American Rifle - Alexander Rose [48]
Nobody had ever witnessed this kind of performance from a prototype weapon, the testers excitedly proclaimed. Its celerity of fire was incredible. Five Halls had discharged 77 times in 4.5 minutes, compared to 54 in the same time from the muskets and 37 from the regular rifles. Whereas ten men loaded and fired their Halls ten times each in an average of 3.75 minutes, the musket took 6.5 minutes, and the regular rifles, 16.75 minutes.
In terms of accuracy, the Hall won hands down against the musket. Thirty-eight men fired at a target 100 yards away for ten minutes at their own speed. The testers found that the Harpers Ferry rifles had discharged 494 times (with 164 rounds, or 33 percent, hitting the target) and the muskets 845 (with just 208, or 25 percent, in the target), but the Halls toted up the extraordinary figure of 1,198 shots, of which 430, or 36 percent, were in the target. All the examiners could gasp was that a Hall-armed unit would achieve a guaranteed victory “over an adversary of equal numerical force, armed with the common muskets.”
They had just one or two minor criticisms. The most important was that concerning “the mass of filth” that accumulated in the chamber and barrel after rapid firing. They recommended that Hall supply a “small cylindrical wire brush” with each gun and make cleaning the breech part of every rifleman’s drill. Aside from that, they had little to add.55
The report had exceeded even Hall’s and Bomford’s most optimistic expectations. A modern-day test has confirmed the Artillery School’s plaudits for Hall’s brilliant achievement of near-perfect interchangeability. In the late 1980s Robert Gordon, a professor of applied mechanics at Yale University, took precise measurements of the eleven critical dimensions of two early machine-made Hall rifles. Perhaps the most crucial measurement, that of the “head space” between the breech block and the barrel, averaged 0.003 inches on a brand-new arm, while the average deviation of the other ten dimensions was 0.0027 inches. For comparison’s sake, the average deviation on Springfield firearms, then the most precisely hand-tuned weapons in the country, with their every piece individually crafted, was a relatively massive 0.0042 inches. By any standard, even those of today, Hall’s success was impressive.56
Hall, however, was uncomfortably aware that he was hampered by a lack of space. He had too little room for all the machines he needed to build. Making a rifle required stock-carvers, drop hammers, forges, a complex pulley system, drilling implements, and machines able to straight-cut, curve-cut, and lever-cut, plus sufficient men to operate the apparatus, examine their output, and store the guns. One recurrent worry was finding enough water power to animate the machinery. Hall was obliged to use one machine to perform several tasks, rather than having several machines each performing one task, a deficiency that hampered efficient production as a single operator had to constantly readjust and remeasure the jigs and settings.
Also weighing on his mind was money. By this time his original patent on the firing mechanism had expired—a gratifying event, in that the malevolent Thornton would never see a penny from his scam. Hall’s solution was to take out a patent on the machinery he had developed over the years while negotiating a $1,500 salary and retaining the one-dollar royalty.57 Almost immediately Hall at last began to garner the rewards due him. The battery of Artillery School tests and inspectors’ visits had convinced the government that the Hall was viable, even if it remained reluctant to replace the entire army’s muskets, and Hall received a contract for no fewer than six thousand rifles over two years in April 1828.
Thanks to the favorable publicity inadvertently produced by Stubblefield’s clumsy