An Assortment of Pinfire Revolvers Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company and I am taking a look at some of the guns that they are going to be selling in their upcoming Regional 2016 auction. And I thought this would be a good opportunity for us to take a look at pinfire revolvers, and just go through a basic history of the pinfire system. Pinfire guns were a big thing in Europe in the middle of the 1800s, but they never saw that much use in the United States, which is kind of an interesting historical quirk, and we'll get into why that was the case. Now the pinfire system is kind of inextricably linked to one particular family, the Lefacheaux family of France. The patriarch of that family, the guy who started this, was a man named Casimir Lefacheaux. And he was born in 1802, lived until 1852, and at a very early age he apprenticed to a man named Jean Samuel Pauly, who was the guy who first invented the self-contained cartridge. Now Pauly was operating a gunsmithing
/ gun shop in Paris and actually ... there are a number of influential
firearms designers from Europe who were involved with Pauly at one point or another, and
Casimir Lefacheaux is definitely one of them. Now Pauly's cartridge, it was a self-contained
cartridge, but not quite what we would think of today. It was made out of brass, but it had very
thick case walls because Pauly's concern was making sure that the cartridge would not,
you know, explode or crack open when fired. ... Technology hadn't gotten to the point
where
people realised that it would be useful and important to have a case that was thin enough that
it could expand and create a gas seal when fired. So Pauly's cartridge did not do that. It was self-contained, it had the powder and
the projectile and the primer all as a single unit. You could load that into a gun, fire it and
then take it out and reload the cartridge. But it ... didn't do all the things
that modern cartridges do. So anyway, Lefacheaux is
exposed to this at a very early age, Pauly didn't do a whole lot to develop this
cartridge, in fact, it's kind of Lefacheaux who did. By 1827 Lefacheaux was running the shop,
Pauly had either retired or died, I'm not sure. And Lefacheaux ... through his whole career
really, continued to make incremental small improvements to the self-contained cartridge.
And in 1835 he patented the pinfire cartridge. Now the idea of a pinfire is you have a brass case,
reasonably similar to what we would think of today, but the primer is actually located inside the
case right on the edge of the case wall. And there is a firing pin built into the
case that sticks straight up out the side. And when you fire a pinfire round, what you do is have
a hammer that hits that firing pin built into the case, slams it down into the case,
hits the primer, fires the cartridge. So, they have some advantages. They don't have
a primer exposed anywhere, but on the other hand if you were to, you know, if you had a big
case of these things and you dropped them, and if one landed with enough force on that
firing pin it could discharge unintentionally. And ... one of the other main issues with these is
that you have this pin sticking out the side of the case, so the cases are not perfectly symmetrical.
And you have to in the design of your action, you have to have a space for that
pin to be exposed to a hammer. So when you load the cartridge, you have to make
sure the pin lines up with that hole when you load it. It's not the best cartridge in the world,
but it is one of the very first. If you think about it, in 1835 there weren't a whole
lot of other options. Rimfire hadn't been invented yet, centrefire certainly hadn't been invented yet. Everyone
else was using percussion guns, or still old flintlocks. So right off the bat, Casimir Lefacheaux, he
was running the gun shop, he made firearms, but he didn't have a whole lot of production
capacity, this was kind of a small shop. And so he did kind of the smart thing, he
licensed out rights to produce guns using his pinfire cartridge to pretty much
anyone who wanted to build them. With the exception that he retained sole rights
to make military firearms with this cartridge. His patent ultimately expired in 1845, and by
that point the cartridge was reasonably successful, reasonably popular. Now I mentioned that Casimir died
in 1852, well, he had a son named Eugene Lefacheaux. Eugene very much took up the mantle of
his father's work. Eugene was born in 1832, and he actually left and went to apprentice in
Liège, to some gun makers in Liège, Belgium, which was a major centre of firearms production. He
came back and in 1853, the year after his father died, he took over the business and made a lot of substantial
changes. This is one of those instances in history where the second generation really took advantage
of this opportunity to stand on his father's shoulders and grow this company and concept quite a lot. In fact one of Eugene Lefacheaux's biggest accomplishments was one of his very first. In 1854 he patented his 1854 model of pinfire revolver,
which kind of became a gold standard for the type. Ultimately in 1857 this was adopted by the French Navy
as its service handgun, which was a major accomplishment. At that time Eugene is 25 years old and and here he has
designed and gotten a military contract for a service sidearm. Pretty cool, pretty impressive. He also took the business and kind of revolutionised it,
he turned it into a very large-scale production factory. By the middle of the 1860s he had kind
of a unique operation going. He had ... about 900 workers, and he was
able to produce about 40,000 revolvers a year which for the industrial technology of the
1850s and '60s is really quite impressive. So this is why Lefacheaux has become inextricably
linked with the pinfire, he was making a ton of them. Now, his patents would expire, obviously. Some of the
early pinfire patents had already expired in the 1840s Lefacheaux's patent on the 1854
pattern would expire in the 1860s. And these guns became very popular. There
were large quantities of them out there, and so copies were manufactured by
everybody and their brother, Especially in Liège, which was a centre of many, many small and
large, but also small gunsmithing operations. So you will find Lefacheaux
marked pinfire guns out there, and you'll also find a vast quantity of both unmarked
and marked by other manufacturer examples. In fact, in the 1860s Lefacheaux actually
opened an additional, a second gun factory in Liège to take advantage of the climate
there himself. It was also a major concern. However, as the 1870s roll around ...
rimfire and centrefire both are invented, but rimfire ... proves to be the best system
overall. It's reloadable, it's safe, it's easy to transport, it's symmetrical, you don't have to worry about protuberances
coming out of the cartridges like you do with pinfire. And Lefacheaux ultimately files his last
patent in 1878, and pinfires fade from popularity. They're simply rendered obsolete by centrefire guns. Now, I mentioned that I would touch on why these
guns never really showed up in the United States. These aren't particularly popular with collectors here. Frankly most people don't know much about them,
and most of the guns that we find in the pinfire category are marginal quality Belgian knock-offs. Because there
was a ton of them made, they were very inexpensive. So why didn't they show up here?
The answer is Eugene Lefacheaux patented his 1854 pattern gun in
France and in the United Kingdom, but he did not bother to patent it in the
United States. And just a year or two later Rollin White would ... come up with
this patent for a thoroughly impractical, stupid gun design that happened
to include a claim on the idea of drilling a hole all the way through the revolver cylinder
so that you can load a cartridge from the back. That design feature is critical, you
have to have it to make a pinfire revolver. You have to be able to load the
cartridge from the back. But Rollin White's patent covered the ...
ability to manufacture a gun like that. Rollin White's patent was controlled by
Smith & Wesson, and Smith & Wesson was interested in manufacturing guns on the
rimfire cartridge and then the centrefire cartridges. Smith & Wesson didn't see any reason to get into
pinfire and because Smith had the exclusive rights to ... Rollin White's patent, nobody else
was able to make pinfire revolvers either. So some of them were certainly imported from
Europe. Some of them did see service in the US Civil War with the Confederacy, because the
Confederacy was getting guns from mainland Europe. But in general they remained a small
niche item here in the United States. Now I have pulled out here a selection of
pinfire revolvers from this particular auction that kind of begin to touch on the variety that you
will find in pinfire guns. This is a massively wide-open opportunity for someone who
is simply looking for an interesting and less common type of firearm to collect, because these
were manufactured in all sorts of configurations. So this one I believe is a 10mm, possibly 12mm
(I have not actually measured the bore). They were manufactured in 5mm, 7, 9, 10,
12, 15, although 15mm guns are pretty rare. Most of them are kind of on the smaller end
of that range. They were manufactured with fixed triggers like this. They were manufactured
with (that's another fixed trigger), they were made with folding triggers like this one. This
was particularly common on small concealable versions, or pistols of this type. So it's rare to find them single action only, however
some of them are single action or double action. Some of them were made double action only. You can see
that there's no spur on the hammer of this one, so it's DA only. You will occasionally find them with solid frames,
although you usually find them with open frames. Typically you'll find them with 6 shot
cylinders, but occasionally there are big ones, like this 10 shot example, and even larger. Just massive variety. You can see some are blued, some
are nickeled, some are plain, some are heavily engraved. Some, like this one, have some interesting
extra features like a little folding bayonet that sits under the barrel. Anything that was being done with firearms
you can find having been done to a pinfire. There are pinfire pepperbox revolvers
in addition to traditional style revolvers. Eugene Lefacheaux himself actually invented
what he called a triple action lock, where it's like a normal double action gun, you
can cock the hammer for single action, but you can also cock the hammer by pulling
the trigger partway back and then releasing it, which would allow you for example to fire single action with a single hand grip on the gun, without having
to change your grip to thumb the hammer back. You could in effect thumb the hammer
back by using the trigger, then take careful aim and a slight additional press would fire the gun. Just a few of the huge number of
varieties of these guns you'll find, so. There are I think about a dozen different
lots in this particular auction with pinfire guns. Some look very nice (although this
one is refinished), some look less nice. It can be a bit of a challenge to find really nice pinfire
revolvers, but if you start looking they are out there. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video,
hope you learned something. We can touch on a new subject that most
people aren't very familiar with, and an interesting element of firearms history that
we don't see very much here in the United States. If you're interested in any of these five in
particular, take a look at the description text below. I have included links to the catalogue pages
for all five of these. Most of them are in batches with other guns, so you can take a look at the catalogue
page and see what other guns are included with these. And if you're interested in them, you can place
bids right there through Rock Island's website. Thanks for watching.
