Durs Egg Ferguson - The Rifle That Didn't Shoot George Washington

hi guys thanks for tuning into another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today at the Murphy auction house where we have a really cool rifle to take a look at this is one of the first to prototype Ferguson rifles manufactured for British military consideration by one of the best British gunsmiths of the time a guy oddly named ders egg so captain Patrick Ferguson was a officer in the British Army in the seventieth regiment and he came up well I shouldn't say he came up with this idea because this style of rifle existed back into the early 1700s and what's interesting is Ferguson got a patent for it in 1776 apparently whoever was issuing the British patents wasn't fully aware of the scope of prior development because you know Ferguson didn't invent this but he was the first guy to really take it to the British military and get some limited success in it this is potentially one of the very first breech loading guns actually used by a military force in combat which is really cool we'll take a look at the mechanism in a minute when we look up close at this rifle but basically you have a screw breech that allows you to open the back end of the barrel load powder and ball in there close the breech and fire and this has a couple of notable improvements notable advantages over a muzzle loader one of them is rapidity of fire you don't have to push force the bullet all the way down the bore you can just stick it in the back where it's really easy to put it in because you don't have to engrave the rifling on to it it is very accurate because it is a rifled barrel as opposed to a smoothbore barrel which was much more common especially in military service in the 1700s and it also interestingly allowed troops to be a little more tactically wise and this is something that Ferguson was particularly good at and interested in so you could reload this gun from pretty much any position including say on your back or on your belly you could shoot prone and reload this rifle and fire again without having to go through contortions of putting powder down the barrel and then using a ramrod down the barrel to seat a new bullet this is a major problem if you're trying to like use cover and shoot from prone with a muzzle loader you know you have to slide the rifle back and it's awkward and slow or you stand up and you make a really good target while you're reloading so Ferguson wanted to he had this idea to improve basically have an elite unit of troops in the British military who could make best use of a technologically advanced gun like the Ferguson breech loader so he presented two of these guns to the British military for trials and testing and he what what's particularly impressive about it is that he did this this trial was conducted on a particularly rainy windy day which normally is kind of the death knell for a muzzleloader like your powder is gonna get wet and ain't gonna work trials over well because of this because this system is a breech loader it's really feasible to shield the breech from rain when you open the breech put in powder keep it dry close the breech and be able to fire repeatedly and it's something he was able to do he was able to show rate of fire up to six rounds per minute on targets at 200 yards where he um he almost shot the entire trial without a single mess I think they said he had like three misses in the course of the whole trial it was very successful in fact it was so successful that the British military actually decided to adopt it now they adopted it on a very limited basis there were two guns initially presented one of them went through the trial and was handed over was actually kept after the trial in the Tower of London as a pattern for the gun the other one is this one they took that try that pattern gun and they made they ordered a hundred more of them to be made and they detached Ferguson from his regiment and put him in command of a company of a hundred riflemen that were going to be sent out to the United States which wasn't the United States yet it was the British colonies in North America who are currently in the process of attempting to revolt against the British crown so what the British did is they accept this rifle for a company level field trials experiment Ferguson actually had his men all equipped with green uniform so they kind of had proto camouflage they had breech-loading rifles they were well-trained which is an important point to make most of the British Army at this point had minimal training you know if they got to fire a couple times a couple shots per year that's pretty good training powder and ball were expensive they didn't do a lot of actual shooting and most of the you know the the lion infantry was equipped with muzzle loaders and they fired in volleys aiming wasn't really a thing you know you didn't really need to do it they didn't get to practice it aiming was absolutely a thing for the Ferguson rifles because these were rifled accurate guns and Ferguson trained his troops well to be able to make best use of that so they get a hundred rifles they set off to the colonies they arrived in I think it was there in the field by June of 1777 and in September they're going to have their first their real major combat inauguration which was the Battle of Brandywine now unfortunately for Ferguson Brandywine nothing it his troops that don't really play an important role in Brandywine so well I'll tell you what let's talk about the the final implications of this gun after we take a look at how it actually works if this rifle sounds familiar to you it's because I actually had the chance to do some shooting with a modern reproduction at gorgeous modern reproduction of a Ferguson several years ago and if you're interested in that you should definitely check out that shooting video because it's a really cool opportunity to get some hands-on experience with one of these guns there will be a link to that in the end at the end of this video but if you haven't seen it the way this works is with a very rapid thread rapid pitch screw breech so if we take one revolution of the trigger guard here and it opens this screw breech you have access to the chamber right there and what you would do is drop in round let all drop in a powder charge behind it and then you rotate this make sure I get a right direction you rotate this back into position it snaps in place over that detent and that seals the breech ready to fire now these guns were all meticulously handcrafted Ferguson oversaw the manufacturer he approved every individual done and the the lapping on the threads on these breech plugs were good enough that this was a completely effective obturator these didn't suffer from particularly badly from fouling although fouling in the chamber or fouling in the barrel would impact accuracy of them and they had to be cleaned to be reliably accurate as with all black-powder firearms but this screw breech works it's really quite remarkable take a look at this from the bottom so open this up like so there are you'll notice there are a couple of cuts here in the side of this breech plug and those are when you so that the one place that does foul is the front face of this screw when the breech is closed and these cuts are there to give that fouling a place to basically be pushed into when you operate the breech rate of fire of this was allegedly according to Ferguson up to six rounds per minute more typical for troops equipped with these was like three rounds per minute but even Ferguson in himself never really tried to focus on the rate of fire for him the advantage of this was the the breech loading the the ability to reload from awkward positions and to and and to be a little more tactically sound as well as to have a very accurate rifle now looking at this one in particular we have a couple of very important marks here this it's is worn but it says d egg serial number two this is the King's proof there are no military proofs on this rifle because it was not a military service rifle this was manufactured for testing it was not not formally a military gun we have another D egg ders egg marking down here ders egg despite his funny sounding name today was one of the best British gunsmiths working at this time he was actually a Swiss immigrant he moved to London and in the very late 1760s he actually started his career working for Henry NOC whose name you might recognize from the NOC volley gun as well as many other guns that were much more successful than the volley gun and really made a tremendous name and reputation for himself making really nice guns so these two first Ferguson's number one that's still I believe still in the Royal Armouries today and number two here he was paid just over 31 pounds by the royal wealth by the government in 1776 when these were presented for trials also here on the top of the barrel we have a couple of Ferguson marks this is a Ferguson family pressed or family symbol that was stamped on these guns and then this would originally have said a Fergus and you can see the F are a little bit of the G and the S curved around there as in son of Fergus or Ferguson this has a rather delicate rear sight on it that would not be copied on the military guns the hundred guns made for the army you can see we have two additional rear sight notches here as well as that one for different ranges London and I believe that would have had eggs address which has worn down this rifle has a really good fine front sight blade to go with that rear sight and that's a very important aspect of it this was a rifled gun it was very accurate and in order to actually exploit that accuracy you had to have decent sights which is kind of a rarity on guns of this period and you can see the rifling there it's actually really impressively intact and distinctive rifling there were a number of flaws in these guns from a military perspective so one of them was the cost building a very finely fitted screw breech gun like this was far more expensive than a typical muzzle loader you know just having a rifled barrel was a lot more expensive than a typical muzzle loader so that's one strike against them in addition the the material removed from the stock for this screw breach and for the lock plate left the stocks actually really thin and fragile in this area right around the the trigger in the breech area and in fact the the known surviving examples almost all have repaired damage in this area when these guns were eventually collected up by the British military most of them were unserviceable probably because of damage to the stock here there are you know there are people who would who would bring up this hypothetical question what if the whole British Army had been you know armed with Ferguson's they could have just obliterated him American colonists and and prevented the United States from achieving independence well probably not in reality issues like this they're not sexy and exciting and cool but they're extremely practical so if a gun stock is this fragile the chances are you know in the tire army armed with these rifles would have massive problems with the guns breaking and massive amounts of combat ineffective men with broken rifle stocks and that's more substantial more important that has a bigger negative effect than the positive that you get from having you know an accurate and rapid firing breech-loader now I'll just point out here if you would like to know more about this sort of rifle I would recommend do it Bailey's book British military flintlock rifles this discusses the Ferguson in some detail with a lot of of the original correspondence reproduced and it does actually show this particular rifle specifically so so on September 11 1777 the Battle of Brandywine takes place Ferguson's unit is deployed is active at the battle they don't really do anything substantive as a part of the battle which is really unfortunate the the idea here was to have this you know field combat experiment with a company of elite riflemen they have camouflage they're operating in small groups they're doing everything tactically sound and they're being led by an officer who is a huge proponent of these tactics he understands them he helped develop them he develop the rifle that they're using for goodness sake and that's is too often when military units try out these new tactics they'll end up you know giving command of the unit to some officer who doesn't isn't interested or doesn't understand the new equipment that he's been given and Ferguson's men really had every benefit that they could have to prove that this this concept was tactically sound and unfortunately they weren't able to not really for any reason of their own and not for any fault of their own they simply didn't end up in a position to be tactically relevant to the battle and Ferguson gets wounded during the battle and that puts him out of action and this this company really was Ferguson's involvement was essential to the company so once he's wounded and taken out of the fight in the aftermath of the battle his hundred-man company is split up these men were all all had been taken from other other regiments and when Ferguson is is wounded they're all sent back to their individual regiments and the experiment pretty much ends after Brandywine inconclusively no unfortunately for Ferguson he would go on to take part in the Battle of Kings Mountain where he would be killed didn't survive the war so that pretty much ended the ferguson rifle experiment on the part of the british the guns that were left were eventually collected up almost all of them by that point we're considered unserviceable in the british army records probably because the stocks broke as we mentioned earlier and yeah and unfortunately this would have a significant effect in in cooling interest in breech-loading rifles in the British military for some time to come all right I have to mention one last anecdote with the Ferguson rifles here because if I don't I'll never hear the end of it and that is actually Captain Ferguson himself with one of his rifles out before the Battle of Brandywine was in a position over watching a road and happened to see two unaccompanied officers ride past and he didn't shoot them he didn't attempt to shoot them he almost certainly could have hit them had he tried he was really a very good shot and he was equipped with a very accurate rifle at the time these guys stood out he mentioned this in a letter that one of them was in a really distinctive odd uniform one of them had a very large hat and it was only later that he was told that in the area where he had been he was trying for her rebels American rebel troop movement apparently General Washington General George Washington had been in that area with a French officer on that day inspecting troops and it is virtually certain that the two men that Ferguson watched ride by where this French officer and General Washington and he did not make any attempt to shoot them hunt because well it wouldn't have been polite it wouldn't been proper these men weren't at the head of troops they weren't aggressive in any way they never even knew that he was there they didn't they they never noticed him and and for him his recounting was it just wouldn't have been proper to shoot them in the back as they rode past and so he let them go and I'm really interesting that General Washington could have had his military career ended right there and who knows what implications that might have had for the American independence movement at that time anyway a couple really cool pieces of history tied to the ferguson rifle of course both with our own independence and revolution and just the technological aspects of a breech-loading gun in the 1770s so this particular one unfortunately by the time you see this video this has already sold but it is one of the things that was on consignment here at the morphe auction house for sale an exquisitely cool piece of history so thank you all for watching stay tuned tomorrow we'll have another and cool forgotten weapon

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 199,770

Rating: 4.9748759 out of 5

Keywords: ferguson, rifle, breechloader, breech loader, rifled, kentucky rifle, revolutionary war, american revolution, british, english, royal, patrick ferguson, brandywine, kings mountain, george washington, camo, camoflage, camouflage, 1776, trial rifle, durs egg, london, tactics, sharpshooter, marksman, forgotten weapons, original, mccollum, history, development, disassembly, screw breech, breech plug, ernie cowen, ernie cowan

Id: IlD5SFR_qq0

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 27 2018