American Rifle - Alexander Rose [91]
The Remingtons, meanwhile, had been encouraged to reenter the firearms trade by the expansion of the West and by settlers’ demands for weapons. Stumped for ideas, they directed their plant supervisor, Joseph Rider, to have another look at the Geiger rifle. In the winter of 1865–66 Rider showed the brothers the rolling-block rifle. Instead of Geiger’s split-breech, a pioneering concept but in practice one inherently weak and too mechanically complex for sustained use, Rider used a solid block of metal to house the firing mechanism. The shooter simultaneously cocked the hammer and “rolled” back the breechblock with his thumb. A cartridge was inserted into the open chamber, and the breech-block flipped forward to shut it. Once the trigger was pulled, the hammer slammed into the breechblock, creating a perfect seal against gas leakage. Recocking the hammer ejected the spent casing. It was a magnificently simple system using few moving parts and can justly claim to be the finest single-shot firelock ever produced. With some experience, a shooter could fire up to seventeen shots per minute, slower than a repeater admittedly but spectacular for a “single-shot” weapon. Better still, the breech was virtually unbreakable. In one test Alphonse Polain crammed a .50-caliber Remington with forty small balls and 750—750—grains of powder (the usual charge was 70 grains) and fired it. “Nothing extraordinary occurred,” he reported of the bomb that had just detonated.54
The famed Remington rolling-block rifle.
Though understandably impressed by the Remington, the army was loath to order large numbers, not at a time when secondhand, wartime Springfields were hoarded in the arsenals. Remington, however, was happy to sell to foreign governments. Samuel Remington, the salesman son, was made president and dispatched abroad to glad-hand potentates, despots, emperors, voluptuaries, and even a few mere kings. He was a fine choice: unlike his abstemious brothers, Samuel was not averse to the aristocratic style of life, and he quickly settled in to his new corporate quarters in Paris. Although the American was a businessman, Napoleon III welcomed Remington to the Tuileries, while the spend-thrift (he was rumored to be “indifferent” to interest rates) Ismail Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, consulted him personally about outfitting his army with Remingtons. “A sword and a strong arm are no longer sufficient for victory,” the khedive proclaimed. “Only the most modern rifles will do.” Oddly, the Mahdi of Sudan informed his followers after defeating the Remington-armed Egyptians in 1881 that “the Prophet has repeatedly informed us that our victory is through the spear and the sword, and that we have no need for the rifle.” That unfortunate occurrence lay in the future, but in the meantime so pleased was the khedive with his “most modern” Remingtons that he donated a prime parcel of land in central Cairo to Remington—upon which the American built a com-pact, but exquisitely formed, marble palace to use as the firm’s regional sales office.55
The one dark spot amid all this celebration was Remington’s reception in Prussia. Initially the heroically whiskered Wilhelm I was enthusiastic (“My friend, Remington, the gun man!”), but that rapidly subsided when he fired a faulty cartridge and heard nothing but a click. Throw ing the accursed weapon to the ground, the king galloped off with his retinue of silver-helmeted staff officers. Disappointed but undaunted, Remington was overjoyed to hear soon afterward that at the 1867 Imperial Exposition in Paris, a commission of ordnance authorities from France, Britain, Austria, Russia, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and yes, Prussia (which must have required some explaining when the official reported to Wilhelm) voted the Remington the best rifle in the world.56
High praise indeed, but still, selling batches of 10,000 to Spain, 60,000 to Egypt, or 30,000