Bows and Arrows, Cross My Heart and Hope to Die

I found this on Quora and I thought it was so great I decided to steal it.

Question: Why were crossbows not used in the 19th century, even though they could be reloaded way faster than the infantry guns of that period?

Answer by Roger H Werner

At the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, an English army of 6000 soldiers led by Henry V, defeated a French army of 36,000. A crucial element in Henry’s victory was the longbow: He deployed C. 5000 longbowmen, WHILE the French used Italian crossbowman and their weapons have a shorter range. Largely because of this, the French lost by some accounts as many as 10,000 men to about 100 English. Yet, in spite of the clear deadliness of the longbow in war, it quickly became obsolete as firearms evolved. Within 200 years of Agincourt, it had fallen out of military use almost entirely.

In China, weaponry evolved in an entirely different way. Here, firearms were used much earlier. In 1232, the Mongol army used firearms as armor piercing weapons during the siege of modern Khai-Fun Fu, China. Firearms may also have been used much earlier: A picture dating from the 10th century CE depicts a demon wielding a form of gun. Nevertheless, Chinese armies used bows for another 800 years.

Timo Nieminen, a physicist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, described the evolution of the Asian composite war bow, a device he describes as “the best bow available before the advent of modern materials and the modern compound bow”. The compound bow helps explain why the bow remained an effective weapon in China for centuries after it was abandoned in Europe.

When a bow is drawn, the surface closest to the archer compresses, while the opposite surface is placed in tension, placing extreme demand on whatever material is used for the limb. Nieminen noted that it’s very difficult to find a single material that provides sufficient strength under both tension and compression, whilw permitting a high degree of deformation.

The solution that Asian bow makers settled upon was the composite bow in which the compression surface is made of horn and the tension surface from resin-sinew composite, both joined to a central portion of wood. These bows were extremely difficult to make; some report the resin-drying process required more than a year. When finished however, the sinew-backed bow vastly outperformed other bows and it was a military mainstay for 2,000 years. It was adopted by the Mongols who effectively used it to decimate the mounted knights of Europe.

One key factor in the performance of any bow is size to draw length ratio. The draw length is about as long as an archer’s arm. Because wood cannot be greatly deformed before it breaks, a wooden bow must be at least 2.3 times its draw length. English longbows were as long as the archer was tall and Japanese longbows were 200 cm long. By comparison, the composite bow was only 110 cm long, while achieving a similar performance as the long bow. The composite bow was lighter and easier to carry than its European cousins but it required a long time to create.

The Asian composite bow had a weakness that prevented it from spreading to Europe. Its composite materials did not survive humid conditions. For that reason, the weapons never spread south to India nor would they have survived land or sea crossings back to Europe. Nevertheless, both East and Western bow designs were much more accurate than early firearms, particularly over longer distances. They had a much higher rate of fire, and, they required fewer materials and logistics to manufacture and supply. Yet the bow had one big disadvantage over firearms: Bows require a high degree of skill to use proficiently.The typical Chinese army had a large pool of skilled archers, while European armies did not. Europeans armies therefore trained their soldiers to use firearms because that could be done relatively quickly. For this reason, firearms quickly eclipsed the bow in Europe. Therefore, military effectiveness was not the primary cause for the bows demise as a military weapon: Economic (cost/time) and social factors, especially training of musketeers as opposed to archers, were far more important influences in the replacement of the bow by the gun.