The first US-production military arm was the “US musket, Charleville pattern” – known today as the Model 1795 Springfield Musket. Copied from the French 1766 model Charleville which made up the bulk of existing US […]
The movie industry has always had special requirements for firearms. Flintlocks, for example, can be rather finicky guns for folks to use without practice and care, and that does not work will in a filming […]
How does one keep a flintlock action reliable in wet, riany weather? Well, let’s have a look at a flintlock shotgun designed specifically to be waterproof! This is a Joseph Manton shotgun from about 1815. […]
For a long time, Russian small arms were patterned closely after French designs – the Russian 1809 family was based on the French 1777 muskets, and the Russian 1828 model – like this one – […]
Lot 1193 in the September 2020 RIA Premier auction. John Hall designed the first breechloading rifle to be used by the United States military, and the first breechloader issued in substantial numbers by any military […]
Lot 1173 in the RIA September 2020 Premier auction. During the 1600s and 1700s, flintlock and wheel lock systems were used to make “hand mortars”; firearm-like apparatuses to throw objects. Some of these were military […]
Colonel Thomas Thornton was a wealthy and somewhat flamboyant character in England in the late 18th and early 19th century. He commanded a militia unit with which he had some disagreement, and which mutinied against […]
Joseph Chambers invented a repeating flintlock weapon in the 1790s, and I think it is appropriate to consider it a “machine gun”. The design used a series of superposed charges in one or more barrels, […]
This is Lot 2137 in the upcoming October 2019 Morphy Extraordinary auction. The US Congress passed a Militia Act in 1808 to provide funding for military supplies, and one of the immediate resulting contracts was […]
Lot 1421 in the September 2019 RIA auction. In 1798, the US Congress allocated a huge sum of money – $800,000 – to the procurement of military equipment to supplement the output of the Springfield […]
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