American Rifle - Alexander Rose [90]
The end of the war witnessed the mass cancellation of Remington orders; like the Spencer company, having invested tens of thousands of dollars in new machinery and plant, the firm found itself deeply in debt. The Remington brothers assiduously paid off their creditors, but the arms business was clearly no longer a lucrative one. Reflecting the diffusion of firearms-manufacturing techniques into the wider commercial world, they branched out into sewing machine, farm implement, and most famously, typewriter ventures. (Mark Twain adored his Remington, and it is thought that the first major typewritten manuscript delivered to a grateful publisher was his Life on the Mississippi.)
At the time another businessman, New Yorker Marcellus Hartley, a former Union arms-procurer in Europe and cofounder of a sporting goods company, was developing a new type of ammunition to replace the rimfire—what was called a “centerfire” metallic cartridge. It is thought he entered the arms trade when, during a trip out west, he picked up a shoddily made metallic cartridge and thought that Marcellus Hartley could do better. Within a decade his new Union Metallic Cartridge Company (UMC) was producing millions of cartridges a year.50
Hartley was a gun man in the colorful mold of Samuel Colt, just as the Remingtons were cut from the same sober cloth as Oliver Winchester. He owned two houses, the first at fashionable 232 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and the other, a gigantic turreted Gothic mansion near Orange Mountain, New Jersey, where his friend Mr. Wu also lived. Wu had arrived in America as the personal agent of the Dowager Empress of China—she needed some weapons to put down a couple of unpleasant peasant revolts—and Hartley had invited him to spend the weekend in New Jersey. That had been ten years before. Now comfortably at home, he wore blue, rose, and gold brocaded robes with a pea-cock feather in his cap and would mysteriously shimmer into the room whenever Hartley had dinner guests, much to their surprise. Mr. Wu’s own servant was named “John Chinaman,” who opened the door to visitors and shouted up the stairs, “Hey, Hartley, man come see you!”51
Hartley, who was married, confined the fun and games to his free time; when it came to business, he, like Colt, was as straitlaced as any Remington and as merciless toward competitors as Winchester.52 His mechanical whiz for the centerfire project was Alfred Hobbs, a man who once had won a $1,000 bounty offered by the British government to anyone who could unpick a massive new lock guarding the vault of the Bank of England. It took Hobbs fifty-one hours of continuous concentration, but he did it—and was decorated by the king into the bargain. Together with Colonel Hiram Berdan, the Civil War sharpshooter, he created the centerfire, though there is some evidence that Berdan, who was not unfamiliar with “borrowing” ideas without crediting their conceiver, had first seen an experimental version during a visit to the Frankford Arsenal, traditionally a leader in ammunition technology.
Centerfires outwardly resembled the older rimfires, but instead of packing the fulminate around the cartridge base’s circumference, Berdan and Hobbs thickened the brass rim and inserted what was essentially a small percussion cap in the center. When struck by the hammer, the cap exploded, setting the powder afire. By means of this refinement the centerfire suddenly allowed metallic cartridges to increase vastly in power. The problem with rimfires was that their hollow rims and necessarily thin walls had rarely been strong enough to withstand the pressure blast of loads greater than about