An Assortment of Pinfire Revolvers
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
and I am taking a look at some of the guns that they are
going to be selling in their upcoming Regional 2016 auction.
And I thought this would be a good opportunity
for us to take a look at pinfire revolvers,
and just go through a basic history of the pinfire system.
Pinfire guns were a big thing in Europe in the middle of the 1800s,
but they never saw that much use in the United States,
which is kind of an interesting historical quirk,
and we'll get into why that was the case.
Now the pinfire system is kind of inextricably linked to one
particular family, the Lefacheaux family of France.
The patriarch of that family, the guy who started this,
was a man named Casimir Lefacheaux.
And he was born in 1802, lived until 1852, and at a very early
age he apprenticed to a man named Jean Samuel Pauly,
who was the guy who first invented the self-contained cartridge.
Now Pauly was operating a gunsmithing / gun shop in Paris and actually
... there are a number of influential firearms designers from Europe who were
involved with Pauly at one point or another, and Casimir Lefacheaux is definitely one of them.
Now Pauly's cartridge, it was a self-contained cartridge, but not quite what we would think of today.
It was made out of brass, but it had very thick case walls because Pauly's concern
was making sure that the cartridge would not, you know, explode or crack open when fired.
... Technology hadn't gotten to the point where people realised that it would be useful and
important to have a case that was thin enough that it could expand and create a gas seal when fired.
So Pauly's cartridge did not do that.
It was self-contained, it had the powder and the projectile and the primer all as a single unit.
You could load that into a gun, fire it and then take it out and reload the cartridge.
But it ... didn't do all the things that modern cartridges do.
So anyway, Lefacheaux is exposed to this at a very early age,
Pauly didn't do a whole lot to develop this cartridge, in fact, it's kind of Lefacheaux who did.
By 1827 Lefacheaux was running the shop, Pauly had either retired or died, I'm not sure.
And Lefacheaux ... through his whole career really, continued to make incremental small
improvements to the self-contained cartridge. And in 1835 he patented the pinfire cartridge.
Now the idea of a pinfire is you have a brass case, reasonably similar to what we would think of today,
but the primer is actually located inside the case right on the edge of the case wall.
And there is a firing pin built into the case that sticks straight up out the side.
And when you fire a pinfire round, what you do is have a hammer that hits that firing pin built into the case,
slams it down into the case, hits the primer, fires the cartridge.
So, they have some advantages. They don't have a primer exposed anywhere, but on the other hand
if you were to, you know, if you had a big case of these things and you dropped them,
and if one landed with enough force on that firing pin it could discharge unintentionally.
And ... one of the other main issues with these is that you have this pin sticking out the side of the case,
so the cases are not perfectly symmetrical. And you have to in the design of your action,
you have to have a space for that pin to be exposed to a hammer.
So when you load the cartridge, you have to make sure the pin lines up with that hole when you load it.
It's not the best cartridge in the world, but it is one of the very first.
If you think about it, in 1835 there weren't a whole lot of other options. Rimfire hadn't been invented yet,
centrefire certainly hadn't been invented yet. Everyone else was using percussion guns, or still old flintlocks.
So right off the bat, Casimir Lefacheaux, he was running the gun shop, he made firearms,
but he didn't have a whole lot of production capacity, this was kind of a small shop.
And so he did kind of the smart thing, he licensed out rights to produce guns using
his pinfire cartridge to pretty much anyone who wanted to build them.
With the exception that he retained sole rights to make military firearms with this cartridge.
His patent ultimately expired in 1845, and by that point the cartridge was reasonably successful,
reasonably popular. Now I mentioned that Casimir died in 1852, well, he had a son named Eugene Lefacheaux.
Eugene very much took up the mantle of his father's work. Eugene was born in 1832,
and he actually left and went to apprentice in Liège, to some gun makers in Liège, Belgium,
which was a major centre of firearms production. He came back and in 1853, the year after his father died,
he took over the business and made a lot of substantial changes. This is one of those instances in history
where the second generation really took advantage of this opportunity to stand on his father's shoulders
and grow this company and concept quite a lot.
In fact one of Eugene Lefacheaux's biggest accomplishments was one of his very first.
In 1854 he patented his 1854 model of pinfire revolver, which kind of became a gold standard for the type.
Ultimately in 1857 this was adopted by the French Navy as its service handgun, which was a major accomplishment.
At that time Eugene is 25 years old and and here he has designed and gotten a military contract for a service sidearm.
Pretty cool, pretty impressive.
He also took the business and kind of revolutionised it, he turned it into a very large-scale production factory.
By the middle of the 1860s he had kind of a unique operation going.
He had ... about 900 workers, and he was able to produce about 40,000 revolvers a year
which for the industrial technology of the 1850s and '60s is really quite impressive.
So this is why Lefacheaux has become inextricably linked with the pinfire, he was making a ton of them.
Now, his patents would expire, obviously. Some of the early pinfire patents had already expired in the 1840s
Lefacheaux's patent on the 1854 pattern would expire in the 1860s.
And these guns became very popular. There were large quantities of them out there,
and so copies were manufactured by everybody and their brother, Especially in Liège,
which was a centre of many, many small and large, but also small gunsmithing operations.
So you will find Lefacheaux marked pinfire guns out there,
and you'll also find a vast quantity of both unmarked and marked by other manufacturer examples.
In fact, in the 1860s Lefacheaux actually opened an additional, a second gun factory
in Liège to take advantage of the climate there himself. It was also a major concern.
However, as the 1870s roll around ... rimfire and centrefire both are invented,
but rimfire ... proves to be the best system overall. It's reloadable, it's safe, it's easy to transport,
it's symmetrical, you don't have to worry about protuberances coming out of the cartridges like you do with pinfire.
And Lefacheaux ultimately files his last patent in 1878, and pinfires fade from popularity.
They're simply rendered obsolete by centrefire guns.
Now, I mentioned that I would touch on why these guns never really showed up in the United States.
These aren't particularly popular with collectors here.
Frankly most people don't know much about them, and most of the guns that we find in the pinfire category
are marginal quality Belgian knock-offs. Because there was a ton of them made, they were very inexpensive.
So why didn't they show up here? The answer is Eugene Lefacheaux
patented his 1854 pattern gun in France and in the United Kingdom,
but he did not bother to patent it in the United States. And just a year or two later
Rollin White would ... come up with this patent for a thoroughly
impractical, stupid gun design that happened to include a claim on the idea of
drilling a hole all the way through the revolver cylinder so that you can load a cartridge from the back.
That design feature is critical, you have to have it to make a pinfire revolver.
You have to be able to load the cartridge from the back.
But Rollin White's patent covered the ... ability to manufacture a gun like that.
Rollin White's patent was controlled by Smith & Wesson, and Smith & Wesson
was interested in manufacturing guns on the rimfire cartridge and then the centrefire cartridges.
Smith & Wesson didn't see any reason to get into pinfire and because Smith had the exclusive rights to
... Rollin White's patent, nobody else was able to make pinfire revolvers either.
So some of them were certainly imported from Europe. Some of them did see service in the US
Civil War with the Confederacy, because the Confederacy was getting guns from mainland Europe.
But in general they remained a small niche item here in the United States.
Now I have pulled out here a selection of pinfire revolvers from this particular auction that
kind of begin to touch on the variety that you will find in pinfire guns. This is a massively
wide-open opportunity for someone who is simply looking for an interesting and
less common type of firearm to collect, because these were manufactured in all sorts of configurations. So
this one I believe is a 10mm, possibly 12mm (I have not actually measured the bore).
They were manufactured in 5mm, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, although 15mm guns are pretty rare.
Most of them are kind of on the smaller end of that range. They were manufactured with
fixed triggers like this. They were manufactured with (that's another fixed trigger),
they were made with folding triggers like this one. This was particularly common on small concealable versions,
or pistols of this type.
So it's rare to find them single action only, however some of them are single action or double action.
Some of them were made double action only. You can see that there's no spur on the hammer of this one, so it's DA only.
You will occasionally find them with solid frames, although you usually find them with open frames.
Typically you'll find them with 6 shot cylinders, but occasionally there are big ones,
like this 10 shot example, and even larger.
Just massive variety. You can see some are blued, some are nickeled, some are plain, some are heavily engraved.
Some, like this one, have some interesting extra features like a little folding bayonet
that sits under the barrel.
Anything that was being done with firearms you can find having been done to a pinfire.
There are pinfire pepperbox revolvers in addition to traditional style revolvers.
Eugene Lefacheaux himself actually invented what he called a triple action lock, where
it's like a normal double action gun, you can cock the hammer for single action,
but you can also cock the hammer by pulling the trigger partway back and then releasing it,
which would allow you for example to fire single action
with a single hand grip on the gun, without having to change your grip to thumb the hammer back.
You could in effect thumb the hammer back by using the trigger, then take careful aim
and a slight additional press would fire the gun.
Just a few of the huge number of varieties of these guns you'll find, so.
There are I think about a dozen different lots in this particular auction with pinfire guns.
Some look very nice (although this one is refinished), some look less nice.
It can be a bit of a challenge to find really nice pinfire revolvers, but if you start looking they are out there.
So I hope you guys enjoyed this video, hope you learned something. We can
touch on a new subject that most people aren't very familiar with,
and an interesting element of firearms history that we don't see very much here in the United States.
If you're interested in any of these five in particular, take a look at the description text below.
I have included links to the catalogue pages for all five of these. Most of them are in batches
with other guns, so you can take a look at the catalogue page and see what other guns are included with these.
And if you're interested in them, you can place bids right there through Rock Island's website.
Thanks for watching.