What we today call the Collette Gravity Gun was actually designed by a gunsmith named Jean Nicolas Herman in Liege between 1850 and 1854. He was an employee of Victor Collette (note: spellings vary), and […]
Among all the standard rifles that are coming into the US from Ethiopia through InterOrdnance, there are a handful of really unusual oddballs, and we are going to look at several of them. We have […]
The 1880s and 1890s were a fertile period of experimentation with repeating handguns. One such example is this design by Marius Berger, manufactured in France by St Etienne in 1880 and 1881. It uses a […]
The Colt Model 1847 Walker is one of the most valuable of all US military handguns in the collecting community, with examples sometimes breaking seven figures. However, the Walker was in many ways a remarkable […]
When Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853, he began a serious upheaval of Japanese life. Among other things, the insular Japanese society had been virtually the only nation to ever successfully implement gun […]
Today I’m at the Cody Firearms Museum, taking a look at two of the guns that were used in the court case between Francis Bannerman and the Winchester company – a prototype Magot pump-action rifle […]
Designed and patented in 1856 by Henry North (the grandson of company founder Simeon North), approximately 450 of these revolvers were made between 1856 and 1859. A first prototype was sent to the Washington Arsenal […]
Before Samuel Colt popularized the mechanical connection between the revolver hammer and cylinder, the revolvers being made were manually operated. This example is a copy of a third type Collier (that is to say, a […]
In 1867, a Russian delegation came to the United States to source new small arms for the Czar. In addition to purchasing Gatling guns, they met with Hiram Berdan and agreed to purchase a trapdoor […]
The first handguns issued by the North West Mounted Police (which would later become the modern RCMP) were 330 Adams revolvers, requisitioned by the new police service in March 1874, and shipped over from England. […]
© 2025 Forgotten Weapons.
Site developed by Cardinal Acres Web Development.