barrel. The idea of the Williams bullet was that the sealing by expansion of the skirt of the bullet happened earlier, solving these issues. Hence the ”cleaner bullet” nickname, often misunderstood as a kind of ”cleaning bullet” added at the end of the 10 bullet package. One issue with the bullet was that a too forceful ramming may cause an expansion of the soft lead bullet inside the barrel before firing, making it very hard to remove with a worm added on the ramrod, when trying to unload the rifle after sentry duty.