Random objects: the Berger repeater

Exploring the awkward phase in the development of firearms.

In an earlier post, I talked about my passion for the history of things. The quintessential example is money: the shrinking antoninianus of the Roman Empire, the dodgy promissory notes of the Confederacy, the worthless trillion mark bills of the Weimar Republic, and more.

Firearms make for another 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.

The industry’s enduring pursuit of capacity is of special note. 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.

Revolver-style repeating handguns gained wide acceptance following Mr. Colt’s patent of 1836, while the first truly successful semiautomatic pistol can be credited to Paul Mauser in 1896. But the awkward periods leading up to these milestones hide some fascinating, Rube Goldberg-esque designs — and serve as a reminder that being the first to market is not a guarantee of success.

The inner workings of the Berger repeating pistol, photo by author

What you are looking at is the Berger repeater, a diminutive experimental pistol developed in France in 1881. Only a handful of specimens are known to exist; this might be the first high-quality photo of the gun’s clockwork-like inner workings to grace the internet.

The firearm is fed from a tubular magazine mounted below the barrel; in this respect, it is not different from a modern-day lever-action rifle — except the lever is nowhere to be found. Instead, a carefully choreographed sequence of operations - extracting and ejecting spent casings, loading new cartridges from a magazine, and then cocking the hammer and firing - is carried out in response to a single (excruciatingly long) trigger pull:

The annals of gunsmithing are overflowing with mechanical curiosa. You can find harmonica guns (Jarre, 1742), turret pistols (Cochran, 1837), magazine-fed and semi-automatic revolvers (Dardick, 1958 and Fosbery, 1895), rocket-propelled side arms (Gyrojet, 1962), and more. If you’re willing to look past contemporary politics, the artifacts can be a remarkable source of wonder and amusement.