Question for all you gun nuts.

[Orrex]

Okay, the subject line was just to get your attention. But I do have a few serious questions about 19th century American firearms. I could Google it or look on Wiki, but I'd rather check with somebody who's knowledgeable about the subject, so that I don't misinterpret something that I find at random on the internets.

1. When did single-action pistols first become available, and what kind of ammunition did they use? Could they use self-contained shells, or did the pistols have to be loaded with patch and ball etc? What kind of range did they offer?

2. When did rifles become available with a multi-shot magazine (or equivalent)? What was their effective range?


I know that these are probably really easy questions for someone who's into guns, but I'm barely a laymen. I'm asking because I need the info for something I'm writing, and I'd like it to be accurate, so I don't trust what I could come up with on my own.

If the questions need clarification, let me know.


Thanks in advance!

[dairydog91]

1. Hope this helps a bit.

1. "Single-action" usually describes a mode of revolver operation. Single action revolvers require you to cock the hammer before you pull the trigger, while with double action revolvers pulling the trigger will draw the hammer back and then release it (You can also manually cock the hammer if you wish). Colt patents the first revolver mechanism in 1836, and the very famous Colt Peacemaker enters service in the 1870s.

2. Multi-shot rifle require a self-contained cartridge. Lever-action rifles start entering service in the 1860s, bolt-action rifles in the 1890s (The British introduce the .303 Enfield in 1895. They use it or variants up through WWII). Lever-actions tend to be powerful, but due to the tube magazine they have to fire fat rounds with round or flat noses. This limits their accurate range to maybe 250 meters, though the round remains lethal for many hundreds of meters after that. Bolt-actions can fire spitzer (pointy) bullets with better aerodynamic properties, and are accurate against a point target at maybe 600-800 meters (Lethal to over 1000).

[Orrex]

2. That *is* helpful. Thank you!

So, prior to the 1860s, were all rifles single shot muzzle or breech loads?

[dairydog91]

3. Yes, there were some bolt-actions, but they weren't magazine fed.

The French Chassepot is probably a fairly well known example, as is the German "needle gun". You used the bolt to open up the breech, and then manually loaded in a paper cartridge. These paper cartridges were too delicate to slam around in a magazine, so metallic cartridges had to be developed before magazines could be used.

[taurus145]

6. Mostly.

There was a way to get around the single shot only capability of the muzzle loaders. It became a fairly common military practice in the 18th century to load several charges and balls in line in a muzzle loader in order to fire a fusillade. It was not uncommon for the barrel to explode because, at times, all of the powder tended to cook-off at nearly the same instant.

I'm doing this from memories of things read over 30 years ago, so my memory on the correct time frame may be incorrect.

[Factoid]

7. Gobs of Info

No, there were in fact several multishot and even some cartridge based firearms that appeared long before that, but they were rather expensive and were mainly used by royalty for hunting in europe, save for a couple of curious weapons, one was a Dutch (I think?) assault musket - it used a unique system of bullets with holes filled with fuse, and the Lock lined up with the first set of bullet/patch/powder. The way it worked, was it would fire the first shot, light the fuse that burned through the next bullet and ignited the powder charge, firing it, which lit the fuse behind THAT and fired the next bullet, etc.
Took some time to reload, and was rather expensive, but DEVESTATING at the close-range line combat at the time.

The Lewis and Clark expedition was armed with a semi-automatic Airgun in roughly .45 caliber, which fired at slightly lower velocity than the modern .45acp round. There are no records of what the magazine size was, but it was rather quite effective. Napoleon also used air-rifles as sharpshooters for a time in his army, but data is hard to find on if they were truely semi-automatic or if they had to be manually reloaded, in either case they were stunningly rapid-fire for their time.

I also seem to recall that one of the King Henry's of england (I beleive the 8th but I am having trouble finding much information at the moment) had a cartridge based double-barreled shotgun in the 1600's. The cartridges had extensions on the side that fit outside of the barrels and would be struck by a hammer, which would ignite a mercury fulminate primer to set off the powder charge. Expensive to make and rather dangerous to work with, but when you're a king you can afford both the price and the loss of employees to whoopsies I guess.
It wasn't until Potassium Chloride primers became available in the early 1800's that people really started looking at mass produced cartridges, and it's first use was in percussion caps for muzzle-loaders.

Also early on you had pepperbox type guns, which were not revolvers but rather multi-barreled firearms, like a hand-held organ gun. These typically had 6 to 10 barrels or so, 6 seeming to be the most popular.


It wasn't until the 1850's that industrialization allowed for large-scale manufacturing of cartridges, both metallic, semi-metallic, and "other" (the volcanic actually had the entire cartridge contained inside the bullet, an interesting concept that i feel may be re-examined with modern technology) that you really started to see a large scale public ownership of repeating firearms. But they certainly existed and were well known by even the mid to late 1700's.

[AtheistCrusader]

18. The Girandoni Repeating Rifle was actually same caliber you'd find in a musket of the time.

So anywhere from .45, to the more common .57 and as high as the .68. The GAR was normally equipped with a 20 round magazine.

[AtheistCrusader]

17. Depends.

There was a technological breakthrough in 1781 using a different form of propellant. Compressed Air.

It's called the Girandoni Repeating Rifle, and the Girandoni Repeating pistol. Prior to the ratification of the 2nd Amendment, Austria developed, and deployed this weapon to it's army. They kept it in use for about 35 years, and used them against the french. This was no ordinary pellet rifle, it fired in semi-auto mode from a 20 round magazine, and flung a .50 to .67 caliber ball, just like any colonial musket, with enough force to kill a human. (Or even a deer)

This technology was ultimately deemed too expensive to maintain, particularly the riveted air tanks, and it was very expensive to train Austria's soldiers to use, compared to powder-fired weapons, so after about 35 years, it fell out of use in Austria. The weapons proliferated a bit, even to the US. One example would be the rifle Meriwether Lewis carried on the famed Lewis and Clark expedition.

So multi-shot rifle technology existed in various forms as far back as the signing of our Constitution, but it was not widely adopted in repeating form using gunpowder charged cartridges until the mid 1800's, and not in auto-loading format until the early 1900's.

[Euromutt]

4. A few approximate answers

There were various earlier designs and patents awarded, but the first revolvers (as in a single-barreled handgun with multiple firing chambers) that really caught on were those based on Samuel Colt's ratchet and pawl mechanism, patented in the US in 1836. That said, there was a flintlock revolver designed by Elisha Collier and patented in the UK in 1818 that saw some production in the early 1820s. Aggressive litigation against patent infringements gave Colt an effective monopoly in the US until the mid-1850s, when other manufacturers managed to get round Colt's patents.

From 1836 until the late 1860s, the most common ammunition for the larger caliber revolvers--over .30 inch--was "cap and ball": round lead balls, loose black power, and percussion caps. Reloading these was a bitch, though with most models, you could resort to the expedient of carrying several pre-loaded cylinders and swapping them out.

However, there were certain historically important models, like the Smith & Wesson Model 1 (first made in 1857), which used rimfire cartridges (in the case of the S&W Model 1, .22 Short).

The effective range of models like the Colt Paterson (1836), Walker Colt (1846), Colt 1851 Navy (.36 cal), and Colt 1860 Army (.44 cal) was estimated at around 50 yards. The sights on the Remington New Model 1858 were set for 75 yards, but this probably involved a dose of wishful thinking. Note that these ranges are roughly the same as those of modern-day handguns, which has a lot to do with the fact that the limitations on effective range are significantly more dependent on the capabilities of the user (due to the comparatively short radius and comparative instability of handguns) than the ballistics of the weapon itself.

Concerning your second question, effective models of multi-shot, single-barreled rifles started appearing in 1855, with the most notable models being the Volcanic lever-action rifle, and the Colt Revolving Rifle Model 1855. The Colt used paper cartridges, whereas the Volcanic used an improved version of the Rocket Ball metallic cartridge. The Volcanic Repeating Arms Company was short-lived, but its assets were used by its primary creditor, Oliver Winchester, to create the New Haven Arms Company, which developed the 1860 Henry rifle (named after its designer, Benjamin Tyler Henry), which was based on the Volcanic design. The Henry used a .44 rimfire cartridge. (In 1866, Oliver Winchester reorganized the company again and named it the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. This was also the year the Winchester 1866 rifle came out, which was a further development of the Henry.) Lastly, I should mention the Spencer rifle and carbine, which came out in 1860, and was chambered for a proprietary cartridge, the Spencer 56-56 rimfire. The carbine was widely used by Union cavalry in the Civil War, and several Union regiments used the rifle.

Effective range of the Henry and Spencer weapons was no more than 200 yards.

[oneshooter]

15. Don't forget the Ferguson rifle

A breech loading rifled flint lock. If the Brits had adopted it as standard then the Americans would have had a much harder time of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_rifle

Oneshooter
Livin in Texas

[Euromutt]

19. Valid point; I was just trying to models you could reasonably call "mass-produced"

I gave pretty short shrift to the Collier flintlock revolver as well, and I didn't even mention the Volition and Jennings rifles that preceded the Volcanic. Since only 200-odd Fergusons were ever made (compared to 2,000 of the Volition and Jennings, and probably more of the Collier), I thought it a detail that would rather clutter the post.

[benEzra]

5. Here's a post with a few pics that may be helpful.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/benEzra/74

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

8. It's worth noting that the Gatling Gun and Maxim Gun were made in 1861 and 1884, respectively.

Basically, there were machine guns by the mid/late 19th century.

[SteveM]

9. Just to add on...

In our family collection we have an old wall-hanger revolver with no markings. It is described as a single-action cap & ball revolver (with rifling). With provision for a lanyard, it was allegedly used in the Civil War.

Webley, the old British firearms company, made a "modern era" revolver which worked only in the "second action;" that is, you had to pull the trigger to get it to revolve and fire, but you could not pull back the hammer for the "first" or single-action. This may have been a "tanker's" side arm.

You may wish to acquire "American Rifle: A Biography" by Alexander Rose, Delacorte Press, 2008, for a fine, detailed history of the "unique" American rifles. Rose is the author of "Washington's Spies."

[metalbot]

10. American Rifle is excellent

Reading the OP, I was just thinking to myself "They should read American Rifle: A Biography".

Fascinating read about the development of the rifle in America. Interesting that the military resisted breech loaders and magazine fed rifles initially because they feared that soldiers would go through their ammo to quickly.

[GreenStormCloud]

11. Fire disicipline, meaning to conserve ammo in battle, is a serious problem for soldiers.

The M16 was had full-auto capability and had to be modified to three-round burst capability. Too many soldiers tended to use full-auto as a bullet hose. Full-auto is a great way to turn ammo into noise while killing nothing.

[oneshooter]

13. Too many soldiers tended to use full-auto as a bullet hose

AKA Spray and Pray!!!!

Oneshooter
Livin in Texas

[era veteran]

20. Recon by fire is stupid

I prefer one well aimed shot rather than poke and hope.

[Euromutt]

16. This is a problem endemic to military ordnance boards

History is replete with armies that resisted weapons with a higher rate of fire because some moron was afraid the infantry would use up its ammunition "too quickly." The British have actually been much worse about this than the Americans, grudgingly accepting the breech-loading Martini-Henry but limiting the amount of ammunition the individual soldier could be issued (which is what lost them the Battle of Isandlwhana in 1879; the quartermasters refused to issue more ammunition until the riflemen began to run low, by which time resupply couldn't keep up with demand, and the British force was overrun by the Zulus because the riflemen ran out); they resisted accepting sub-machine guns (deriding them as "gangster's weapons") until in the winter of 1939-1940, during the "Phony War," British patrols on the Franco-German border found themselves getting mauled in nighttime meeting engagements with German patrols, who usually had a couple of MP28s or MP38s; and even after WWII, the British wouldn't adopt the Belgian FAL without disabling the automatic setting. But I'm sure there was at least one asshole on the U.S. Army Ordnance Board who thought the M1 Garand was a bad idea because a semi-auto rifle would encourage troops to use too much ammo.

I say "asshole" because invariably the bean-counters who make these decisions aren't the ones who have to do the actual fighting. To paraphrase a line of Clint Smith's that someone quoted in the thread on .380 ACP, "nobody who's been in a firefight ever wished he had less firepower." History is also replete with military units that performed better once they acquired more firepower. During the American Civil War, "Mosby's Raiders" (more formally, the 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry, Partisan Rangers) greatly improved their effectiveness by ditching their standard-issue cavalry sabers and instead carrying an extra revolver. In WWII, the Soviets equipped entire regiments with PPSh-41 "burp guns" (cyclic RoF 900 rpm) which could overwhelm German positions with a hail of fire, and note that this was when the Sovs were already scraping the bottom of their manpower barrel (yes, contrary to widespread belief, the Sovs did not have a bottomless reserve of soldiers; by late 1943, almost everyone who could be drafted had been, and the Sovs increasingly relied on heavier firepower to compensate for their inability to replace losses). Both the Warsaw Pact and NATO (the latter with considerably more foot-dragging) glommed onto the German concepts of the air-cooled general-purpose machine gun (à la the MG34 and MG42) and Sturmgewehr because they worked. That is, these weapons made the rifle squad more effective by giving them more firepower.

It's not a coincidence that Custer lost at Little Big Horn, given that all the Winchesters on the field were in the hands of the Sioux.

[era veteran]

21. Your last line was the most relevant thing I've ever seen posted here.

Poor troopers screwed by Custer & the government.

[oneshooter]

22. Custer didn't help himself

He left 2 Gatling Guns and 2 field guns behind because "They slowed me down too much". Although these may not have won the battle the Indians were very respectful of the"Guns that spoke twice" aka artillery, and the rapid fire capability of the Gatling would have caused a lot of second thoughts.

1836 S.Colt was issued a patent for the revolving cylinder pistol
1836 the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company is formed and begins to produce the Patterson model (28cal-36cal)
1842 Patent Arms Manufacturing Company declares bankruptcy
1847 Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company is formed and begins production of the "Walker Colt 44cal"
1850 Colt produces the 1851"Navy" in 36cal
1860 Colt produces the 1860"Army" revolver in 44cal
1873 Colt produces the "Model P" revolver (Colt SAA)

There were 20-30 sub types and also Confederate copies made, including those produced in London (1851-1857)

Oneshooter
Livin in Texas

[taurus145]

23. Think "Winfield Scott"

Because of exactly that attitude, only one unit got the Sharps repeater in the Civil War. He did worse than that by penny pinching on firearms and ammo, but that one came to mind first.

[oneshooter]

12. The revolver you describe as a Webley

could be an Enfield No2.MK1 revolver. They were in 38/200cal(38 S&W) and had no hammer spur, thus were double action only. They were adopted in 1923 as a tankers revolver, as they were smaller than the then issue Webley .455 revolver. Tank hatched are somewhat tight to enter and exit in a hurry.

Oneshooter
Livin in Texas

[Euromutt]

14. Sounds like an Enfield No. 2 Mk. I* to me

The Mk. I* was indeed developed at the request of the Royal Armoured Corps to prevent the hammer from snagging on the innards of tanks, but from 1938 onward, it became the only model made, with existing copies of the SA/DA No. 2 Mk. I being retrofitted with DOA hammers and lighter mainsprings to Mk. I* standard. So your copy may have been a tanker's sidearm, but it's at least as likely to have been issued to anyone else who qualified to carry a revolver.