You know there's really something to be said for duelling. It's a way of keeping people polite,
and preventing people from saying stupid things that they oughtn't say,
and that they would regret saying if they said to someone's face.
[ Lepage Wax Duelling Pistols ]
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am at the Institute for Military Technology today,
and I'm taking a look at this set of
French wax bullet duelling pistols.
This was a product that was introduced
by the Lepage Company out of France
right about 1905 or there abouts.
And the idea was to make duelling a fun sport.
To take it out of the realm of, frankly, illegal,
and very dangerous mano-a-mano deadly combat,
and turned it into something that one could actually practice, and enjoy, and relish.
So what this is is a set of classical duelling pistols, albeit with hand guards there,
that have been designed to fire wax balls instead of lead bullets.
The idea being very much like Simunitions or paintball.
The wax ball is nice and light
so it doesn't deliver a lot of kinetic energy and it won't hurt you.
But it will take rifling, it will stay together, it will fly pretty accurately,
and it allows you to actually shoot at other people without serious risk of bodily harm.
So the way these pistols work is they function just like real, actual pistols.
The bores are rifled, they have a locking mechanism,
they have a hammer, firing pin, and the works.
The cartridges, however, are basically dummy cartridges.
They have a space to seat a primer in the back,
and they are rounded out in the front to accept one of these wax bullets, wax ball.
The bore diameter is right about 11mm, it's about .44 calibre.
And what you do is you seat a wax ball over basically a primer-only charge of propellant.
And when you fire that, it allows you to safely shoot at people at about 20 to 25 paces.
Now, there are a couple of interesting things about this.
First off, Lepage manufactured these purpose-built
.44 calibre duelling pistols specifically for this purpose.
But they also made a version of the exact same thing
that would fit the standard French 8mm 1892 revolver.
The idea there being that officers could actually practice what we would consider today
we'd call this today modern tactical force-on-force training.
Well, officers could load their revolvers with 8mm wax bullets and do the same thing.
And instead of getting practice with a formal sport duelling pistol,
they could get practice with their actual service sidearm, pretty cool.
We'd like to think often, that a lot of these great training ideas are come up with recently.
Well, a lot of them have been around for a long time, like this one.
Now, to make this into a safe sport so that you don't, as they, say shoot your eye out, kid,
this set came with a pair of modified fencing masks.
These have thick glass plates, and I mean this is like quarter inch thick,
so you're not going to shatter that with a wax bullet.
That protects your eyes, and then there's a cutout at the mouth,
which you can't really see from back there, but it is protected with this metal plate.
So you don't get shot with a wax bullet in the teeth, which would really suck.
Got a bit of a leather neck guard.
And then the back is a strap just like a ... fencing mask.
Participants would wear these.
You don't want to get shot in the knuckles, as anyone who's
played a lot of paintball will certainly know.
So there is a screw-on handguard for the pistol to protect the front of your hand.
You keep your other hand somewhere, say behind you.
And then the participants would do this while wearing
a thick, heavy overcoat, and some padded clothing underneath.
The idea being you know when you get hit, but it doesn't actually hurt you,
probably won't even leave a bruise.
So this became a popular sport in the first decade of the 1900s.
There were some news stories in places like Popular Mechanics and the New York Times
talking about some of these duels being held right in the middle of, say, New York City.
... These were run or administered by typically fencing societies,
sport combat organisations you could say.
And in fact a couple of months ago you may have seen a bunch of pictures of this,
in fact of this exact model of pistol and mask circulating around the internet.
So, when I had the opportunity to take a look at these I figured,
"Hey, I've seen those. They are really cool, let's take a closer look."
So here's the case that Lepage shipped all of your ... firearms gear, if not your safety gear.
Got the key here, we'll go ahead and unlock this to take a look at it.
Open this up. We do have a nice Lepage Frères, Paris, 12 rue Martel.
That's where you can get a hold of them if you have a warranty claim I suppose,
or you could have, 110 years ago.
Now we've got our two pistols.
Cleaning rod, important because you're going to get wax building up in the barrel.
And then here are our six cartridge cases.
We'll take a closer look at these in just a minute.
Now if I take this tray out, underneath we have some more goodies.
Down here we have our pair of hand shields.
And we have space for four boxes of ammunition.
And I don't know exactly what would have been in here.
We have a few other miscellaneous accessories with this set.
These cartridges are actually slightly different, and don't fit these two pistols.
And then I believe this is a loading block.
So this is a pretty typical single-shot break-action pistol of the duelling style.
Nice heavy grip to it.
We have a break lever here, so I push that down and the barrel breaks open.
This is an extraordinarily smooth pistol, the machining is excellent.
Kind of as you would expect for turn of the century French firearms.
Then the barrel is rifled.
Again, you can see the rifling there, it's a little dirty but in good shape.
And then our sights are actually pretty good.
Got a nice big globe front sight down there.
And a nice wide notch for it at this end.
You have your extractor here.
What you would do is take a loaded case, this one obviously isn't,
drop it in, lock the pistol up, cock the hammer.
And there is a very nice, light trigger.
Now the rear sight is adjustable for windage,
so you can make sure that your zero is appropriate.
And then for the handguard, because of course
you don't want to get a shot in the knuckles with something like this,
we take out this set screw.
And there's this little square mounting block there.
Our handguard shield here has a little square cutout that is going to fit.
That fits right on there.
Then ... put the screw back in from the front.
And there you go.
One wax bullet duelling pistol all set up and ready to use.
So here is one of the boxes of ammunition from this case.
Ammo and Deville system.
I believe that is going to be the name of the primer type that is used to propel these.
They actually have a couple of safety warnings on the front.
So, with my expert translation skills I will translate what those are.
Number 1, don't do this closer than 20 metres, 20 paces, because you'll hurt yourself.
Number 2 is protect yourself with the special mask, lest you shoot your own eye out, kid.
Number 3 is don't put the wax balls in the freezer the night before,
because they'll hurt like nobody's business.
Or I think what it actually says there, a little bit more literal translation,
was don't let the wax balls get overly cold lest, same thing,
they will get very hard, and they will hurt a lot rather than deform when they hit someone.
And Number 4, also refrigerate them if possible. You want to keep them cool in the summer
because if the wax projectiles get too soft,
they will melt down into a smear down the barrel of the pistol rather than actually firing.
So you do need to keep the wax projectiles, which, we have here,
(sticking together there), at an appropriate temperature, not too hot, not too cold.
We also then have a whole bunch of the propulsion, ... the primer pellets.
So one of these goes in the back of the case,
right in there, like so.
And then one of the wax balls goes in the front.
And you would presumably squish that down a bit to make sure it doesn't come apart.
And there is your wax bullet duelling cartridge.
One other thing to show you on this ammunition box.
You'll note here that they have two versions.
They have for the Ordnance Revolver 8mm, and for the .44 calibre pistol.
So this is a box for the .44 calibre pistol, which comes with 100 ball and 100 primers,
and no cartridges, no cartridge case, and that costs 5 franc 50.
Or you could get them for the Ordnance Revolver, in which case the box would include
100 ball, 100 primer, and one fake cartridge.
And the box is 6 francs.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
It was really cool, having seen the pictures that were floating around not that long ago,
to actually get to take a look at a real pair of wax duelling pistols from this exact period.
They are gorgeously manufactured guns, they're really cool.
The projectile idea is something that seems old hat today,
but it was a fairly novel idea at the time, and appears to have worked really well.
So thanks to the Institute for Military Technology for allowing me to
take a look at these and play with them, and bring them to you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed that as much as I did.
IMT has a collection of all sorts of firearms, but primarily trials guns and experimental guns.
Same sort of thing that Forgotten Weapons often takes a look at.
They are not open to the public in general, but they are available by appointment.
So if you're interested in doing some more research,
whether it be on wax bullet duelling or modern military trials,
get in contact with them and arrange a visit, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
If you enjoy seeing this sort of thing on the internet,
well, you might take a look at my Patreon page
and consider subscribing there to help support me
so I can continue to travel to places like this, and bring you cool guns like these.