Defending King George, your Country and Laws,
is Defending Yourselves, and the Protestant Cause. This is for Bridges, Breaches, Lines, and Passes.
Ships, Boats, Houses and other Places. In short, it was a gun for everything. Thank you for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, and I'm here today at the Institute
of Military Technology taking a look at a truly spectacular piece of firearms
history. This is a Puckle Gun. As I just described, this was
invented and patented by a British lawyer by the name
of James Puckle in 1718. And it is well known on the internet and throughout
common culture as an early machine gun. Well, it's not quite a machine gun,
it's actually a repeating firearm. But this did perform the rather impressive
feat in the 1720s of firing 63 rounds in a mere seven minutes. So about 9 rounds
per minute, which is quite impressive from an era when we really expect one
shot at a time, and then reload the gun. A rate of fire of 1 to maybe 2 shots per minute. Now, the rationale behind this weapon, ...
what this was designed for, its context, is actually naval. So in the
1700s British merchant and naval forces were having trouble with Ottoman pirates. Not really that different from what we still
have today, with piracy around the Horn of Africa and Somalia. The problem was you'd
have Turkish pirates who were raiding, well frankly they were raiding England, but
they're also raiding British naval vessels and merchant vessels in these small little boats
that were too fast and too manoeuverable to be effectively engaged with, say, the
broadside cannon that a British naval ship of the line might have. What they needed instead was
something that was smaller and more manoeuverable and more rapid-fire
to engage these small boats. It's really funny to note that this is exactly the
same sort of problem that has continued for literally hundreds of years, where large
naval vessels still have to have large guns to engage other main naval vessels, and
they also have to have much smaller flexible fast firing guns to
engage, say, torpedo boats. Well this goes all the way
back to that exact same concept. What Puckle came up with was a
relatively small gun, the bore size of these vary, this one is about 1 and 3/16
inches. Some of them are listed as being 1 inch. Some people say they were, like,
32mm, you know, an inch and a quarter. But the idea was you had a relatively small
gun, you can mount this anywhere around the perimeter of a ship and you had, in
this case, nine rounds on tap that you could fire pretty quickly. So you can see
you could empty this gun in a minute. And then you'd have some spare
cylinders, you could reload it quickly. And it would give you a flexible and responsive
way to deal with small torpedo boats. Now the British Navy tested these in 1717, this
was actually before Puckle had gotten his patent. He developed it, he took it straight to the Navy first. They turned it down, they didn't actually
like it. It appears that one of the problems was that the flintlock mechanism wasn't
all that reliable. And the Navy probably saw this as some new-fangled, never
going to work right, gizmo from some guy trying to get a bunch of money out
of the military. So they turned it down. In response Puckle applied for and
received a patent in 1718. It was patent number 418. And what's interesting as a
side note, is that this was one of the very first British patents that actually required
the patentee to describe in detail how the weapon, or how the idea, would actually
work. So we have a really cool set of diagrams of this gun from his original patent. Now, he got that patent in 1718, and he
proceeded to get some capital and set up a company to manufacture these and
sell them on the commercial market. As you heard me read on his patent, it was marketed
as a gun pretty much good for anything. And by 1721 he had commercial
production of these guns, and there was actually a display in the
Woolwich Gardens in 1722 where he fired that sixty three rounds in nine minutes. Quite an impressive public display for the time. Unfortunately for Puckle, it turns out, it
appears he only really had one customer. So a British Duke, John Montagu,
purchased a couple of these guns for a naval expedition down into the West Indies.
And I don't know what the result was, but apparently it didn't go very well. And ... the result of this today is nothing
having to do with the West Indies, but instead two complete original Puckle
guns still exist in England that were originally purchased by Montagu. This
third gun is partially original and partially reproduction made from the other parts
from that same collection of two guns. So while this isn't completely original,
it is modelled off two existing originals, and it does use a substantial number
of original parts, which is really cool. Now this is a flintlock mechanism,
we have a repeating action here. It doesn't cycle itself,
you have to cycle it manually. But why don't we go ahead and take
a look at exactly how this works. Actually before we go up close,
I want to point one thing out. This is on a kind of awkward looking tripod, but Puckle did his math and he balanced this
gun really nicely. We have a thumb screw (it's on the other side here), we have a thumb screw right here, that
allows me to loosen this elevation bar. And when I do that now, the gun balances really
well. So it wants to come to rest right about there, but it takes only a little bit of pressure
to bring it up or to bring it down. This is an early flexible mount. It does of course pivot 360 degrees. This is exactly the sort of flexibility you
need for tracking a fast-moving vessel. Now looking at this from the front, you can see we have, basically, an early cylinder here with nine individual firing chambers. And we have a flintlock firing
mechanism that can lift up out of the way. This whole cylinder is removable, so you could
have multiple cylinders like this all pre-loaded. To remove them we just unscrew this, it is quite heavy, but that is our cylinder. So this cylinder slides onto the
central axis here and threads in place. I should point out we have a cam, a
ratchet wheel here and a ratchet tooth here. This means when you're operating the
gun, once you get a chamber in position, it's impossible to accidentally slide backwards. Just line it up with it's threads, there we go. Now, note that the cylinder can rotate
while the crank handle stays in place. So I'm going to line up one of my chambers.
I'm going to thread this all the way on, until I'm locked up in position. Notice that the face of the barrel here
is tapered, and there's a matching taper on each of the chambers. That is what gives you a gas seal. So each of these chambers has a flat hole in it, and
that's where you have a little bit of priming powder. And you ignite this powder, ... the spark goes
through the hole, ignites the main charge and fires the projectile out of that chamber. Each of those little cover plates is nice
and tight so we can rotate it on there, and it will keep the priming pan charged, sealed and safe. So here's our firing mechanism all ready to
go. We have a hammer here, or a striker, a cock, that would have a flint in it
(of course there isn't one in there now), and then this is our frizzen, and this is the trigger. So when you're ready to fire, you just press down on this trigger, that releases this, goes forward, the flint
(if it was there) would hit this plate, pop it backwards, a shower of
sparks is going to fall down into the priming powder right there, and fire the charge. Once that happens, of course, what
we're really interested in is how this cycles to the next charge. So what we
would do (we can leave this alone), we will rotate this back to unlock it (notice
that we've got our priming pan cover here), I'm going to bring this back until this lifts up. What Puckle has done here is this really clever
system where this plate is operating these covers. So what popped that up right now is the little
divot on top of the cover of that charge. Now by right here, I've unscrewed the cylinder
far enough that the chambers are no longer interfacing with the barrel and now I can rotate
this to the next cylinder, the next chamber. This is going to drop down here and now
the edge of this plate is going to push that priming cover open like that, and
then because the top of this is rounded, it's going to pop up, lift the plate up, and
now I just line up my powder charge there, I crank this back in. You can see
that a tapered bore is going to guide that nicely into place, and now our next priming pan
is open and lined up with the flintlock mechanism. So now I can recock the hammer, replace the frizzen, and I'm ready to fire again. Let's take another look at that from the side. When I crank this back, that cover pin is going to lift the pan up like that, then drops down. Right there it's pushing open the next priming pan, which then pops it up like that, and now I'm ready to run this back into place. And that is how James Puckle
developed repeating firepower in 1720. Now there is one other iconic element to this gun,
and this story, that I haven't mentioned yet. And that's the fact that the patent
describes two different chambers, two different types of chamber, that
were going to be available for this gun. You had round ones, which is what we
have here, you also had square chambers for firing square bullets. And according
to the patent the round chambers were for firing at Christians, good and humane.
The square bullets because they had sharp corners, and they would
tumble and do a lot more damage, those would be used specifically
and only for shooting at Turks. How exactly that would work because you have
a round barrel on this gun is a bit of a question. One presumes that the barrel would be
removed and replaced with a square bore barrel. Something like that with, say, Whitworth rifling is
not unknown, and would be theoretically feasible. I don't think anybody ever would have
wanted to deal with square bullets for this thing. As it was, he only had one guy who actually
was willing to buy the guns in the first place. I don't know what the cost was, but
one can only presume that this would have been a very expensive firearm
to buy. A lot of brass casting and a lot of workmanship
went into making these. Thank you for watching, guys. I hope you
enjoyed the video. The Puckle gun here is an extremely cool piece of firearms
history that everybody knows about, but nobody's really ever seen. So I'm
thrilled to have been able to take a close look at this one, demonstrate
to you guys how it works. And many thanks to the Institute of
Military Technology for facilitating this. If you're interested in firearms history,
their mission is to preserve it and educate people about it,
very much like Forgotten Weapons. So, they're not open to the public, but they are
open by appointment. So if you're interested, definitely get in contact and check it out. And of course if you like this sort of
content on-line, please do consider checking out my Patreon page. It's a
buck a month from supporters there that makes it feasible for me to travel to
places like the IMT, and bring you guys iconic, cool firearms like the Puckle gun. Thanks for watching.
Let's not forget the Girandoni air rifle. It had a "high capacity" magazine of 22 rounds and was chambered in a .46 caliber round that had the energy equivalent of a .45 ACP and had a repeating mechanism as to allow for rapid fire. It also wasn't some one off rare prototype either. It was adopted by the Austrian military for many years and used to great effect.
Yes, the founding fathers "could have never imagined" the type of weapons we have today. /s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dZLeEUE940&t=125s
The state of modern firearms technology has been the end goal the entire time. Ever since primitive fire lances and literal hand canons were used on ancient battlefields, there have been numerous attempts throughout the centuries to achieve the capabilities firearms have today. Their imaginations failed to materialize into reality because they were held back by lack of material and chemical advancements. Once those were discovered the modernity of firearms were the inevitable conclusion and they were well aware.
Those framers of the Constitution were so dumb they could have never imagined the advancements in firearm technology. /s
Politics aside, that is some truly impressive engineering.
"but this thing sucks so it doesn't count"
Forgotten Weapons is one of my favorite YT channels.
I just don’t understand how “it doesn’t apply to ARs because they’re weapons of war” makes any fucking sense.
Muskets were weapons of war! And for fuck’s sake, the ARs don’t even have the select fire capability that the M4 or the 16 have.