Mad minute

The origin and definition of a "mad minute" is a description of the time it takes to reload a musket during combat in the 1700s and 1800s. The theory was to mass your firepower on an enemy you had to mass your soldiers. So formations would stand shoulder to shoulder and fire at each other from a range of fifty to several hundred yards with slow-loading and relatively inaccurate muskets. The description is especially relevant to close combat because you are trying to reload your musket faster than the soldiers in the enemy formation who are directly in front of you as you are firing at each other. Its therefore a "mad minute" of reloading in between shots.