Importantly, then: for most of the history of crosshairs, these fine lines were trained on the heavens. The bulk labor of astronomers for several centuries consisted of the making and refining of star charts, necessary to navigation and cartography. The perfecting of such celestial maps hinged on the observation of stellar “transits,” the passage of a given star across the “meridian”—which amounts to the measurement of the star’s “noon,” its apogee in the sky, its highest point on a given night from a given location.
Which is to say, for hundreds of years, we used crosshairs to take aim at rising stars. In dark observatories, peaceful, patient snipers waited, watching the bright specks walk slowly into their sights—which were often called “spider lines,” no wire or thread or etching having proven as fine and resilient as the silk of the web weavers.
The unholy marriage of the gun and the telescope came late. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century were rifles sufficiently accurate that a marksman, taking aim squintingly down the barrel, could wish for preternatural sight—could want to see beyond the reach of his eyes, more clearly to direct the lead slug at his command. While there had been experiments with telescopic range finders for cannons, and while a few early suggestions of gunsights that made use of lenses can be found, it is really only with the publication of the English-born American engineer John Ratcliffe Chapman’s 1848 Instructions to Young Marksmen that we find wide dissemination of the design for an integrated telescope-rifle, suitable for improved death-dealing at long range. The idea caught on rapidly. The catalogues for the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 list a number of the novel systems, and by the US Civil War, carefully selected “sharpshooters” were training spider-silk crosshairs on human beings in combat.
This is the earliest account of the killing of a specific person by telescopic sight that I have been able to find. It reports a skirmish in Virginia in April of 1862: “Several times one bolder than the rest would take off his cap and wave it defiantly in the air, and upon one occasion, while doing this [sic], Colonel Berdan directed one of his men to wing him. Notwithstanding the distance, at least thirteen hundred (1,300) yards, the unerring telescopic rifle brought down the bold rebel.”
In scenes like this, we turned an instrument for measuring the heavens into a new mechanism for effecting fatal action at a distance.