American Rifle - Alexander Rose [172]
Studler had two secret weapons. The first was a cartridge code-named the T65, and the second was a man birth-named Earle Harvey. Regarding the former, the Western Cartridge division of Olin Industries had lately perfected a type of “ball” propellant powder that possessed several advantages over the standard smokeless, nitrocellulose powders: it could be manufactured in a fraction of the time; its burn rate was steadier, thereby producing stable velocities; and it was more powerful, grain for grain, so that a soldier could use less but get more bang. What the ball powder made possible, in sum, was a full-power .30 round whose casing was shorter than before—by five-eighths of an inch, to be precise—while its bullet retained its previous weight and velocity. Just as important, a shorter cartridge entailed a shorter breech mechanism that used less metal, and that in turn meant a lighter rifle.7
To accessorize the T65, Studler set in motion a new rifle project, trusting to Earle Harvey to see it through. The T25, as the Harvey rifle was called during its experimental stages, would be expressly designed to take advantage of the new, shorter cartridges that would, thought Studler, serve NATO as standard.
Harvey was in his late thirties, the Connecticut-born son of a lawyer’s caretaker. Itching for the unindentured life, his father had purchased an eighty-two-acre farm a few miles south of Woodstock when Harvey was fourteen. Young Earle spent his youth learning about firearms from his father and grandfather, and he practiced his aim by shooting squirrels and grouse. Finishing high school in 1928, he attended the University of Connecticut, where for two years he studied engineering but found it too taxing. He then transferred to Brown University to study English. Graduating in 1933, he pursued graduate work at Yale before belatedly realizing that during the Depression English majors were hardly at the top of any employer’s most-wanted list. In 1937, rather reluctantly, he returned to engineering but decided to specialize in his first love, firearms. Throughout his student years he had continued to hunt, and in the fall of 1934, while tootling down the street in New Haven, he had a vision of a new locking mechanism for a self-loading rifle. He mentioned it to Howard Newton, a partner in a local sporting goods firm, who advised him to go see Edwin Pugsley, an old Yalie and MIT man who currently headed research at Winchester. Pugsley advised the young man to draw diagrams of the mechanism and bring them in. Harvey purchased some brown wrapping paper from the Whitney Avenue Pharmacy on the way home and began sketching. Within a few hours he’d finished. Back at Winchester, Pugsley examined them for about ten minutes with Frank Burton, one of his arms designers. The mechanism had promise, they concluded, but probably would not work. Even so, Harvey was clearly talented, and Pugsley offered him work at the firm. The job was a low-paying, low-status one, and Harvey still dreamed of becoming an English professor, but after eighteen fruitless months of unemployment, he belatedly agreed to take the position. By then, however, there was no work at Winchester, and Pugsley tipped him off that there were better opportunities at Remington, which had recently been bought by the Du Pont Company and was rapidly expanding.
The 1930s were a dire time for dear old Winchester, as Pugsley was well aware. After the Great War its management had disastrously decided to expand its core business into cutlery, radiator tubes, lawn mowers, washing machines, electric irons, padlocks, flashlights, roller skates, and dry-cell batteries. Despite the company’s optimistic advertising slogan (“As Good As the Gun”), few of these products had gained traction with the public, and the arrival of the Depression sent what little demand there was to