[ Why Pinfire? ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another "Ask Ian" Q&A video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, of course, and our question today
comes from "NintendoEats" on Utreon who says/asks,
"Modern centrefire and rimfire cartridges seem, to the casual observer,
like they would always have been the simplest cartridge types to make.
Why was pinfire ever used, and how was it economically manufactured?
Well, the short version of this is pinfire was invented before there was a way
to ... industrially draw brass into a long deep tube that you could turn into a cartridge case.
So pinfire started off as a metallic head on a cardboard or paper cartridge body.
And ... in fact, in a way centrefire did exist before pinfire.
So if we go back and look at the chronology of cartridge development here.
We'll start in 1807 when Forsyth, a Scottish pastor, invents fulminate primer material.
Which is essentially a (relatively at that time) stable chemical compound,
which will explode if you hit it with force.
And that's still the basis of today's primers.
That's why you can hit a primer with a firing pin and it will detonate
which then detonates the gunpowder in the cartridge.
Now within just a couple of years, in 1812, a guy named Samuel Pauly
invents a self-contained cartridge making use of this fulminate priming material.
And Pauly actually developed this as a breech loading firearm.
I have a video on an early Pauly firearm which is pretty cool,
which you should check out after you are done with this one.
And it's actually technically sort of a centrefire case,
although not quite in the way we'd think of it today.
It is a cardboard tube that holds the gunpowder and the bullet.
And then attached to the back of that is a metal rim
that has a little chimney on it, or what looks like a percussion cap nipple.
Although at this point, we are pre-dating the development of standardised percussion caps
like you would think of now with muzzleloading firearms.
Anyway, it has a little fulminate chimney that you put some fulminate material in,
which then is struck by a hammer or a striker and fires.
Now that fulminate chimney is right in the centre of the back of the case.
So in a way yes, ... centrefire does make a lot of sense in that way,
it's an efficient place to put your priming compound.
Now Pauly would make guns for a while.
These were all artisanal, these were all handmade guns.
And in retrospect one can certainly look back and go,
"Well, why on earth didn't this just completely take off as a huge popular thing?
Because it was obviously the way of the future, like that's what we're using today,
or the ancestors of that."
And the answer is it certainly had some problems, it wasn't a perfect system.
It didn't have any obturation, so it didn't really have any gas sealing capability.
You're going to get gas venting out the back of the thing.
The fulminate was unstable, sometimes if you jarred or dropped a cartridge it would detonate.
Which oops, that's not great.
This is kind of like asking people today,
"Well, why weren't you buying Bitcoin when it was $100 a Bitcoin?
Why didn't you have a cell phone in the 1980s? Obviously those things were the wave of the future."
Well, retrospect. We can tell what will be at the time.
It's an expensive gun with an experimental technology, and it's easy to see downsides to it.
And so ... in fact a lot of people are not going to buy into it.
Anyway if we move forward a bit.
There are some improvements on Pauly's cartridge style.
Pottet actually sort of retrofits the Pauly cartridge
to use a standardised percussion cap in, I believe, 1829.
But the real development comes in 1835 when Casimir Lefaucheux patents the pinfire system.
And what he has done here is take this self-contained cartridge,
and develop it in a way that it fits the existing firearms ... style of the time.
So the original pinfire cartridge was still a metal case head, but with a cardboard body.
... In fact the original way it worked is you put a percussion cap
on the ... outside of the case head.
And then you had essentially a self-contained firing pin
running through the body of the ... cartridge case.
And you would hit that firing pin, which would then detonate the primer on the inside.
And it uses ... either the inside of the chamber or the inside of the case itself as the anvil.
It's important to point out that for a percussion firing thing to work
you have to have a hammer that's doing the hitting,
and an anvil that prevents the hammer from just pushing the primer around.
So Lefaucheux's pinfire system ... uses the inside of the case
or the inside of the chamber as the anvil.
The firing pin comes through as a hammer built into each individual cartridge case.
And then it fires, and ... there you go.
It still has some of the downsides of the Pauly system.
It doesn't have any obturation. There's a metal cartridge case head, but it's not expanding to seal.
It's there [because] it's hard to make something like this ... entirely out of cardboard.
... The advantage that the pinfire system gives is that it's compatible
with the same sort of hammer mechanism that you would use on a typical percussion gun.
Which was basically the same as the hammer system you would have used on a flintlock gun.
And so this is a much more familiar style of firearm,
it's something that's more easily developed.
At this point ... there's no real development of magazine-fed firearms.
If you want a repeating firearm it's a revolving type of system,
and the pinfire cartridge works really pretty well in a revolver.
You don't have to have anything coming through the back of the breech face.
You just need one little hole sticking up,
and that's where the firing pin from the cartridge is exposed.
And then the hammer that everyone's used to, that's sitting on the side of the gun,
just - pop - comes, down hits that firing pin, which detonates the cartridge and fires it.
So this is what made the pinfire system for Lefaucheux a popular and feasible product.
Now ... everyone's hand making one cartridge at a time. There's not the sort of efficient
large-scale manufacture you are probably thinking of, NintendoEats.
And Lefaucheux's guns, as made by Casimir Lefaucheux starting in 1835,
are still high end, artisanal, craftsman made guns, they are not industrial production firearms.
That wouldn't happen until the 1850s.
Casimir dies in I believe it was 1852, and his son takes over the business.
And it's actually his son who turns the pinfire system into the industrial product
that it became for about 20 years.
Now ... Casimir, the elder Lefaucheux, does actually tinker with
a centrefire version of his pinfire cartridge.
The same thing, but you're putting the pin in the middle of the base of the cartridge.
He has illustrations of such a thing in an 1847 patent, but never actually put it into production.
And I suspect it's because it just didn't really fit the current firearms design.
Why reinvent the wheel if you have a system that's still pretty good?
By 1850, 1851, Lefaucheux ... gets rid of the cardboard.
We now have by the 1850s the industrial technology to actually draw brass.
First off, we also have the right alloys of brass, all brass is not the same.
And in order to make good cartridge case brass you need the right blend of
hardness and ductility, and the ability to draw it out.
And to press a flat sheet of brass into a long cartridge case tube
without it cracking or shearing or anything like that.
So it takes some experimentation with alloys.
It turns out that 60/40 brass alloy is about best (maybe 70/30) for cartridge cases.
There's experimentation with ... just pure copper as a cartridge case.
But it doesn't have the metallurgical properties to work very well,
and it's clearly inferior to brass.
So this is the sort of ... experimentation that's going on by the very late 1840s and into the 1850s.
And Eugene, the younger Lefaucheux, is the one who takes that technology
and combines it with his father's pinfire system to turn this into an
industrial production product that became very popular, especially in Europe.
And the reason that it became popular there is because it's an existing company,
with existing manufacturing techniques, they know how to make the guns.
And now they're adding in the new metals, developments and technology.
It's easy, it's there, and so it's simple to put into production.
Whereas ... people are still trying to figure out what's the best way to do a centrefire case.
There's not that much in the way of self-contained cartridges
that pre-dates the pinfire system with Lefaucheux.
So the earliest ... direct ancestor of the centrefire cases we have today would probably be Morse,
who invents something that looks very similar to what we have today in 1856 and patents it.
Now, there would have been a very real possibility of Morse's centrefire cartridge
really shutting down pinfire as a popular system much more quickly than centrefire actually did.
Morse's cartridge is pretty darn good.
And what he's developed is a primer that has its own self-contained anvil.
So I mentioned earlier you need to have something for that hammer to strike against.
And one of the big developments that Morse comes up with is building that into a primer.
So instead of having a cup full of fulminate that you expose to a hammer that hits it,
well now you turn it around, which gives you a much better way to
seal that primer on the outside of a cartridge.
So you've got metal on the outside, fulminate on the inside, and then
built into this is a little anvil that the hammer strikes against, or the firing pin strikes against.
If you take a primer today, not in a cartridge you can't really see it that way,
but if you take out a primer and just look at an either fired or unfired primer,
you will see a little anvil on the inside.
And that's one of the critical elements of Morse's development, what made his system practical.
So Morse submits his idea to the US military for testing.
And they like it, and they decide to make 1,000 conversions of
muzzleloaders into Morse cartridge breech-loading guns.
And then the Civil War happens. And that shuts down a lot of the ongoing development
in favour of manufacturing of standard percussion fired, like,
"We know this is good, we know we can mass-produce it fast.
We're going to stop experimenting with new fancy technology for the infantry rifle
because there's a war on and we need reliable, understandable, and economical guns."
So it's all muzzleloading rifles, there are a lot of carbines developed for the cavalry,
but the go-to for the US Civil War is percussion muzzleloading rifles and muskets.
Rim fire is a separate topic, we can talk about rimfire a bit later.
But ultimately the reason that pinfire exists is because pinfire was a system
that made sense before the technology existed
to make a brass cartridge case as we understand it today.
Yes, centrefire is the best system using a brass cartridge case like that.
But until you have that cartridge case, it's not necessarily the best system.
And so I think that, combined with the pinfire system's
suitability for a percussion hammer style of firearm
explains why it was popular before being eventually overtaken by centrefire.
Hopefully that answers your question reasonably well.
A little bit of a deep dive into some fairly obscure systems here.
I do have videos on a couple of these systems.
Like I said, I have a video on a really cool early Pauly shotgun
which I would highly recommend taking a look at if you're interested in this subject.
I'll link to everything else that I find in the archive down in the description text below.
So as always, if you would like to have your question answered in a video like this,
check out, subscribe, join us over at Patreon or Utreon.
I have ... running threads every month on both of those platforms for Q&A questions like this.
Thanks for watching.