[ Winchester 1886 Line Thrower ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with a Winchester 1886 line-throwing gun.
Line throwing is a thing that's existed
for as long as there have been shipwrecks really.
Most shipwrecks occur within just a couple of hundred yards of shore.
And ... if something is dangerous enough that it has wrecked the ship,
it can be really dangerous to just like jump off the side of the boat and try to swim to shore
in surging stormy seas and rocks and reefs.
And so what people have always tried to do
is find a way to rescue people off of shipwrecks by throwing a line.
Somehow getting a rope from the shore out to the ship
and then you can haul people off using the rope.
Early on, crude methods, this would be a rope in the water
and you can just tow someone in with it.
The more substantial methods that were in use for example
before the Coast Guard was the Coast Guard, when it was the United States Life Saving Service,
they would rig up a frame assembly with a rope on shore
and throw a line onto the ship and haul people across in
something that was called a breeches buoy. Breeches as in pants.
The idea was basically you take a regular life preserver ring
and you attach a cut-off pair of big pants to it that act as a seat.
And someone on the ship can hop into that thing
and then you tow them across on the rope and send it back and get the next person.
But this only works if you can get a rope over to the ship. So how do you do that?
Well, there were a whole lot of different methods that were used,
there were cannons, there were rockets.
Early rocketry: a lot of it was done to throw lines to ships.
And there were essentially shoulder rifles converted to throw
a heavy steel rod towing a piece of rope that would get out to the ship.
The idea is of course you would throw a relatively small diameter line
so it didn't weigh as much, so that ... the projectile would have enough range to go a couple of hundred yards.
And then they'd get that line and pull it across, and that line
would be tied to the heavier line that you could actually use to ferry people off the shipwreck.
Anyway, this was a really common thing.
And in particular there's a spike in demand for these things in 1918,
because at that point US law changed to actually require
US seagoing vessels to carry line-throwing devices.
They didn't specify what type, but a bunch of people
who didn't have these things were going to need them, and so there was a surge in demand for them.
And it's right about that time that a company called William Read & Sons
contracts with Winchester to ultimately get just shy of 500
Winchester 1886 rifles converted to be line-throwing guns.
So let's take a closer look, and we'll talk about what happened to them.
This is a rifle that was not purpose built as a line-throwing gun.
It was built as an 1886 lever action .45-70.
And it was then purchased under a contract
where Winchester did a little bit of conversion work to turn it into a line-throwing gun.
So the barrel is cut down to 14.5 inches. It still does have a magazine tube, interestingly.
I think because it just would have been more expensive
to try and get Winchester to take the magazine tube out.
And I suppose there's no reason you can't load line-throwing blank ammunition
into the magazine tube, but not really the sort of thing you actually need.
Anyway, the rear sight was never installed because you don't need it.
And the bore has been, well, bored out so it is smoothbore.
The back end of the gun is totally stock original Winchester 1886.
The serial number on this one is in the high 153,000 range, which fits.
Most of them are generally recognised to be in the 154,000
serial number range, but it's all right about the same time period.
And the way this would work is you would simply take this ... weighted rod,
run that down the bore, it's got a loop at the end that you connect your line to.
You would have a spool of this line, obviously, alongside the rifle.
You then load up a blank-firing cartridge.
Or like this, note that this was being made in 1943.
Line-throwing guns did not go out of fashion, they were still being used during World War Two.
Frankly, they are still being used today, but we'll get to that in a minute.
So the William Read Company purchased these guns (497 of them or thereabouts) in 1918.
It's interesting that we know that the Winchester Company
actually looked into doing a line-throwing conversion itself
when the law changed to require line-throwing guns on US ships.
They looked into it and they concluded that there were already a bunch of other people
doing stuff along these lines, and there wasn't going to be sufficient demand
for it to make sense for Winchester to make this a special project of their own.
But they were quite happy to take guns that were already in stock, like this one,
and convert them under contract for someone else who wanted to buy them.
William Read & Sons put together a kit for these guns.
They would come in a case with the rifle and 10 of the launching rods,
4 spools of line, and a few various other miscellaneous accessory bits.
Unfortunately, what we have here is just the rifle and this, we don't have the original box, which would be cool.
So William Read & Sons was looking to fill the demand for these guns.
They bought the guns from Winchester. They then went to a company called (creatively)
Naval Company in Doylestown, PA, to get the rest of the accessories.
They packaged these things together into cases and sold them to ships.
A bunch of these were actually used by the Navy, now this particular one doesn't have any navy markings on it.
Honestly, I don't know if the Navy would have marked them when they used them.
But we know they were used by the Navy because the Boston Naval Yard
actually made five different orders with Naval Company
for some of the accessories for these things during World War Two.
And in fact as you saw, our box of ammunition is World War Two dated.
And this sort of thing is still in use today.
I don't think the Navy has any 1886 Winchesters any more,
but they still have a variety of otherwise like wildly obsolete rifles that are used for line throwing.
Now for the Navy today this is not probably so much for rescuing guys off of shipwrecks,
but for bringing two ships together at sea
for resupply, or transporting people or anything between two ships.
How do you get a line from one ship to another? Well, like this.
Stuff that down the end of the rifle, shoot it across to the other ship.
By the way, the way you are supposed to do it is to launch it
over the other ship, not into the other ship.
Pro tip there. You launch it into the ship and it hits a guy, you are going to get in trouble.
If you would like to know more about these, by the way, there is a fantastic article
that is published free on the internet by John Spangler
of the American Society of Arms Collectors on the entire history of line-throwing devices.
It's like 35 pages long, significantly illustrated,
and will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about line-throwing rifles,
rockets, Schermuly devices, cannons. All of it, the legal history, the technical history.
It's a fantastic article, I highly recommend it if you're interested in the subject.
And I will have a link to it in the description text below.
Of course, we've looked at a bunch of line-throwing devices on the channel before.
I think it's always neat to look at the various different ways that they've been done.
This is a particularly simple one, but no less interesting for it.
So a big thanks to Morphy's for giving me access to this one to film.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.