Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at
the Morphy Auction Company taking a look at a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon that probably came off
San Juan Hill after Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders took it. We don't know for sure because,
honestly, at that point in history, people didn't put that much
significance on the Battle of San Juan Hill. We know for a fact that this gun came out of
Cuba right at the end of the Spanish-American War. And we know that there were Hotchkiss
Revolving Cannons on San Juan Hill. It's a pretty good bet that this was one of them,
although you can't say with 100% certainty. Anyway, what is a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon?
Well, aside from being about the coolest thing you can possibly put in your living room, this is a creation
of an American guy by the name of Benjamin Hotchkiss. He ... was an artillery designer and he came up
with a number of interesting products, innovations, in the United States and wasn't able to get
any significant interest in them and thought, as did more than a few other Americans
around this time period, "You know what? I'm never gonna make any serious military sales here
in the United States. This is a backwater of a country that's never gonna go to war because, you know,
there's a big ocean between us and everyone else." So he went France. He took up residence in Paris in
1867, and started working on some of his ideas there. And he was actually there during the
Franco-Prussian war and the Siege of Paris. And one of the things that he was maybe not
a direct witness to, but recognised, was the utter failure of the French Mitrailleuse, which was the
repeating gun, a 25 barrelled volley gun sort of concept. ... The French thought this was going to be
a tremendously successful secret weapon that would annihilate the Germans. The problem
was it was so secret they didn't really train with it, they didn't have any good doctrine for it,
and ended up using it like artillery at extended ranges where it got
demolished by Prussian Krupp artillery guns. So the Mitrailleuse was an ignominious failure,
and really left a bad taste in the mouths of European militaries worldwide about machine guns. Well, Hotchkiss saw that, and what he thought was, "That
Mitrailleuse used just rifle ammunition, it used solid lead bullets, and they were trying to have, you know, a
significant effect with these at 1,200 metres or more. And obviously that's not going to work.
What you need is exploding projectiles. You need a gun that has the power of an explosive
artillery shell, but the rapidity of fire of one of these early manually operated machine guns." And that is
where the Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon came from. So let's start with the calibre of this thing.
This is a 37mm gun, that's about a 1.5 inch bore. Why that? Well, the Congress of St Petersburg at
the time had set out some rules of civilised warfare. And one of them was that civilised nations would not
use exploding projectiles that weighed less than 14 ounces. That's about 400 grams. So Hotchkiss took that, scaled it up just a little bit,
you know a little bit of error correction there, and went with a 16 ounce, or about a 450 gram
projectile, which equated out to a 37mm bore. So that was the basis for this. He knew that the
explosive capability of the projectile was really one of the important core elements of his Revolving
Cannon. Hence it had to be big enough to do that legally. Now it's easy to look at this and assume, "Oh, Hotchkiss
was just ripping off the Gatling gun. It's crank fired, it's got a bunch of barrels, it's got you know, a top feed.
It's obviously ... it's just a big Gatling gun, right?" Well, the answer is no. This is actually substantially
different from a Gatling gun in a number of ways. Fundamentally the Hotchkiss gun only has one bolt, where the
Gatling gun works by having a bolt paired to each individual barrel. So if you have a 10 barrel Gatling, you've got 10
bolts in it cycling around as you turn the crank. With the Hotchkiss there's just one.
And on top of that as you turn the crank on the Hotchkiss
gun the barrels do not continuously revolve. As I turn this crank there is a cam inside,
and we'll take a look at it in just a moment, but it will rotate one barrel into position.
And then it will let the barrel stay in position, even while the crank's turning,
while a round is chambered and fired. So this does a couple things. First off it
provides some safety against a hang fire, because the barrel does not
immediately continue turning. And secondly, it ... means the barrel's
not actually moving when the shot's fired. Which means you don't have any
potential accuracy issues as a result. It's more important with the lower
rate of fire with a gun that's this huge. So you can see as I turn the crank, right in here I'm
turning the crank and the mechanics are moving inside, but the barrel doesn't actually rotate
until the bottom half of the crank. So up here it's firing, down here it's rotating. That's cool, I'm just gonna
keep doing this for a minute. This thing is basically the Mark 18 Automatic
Grenade Launcher of the 19th century, because every one of those rounds is effectively
a 37mm high explosive shell going downrange. Got a tower feed here. This was
actually run by a three person team. You had one guy who is the gunner, who would
adjust aim, and run the crank to actually fire the gun. You'd have a second guy whose job was loading. As
you suspect, he keeps this topped up with ammunition. And you had a third guy, whose job was
to basically shuttle ammo from the limber (the standard production limber for
this gun would hold 200 rounds), he'd shovel it from that limber to the loader,
the loader would then load it into the gun. So how does one actually load a Hotchkiss
Revolving Cannon? Well, with magazines. That's the cartridge that you're using, and you
could fit 10 of those into one of these magazines. Now, this isn't really a magazine as we think
of it today because there's no spring in it. It's just a box that will hold ten rounds
and has a little lid on the bottom, with a lever that allows the lid to
open or, like that, remain closed. So what you would do is
take your 10 round magazine. Your loader would insert that into the
feed tower here, and then trip that lever, then the weight of the cartridges
is going to push this gate open, they're all going to ... shuttle down here into
the feed tower. Where they are then good to go. The gunner can keep firing while this is
done. The loader would then hand this off to his ammunition bearer
assistant, get another loaded one, drop it in, flip the lever, cartridges all come out.
And so on until you run completely out of ammunition. The effective practical rate of fire
for ... a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon was between 60 and 80 rounds per minute
depending on the skill of the gunners. Now the actual aiming is done with a pair
of hand cranks. This is fixed on its pedestal, ... this thing is too heavy to just free
mount and have a gunner swing around. This thing weighs 225 kilos, which is
about 500 pounds, 450, 500 pounds. It's a very heavy gun. And that's just the gun, not
the carriage. So you have an elevation wheel here that adjusts your elevation up and down.
And you have a traverse wheel right here. This is a gun that was sold to the Spanish, of course, used
on Cuba, so it's marked in Spanish, "Izquierda" and "Derecha". And running this pivots the gun
left and right. Well, right and left. You don't have a whole lot of traverse available. If you need to do more than this [wheel] will do,
you just adjust the entire gun side to side. Now to access the internals
we have a screw plug right here, loosen this up and then conveniently
the whole thing opens up for access. Looking in the back of the gun we
have a couple of things going on. Obviously our crank handle is
connected to this giant cam wheel. And you'll notice that there is a diagonal section
of the cam here, and a straight section here. This is operating on the barrel cluster. So there is a little spindle at the end of
the barrel cluster that has some lugs on it, those lugs interact with this. In fact,
you should be able to see them up in there. What that does is it locks the barrels in
position during the top half of the rotation. During the bottom half it forces
them to rotate 72 degrees, one of five barrels coming into position. Now we also have a firing pin. The firing
pin is actually a completely removable unit. That's probably the biggest firing pin I've ever seen
in a gun. And we have a firing pin spring that is here on the rear cover of the gun. This is a V spring
that is pushing on the firing pin at all times. This actually fires from ... about the five o'clock
position, which isn't what you would expect, but there's another cam here on the crank handle,
and what that does is it pulls the firing pin back until the gun's ready to fire. So at this position
the barrels have been locked, they're not moving, this spring is pushing on the firing pin, and as soon as you drop it past, right there,
the firing pin snaps forward and fires the cartridge. Then lastly, we have this cam coming back and forth
there, and that is what is pulling the bolt back and forth. There's a set of gears in there so that as
this goes forward, the bolt comes back. And in this case the bolt, when I say "bolt" it's
actually maybe a little bit misleading, because this is really just like a loading rammer,
it's not a bolt as we think of it today. So let's go ahead and take a look inside the ejection
port. Which means I'm gonna take our feeding tower, and wiggle it out here. This of course comes off because
it'll just get in the way when you're transporting the gun. And you then of course have a little cover, a ... big,
hefty solid brass door to cover that opening in the gun. So looking at this as we cycle the bolt,
you can see the bolt comes forward, but it only goes this far. It doesn't actually
push the cartridge completely into the chamber. It gets it most of the way in
and then it's going to retract back. By the way, we also have this interrupter, so what this allows
is when it's down, the ... bottom cartridge in the magazine drops into the opening here, and then
as soon as this starts to push it forward, it pushes this up, which is going to cut off the magazine,
so that the next cartridge doesn't try to drop in, until the bolt is all the way retracted and ready
to push another cartridge into the next barrel. Now if we look closely down there, and I don't know
that you can quite see it because it's pretty dark, but this this part of the actual back end of the
receiver is sloped, and it is going to slowly cam the cartridge all the way into the barrel. As the barrel
rotates past, that cartridge gets pushed slowly in. What that does is it gives you a lot of leverage with
the crank lever to force a cartridge into the chamber. So that if the gun has gotten dirty, or the
ammunition is slightly out of specification, you're not just relying on the bolt pushing a cartridge in straight in, instead you're using leverage and
extra time and distance in its travel to get, well, a more efficient, more effective,
push of the cartridge into the chamber. You can also see the front of the bolt face here, which is just solid, there's no firing pin in there at all. So there's a pro tip: if you're trying to negotiate a better
price buying yourself a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon, if they don't know how it works you can tell them
it's deactivated or something and get a better price. I should also point out in the carriage
here we have a compartment for storage that holds a bunch of the critical components,
so the firing pin comes out and gets stored here, as does the crank handle. And then a selection
of tools, some of which are here and some aren't. There's hammer there of course, probably a punch that's
been replaced by a smaller more modern punch, but it's a cool shaped wood block in there for storage
of all the important tools and components. As you might gather from the fact
that the Spanish had these on Cuba, they became very popular. They were expensive
guns, but they were also extremely effective guns. They were reliable, they were durable and they
could lay down a withering amount of firepower. There were actually three different types
of cartridges that were used with these. They had the high explosive that it was really
designed around, but then they also had armour-piercing ammunition for firing at ships.
These were used quite substantially in a naval role, in fact more in a naval role than in a land role. And
they also had canister shot full of, basically, buckshot, you know a 37mm buckshot round that was
devastatingly effective against, say, sailors on a deck. So they were purchased by a lot of different countries in Europe,
in South America, the US Navy bought a bunch of them. The French bought a tremendous number of them.
Now the French had been kind of once bitten twice shy by the Mitrailleuse, and so they spent
close to 10 years testing these guns before they really took ownership of
them and started to buy them in quantity. But they were very popular guns,
especially for naval applications. The height of the use of the Hotchkiss
Revolving Cannon really was naval warfare during the late 19th century and
the beginning of the 20th century. However, these guns did stay in
service through World War One. Think about it, that was only less than 20 years after
the Spanish-American War when this one was captured. They would be used as, you know, rear echelon sort of
fortress defensive guns in places where they were available. And these were actually repurposed as anti-aircraft
guns in World War One, which would have been an interesting combination of a relatively low rate of fire, but a
pretty devastatingly effective shell should you manage to hit. So this particular one of course has the really exceptional
provenance of having been captured by the American military almost certainly on San Juan Hill, but absolutely
in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. It came back here to the United States to a museum in
Florida for many years before going through a couple of private collector's hands, and is now coming
up for sale here at the Morphy Auction House. So if you would like a gun that is both
a very cool piece of firearms history, really the crème de la crème of the
manually operated machine gun era, as well as being just a fantastic
piece of very direct US military history. And, of course, this is an antique under
law, so this is not a destructive device. Of course it's crank fired,
so it's not a machine gun. This in fact transfers as if it were not a firearm at all. And it comes with some cool accessories. If you
take a look at the description text below the video, you'll find a link to ForgottenWeapons.com,
and from there you can click over to Morphy's catalogue page for this guy and
check out all their pictures, description, etc. And if you're interested you can
place a bid up there on-line for it, come down here to Pennsylvania
and take a look at it in person, or just just window shop at all the
other cool stuff in the catalogue. Thanks for watching.
