Franklin Ware Mann

Franklin Weston Mann (July 24, 1856 – November 14, 1916) was an American physician and inventor remembered as the author of the pioneering ballistics text entitled The Bullet's Flight from Powder to Target: The Internal and External Ballistics of Small Arms; a Study of Rifle Shooting with the Personal Element Excluded, Disclosing the Cause of the Error at Target.^[1]

Mann was the youngest of six children born in Norfolk, Massachusetts to Levi and Lydia (Ware) Mann. He grew up on a New England farm and started shooting at the age of twelve. He was intrigued by the causes of dispersion of bullets fired at a single point of aim. He graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1878 and from Boston University School of Medicine as a Doctor of Medicine. He worked four years as a general practitioner including obstetrics while running a shop where he sharpened knives and lawnmowers and invented in 1889 a machine for chopping slaughterhouse bones into bone meal for chicken feed. He manufactured and sold the Mann Bone Cutter from a factory in Milford, Massachusetts.^[2] Revenue from the sale of his bone cutters enabled him to retire from practicing medicine at the age of 37 and devote his time to the investigation of rifle ballistics.^[1]

Mann worked with members of the Massachusetts Rifle Association including gunsmith Adolph Otto Niedner and gun barrel-maker Harry Melville Pope. By 1894 he was conducting experiments with the aid of precision-crafted guns and ammunition on specially designed equipment to minimize and measure sources of error. On his family farm, he constructed a massive concrete foundation to anchor machines holding rifle barrels as motionless as possible. In front of the foundation, he built a 200-yard (180 m) range where bullets could be fired through a cloth tunnel to prevent wind disturbance. Stations within the tunnel held sheets of paper to measure bullet orientation and deflection at intervals.^[1]

The results of his investigations published in 1909 are commonly known as The Bullet's Flight. The precision-machined vee-shaped cast-iron steadying cradle he invented for his investigations was adopted in 1920 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Aberdeen Proving Ground,^[3] and has been widely replicated for ballistics investigation as a "Mann Rest". His 1909 publication had secretly been studied by European combatants building long-range artillery of World War I. Mann died at home in 1916 without being aware of the international governmental recognition of his work.^[1]

• The Bullet's Flight from Powder to Target - Franklin Weston Mann