It's a slow day, and I'm about to reach the 600 mark in my CGN post count, so here's a totally useless post about a forgotten bit of gun history.
Spoiler alert, I study the pin-fire game gun, that strange transitional step between the percussion cap muzzle-loader and the guns we shoot and treasure today. In researching these guns, I could not help but delve into the histories of the guns that led there. Like most evolutionary routes, there were side shoots and dead-ends along the way as inventors furiously tried to develop better contraptions.
Probably one of the most significant turning points in the saga that resulted in the fine guns pictured in this sub-forum was the switch from ignition by friction (the flint-lock) to ignition by chemical means (fulminates, percussion caps, and, today, primers). All are based on the property of fulminates, whereby a sharp blow causes the fulminate to explode in a hot flash, which is needed to light the gunpowder. Think how many firing pins connect with primers in a day's shooting at the local trap and skeet range! It took a while to get from hammers hitting loose fulminate granules, to putting those granules into a copper cap, to placing the cap on the cartridge itself (or inside the cartridge, in the case of the pin-fire), or dispensing with the cap entirely, with the rim-fire.
But the very first cartridge-fed breech-loader, designed and built by Swiss-born Samuel Pauly in Paris in 1808, used a very different method, and but for some later decisions involving manpower and price points, today we might all be using air guns in the field and at the range. Yes, the first cartridge-fed shotguns, rifles and pistols were air guns.
Pauly's method used a fire piston instead of air guns that used pressurized air to drive a charge. When air is rapidly compressed within an enclosed space, the interior temperature rises sharply to over 260 °C through adiabatic compression. Humans discovered this method of making fire 1500 years ago in Southeast Asia. Europeans rediscovered the fire piston in the mid-to-late 18th Century, and fire pistons were in everyday use from about 1807; they were displaced as the usual means to light fires, cigarettes etc. before the friction match was invented in 1826. [The story of the invention of the strike-anywhere match is also gun-related, as John Walker, an English chemist, was trying to improve gun primers – he used a stick to mix his wet sulphur-potassium chloride paste, and when dried, he found he had invented the match! Second fun fact: it was after playing with a fire piston that Rudolf Diesel came up with the idea for the internal combustion engine in 1892.]
As for a gun mechanism, the spring-powered fire piston caused a flash of super-heated air to light the priming compound on the base of the cartridge, which then ignited the gunpowder. The gun had external 'hammers,' but these were cocking handles for the pistons. Pauly's piston had a greased leather seal (modern fire pistons, popular as camping fire-starters nowadays, use rubber O-rings). Pauly obtained a patent for his fire-piston gun locks, which he called 'syringe locks.' He later moved to London and teamed up with his Swiss compatriot Durs Egg, and together they tried and failed to sell the fire-piston gun idea to the British government for military use.
In France, Pauly's successor to the business, Henri Roux, decided around 1815 to ditch the fire piston lock. It was difficult and expensive to make, and like all gunmakers, he had to consider his market and profits. So he switched to the simpler and cheaper way of exploding the fulminate with a hammer/firing pin strike, something we’re still doing.
We came THIS close to having gun safes full of air guns!
(Sorry, I don’t have a Pauly fire piston gun to show. I wish I did.)
Spoiler alert, I study the pin-fire game gun, that strange transitional step between the percussion cap muzzle-loader and the guns we shoot and treasure today. In researching these guns, I could not help but delve into the histories of the guns that led there. Like most evolutionary routes, there were side shoots and dead-ends along the way as inventors furiously tried to develop better contraptions.
Probably one of the most significant turning points in the saga that resulted in the fine guns pictured in this sub-forum was the switch from ignition by friction (the flint-lock) to ignition by chemical means (fulminates, percussion caps, and, today, primers). All are based on the property of fulminates, whereby a sharp blow causes the fulminate to explode in a hot flash, which is needed to light the gunpowder. Think how many firing pins connect with primers in a day's shooting at the local trap and skeet range! It took a while to get from hammers hitting loose fulminate granules, to putting those granules into a copper cap, to placing the cap on the cartridge itself (or inside the cartridge, in the case of the pin-fire), or dispensing with the cap entirely, with the rim-fire.
But the very first cartridge-fed breech-loader, designed and built by Swiss-born Samuel Pauly in Paris in 1808, used a very different method, and but for some later decisions involving manpower and price points, today we might all be using air guns in the field and at the range. Yes, the first cartridge-fed shotguns, rifles and pistols were air guns.
Pauly's method used a fire piston instead of air guns that used pressurized air to drive a charge. When air is rapidly compressed within an enclosed space, the interior temperature rises sharply to over 260 °C through adiabatic compression. Humans discovered this method of making fire 1500 years ago in Southeast Asia. Europeans rediscovered the fire piston in the mid-to-late 18th Century, and fire pistons were in everyday use from about 1807; they were displaced as the usual means to light fires, cigarettes etc. before the friction match was invented in 1826. [The story of the invention of the strike-anywhere match is also gun-related, as John Walker, an English chemist, was trying to improve gun primers – he used a stick to mix his wet sulphur-potassium chloride paste, and when dried, he found he had invented the match! Second fun fact: it was after playing with a fire piston that Rudolf Diesel came up with the idea for the internal combustion engine in 1892.]
As for a gun mechanism, the spring-powered fire piston caused a flash of super-heated air to light the priming compound on the base of the cartridge, which then ignited the gunpowder. The gun had external 'hammers,' but these were cocking handles for the pistons. Pauly's piston had a greased leather seal (modern fire pistons, popular as camping fire-starters nowadays, use rubber O-rings). Pauly obtained a patent for his fire-piston gun locks, which he called 'syringe locks.' He later moved to London and teamed up with his Swiss compatriot Durs Egg, and together they tried and failed to sell the fire-piston gun idea to the British government for military use.
In France, Pauly's successor to the business, Henri Roux, decided around 1815 to ditch the fire piston lock. It was difficult and expensive to make, and like all gunmakers, he had to consider his market and profits. So he switched to the simpler and cheaper way of exploding the fulminate with a hammer/firing pin strike, something we’re still doing.
We came THIS close to having gun safes full of air guns!
(Sorry, I don’t have a Pauly fire piston gun to show. I wish I did.)
