Random objects: Guycot & Jarre
Buckle up for another unnecessary excursion into the bowels of history.
Every now and then, I circle back to the history of things: learning about bygone eras by studying the evolution of everyday goods. I usually find this approach more insightful — and less prone to distortion — than flipping through the biographies of famed statesmen.
To be fair, I might be alone in this belief; by far the least popular entry on this blog is an article about the Berger repeater — an unusual 19th century firearm. To explain my interest in this contraption, I noted the following:
“Firearms make for an interesting area of study. It’s not the role they play in conflict; it’s how faithfully they chronicle nearly ten centuries of progress in mechanical design, manufacturing, and materials science. The consequences go beyond warfare: take Samuel Colt’s and Elisha K. Root’s pioneering work on interchangeable, machined components and streamlined production lines.”
Weapons are not only central to the development of the modern industry; they’re also uniquely polarizing today. A common talking point in the United States is that high-capacity firearms materialized only in the 20th century — and that the drafters of the Bill of Rights couldn’t fathom what they were signing up for. Not so:
“Multi-shot firearms go back further than commonly believed; by the mid 18th century, several manufacturers offered products that automatically reloaded projectiles from a storage compartment inside the gun. The American Revolutionary War was still fought with single-shot weapons, but dependable repeating firearms became a common sight before the Civil War.”
The point of that passage wasn’t to diminish the gun control argument as a whole; it’s just to note that history isn’t as neat and tidy as we’d like.
One of the most significant milestones in the annals of repeating firearms was the development of the six-shot Colt revolver (1836), followed by the 16-shot lever-action Henry rifle (1860) — a design later improved by Winchester. But far more extreme examples could be found on the market around that time; my favorite is probably the chain-operated pistol developed in France by Paulin Gay and Henri Guénot:
The firearm, shown here with one of its side panels removed and replaced with an acrylic window, had a capacity of 40 rounds. Cartridge carriers were mounted on a chain that extended into the firearm’s grip. With each pull of the trigger, the chain advanced to the next position, a fresh cartridge was seated in the chamber, and then struck by the firing pin.
The Guycot pistol wasn’t particularly successful; it was bulky and difficult to reload, and its 6.5mm cartridge was quite underpowered. In that sense, much like today’s ultra-high-capacity handguns, it was a novelty more than a viable design.
We now know that a more practical approach is to use a detachable magazine that lets one reload a lower-capacity firearm in a matter of seconds. In popular lore, the development of this system is intertwined with the invention of the semi-automatic handgun. The first commercially successful semi-auto with a detachable magazine was the Borchardt C-93 (1893); the most iconic and enduring example is probably John Browning’s M1911.
But, once again, the story is more complicated than that! Consider the case of harmonica pistols — a fairly successful design going back at least to the 18th century:
The harmonica pistol shown above — a model developed by Alphonse Jarre in France — features a 10-shot “bar” magazine that is automatically advanced to the next position with each pull of the trigger. Once all the bar-mounted pinfire cartridges are spent, another magazine can be slid into position, pushing out the old one.
Again, my point here isn’t politics: rusty antiques have little bearing on how you should feel about the societal challenges we’re facing today. It’s just that political slogans are a terrible way to learn history.
Thank you for your history dive. Learned new things. Had a rusty pin fire revolver given to me at age 12, part of small collection of old projectiles. The screw attaching the barrel to frame was lost. It had the same thread as a brass squirt gun nozzle. Gave it away 19 years later.