American Rifle - Alexander Rose [63]
The French, as in so many other matters military and technological, had initially been at the forefront of development but dropped sharply behind as time went on. In 1812 Samuel Pauly (who was actually Swiss but lived in Paris) was awarded a patent for an innovative breech-loader that relied for ignition not on an external flintlock but on a hammer that cocked a firing pin or internal striker. The weapon itself went nowhere, but the little descendants of the special ammunition that Pauly designed for it were destined for greater things.
He had added a metal base packed with fulminating primer to a conventional paper cartridge containing powder and ball. When the shooter cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger, the striker hit the base’s rim with such force that the fulminate exploded and sent the bullet on its way.47 Essentially Pauly was using a regular percussion cap, but instead of loading it separately and letting the hammer hit it directly, he had integrated it into the cartridge. It was the first example of that type of cartridge soon known as a “rimfire.”
The next, crucial stages occurred in America, where for the first time the twin concepts of the metallic cartridge and rapid fire were linked. The original genius who made this connection was Walter Hunt (1795–1859), one of those mechanically minded polymathic types so common in the nineteenth century. Hunt is best known today as being the inventor of the safety pin (conceived while fiddling with a piece of wire as he worried over how to repay a small debt) and builder of America’s first sewing machine, though he also came up with a fountain pen, a streetcar bell, a heating stove, a knife sharpener, a road sweeper, and most intriguingly, what he called his “Antipodean Apparatus”—a pair of shoes that allowed a person to walk “upon a polished ceiling with HEAD DOWNWARD.”48
In 1848 (a year before his safety pin triumph) Hunt birthed a new and improved type of cartridge, which he vividly dubbed the “Rocket Ball,” noting in his patent application that it was “well adapted to firearms made to be charged at the breech.”49The Rocket Ball was actually a hollowed-out conical bullet containing powder whose open rear end was stopped up by a cork wad with a small hole in the center. When the cartridge was chambered, a separate primer cap was also automatically loaded, the hole in the cork serving to admit the fulminate’s flame.
A year later Hunt returned to the Patent Office with plans for a rifle named the “Volition Repeater,” designed for use with his Rocket Ball. Hunt’s gun was a remarkable weapon, one that eclipsed every other design on the market. The Volition Repeater had a movable trigger that did double duty as a “lever” to feed cartridges contained in a long tube underneath the barrel repeatedly into the chamber. Its main problems were that it was too complicated a mechanism for popular use (the shooter also had to operate a second lever to make it work) and that the tube chambering proved unreliable. The concept, though, was brilliant.50 For the first time, a shooter could carry a supply of ammunition in the gun itself rather than insert rounds individually by hand. Loading and firing was thus a mechanical process, not a physical one.
Despite his sparkling inventiveness, Hunt was a poor businessman: he sold the rights to the safety pin for $400 and never bothered to patent the lock-stitch needle that was crucial to a sewing machine’s operation. Lacking the funds to market the Rocket Ball and Volition Repeater—only one