Defending King George, your Country and Laws, is Defending Yourselves, and the Protestant Cause.
This is for Bridges, Breaches, Lines, and Passes. Ships, Boats, Houses and other Places.
In short, it was a gun for everything.
Thank you for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and I'm here today at the Institute of Military Technology taking a look at a
truly spectacular piece of firearms history. This is a Puckle Gun.
As I just described, this was invented and patented by a
British lawyer by the name of James Puckle in 1718.
And it is well known on the internet and throughout common culture as an early machine gun.
Well, it's not quite a machine gun, it's actually a repeating firearm.
But this did perform the rather impressive feat in the 1720s of firing 63 rounds in a
mere seven minutes. So about 9 rounds per minute, which is quite impressive
from an era when we really expect one shot at a time, and then reload the gun.
A rate of fire of 1 to maybe 2 shots per minute.
Now, the rationale behind this weapon, ... what this was designed for,
its context, is actually naval. So in the 1700s British merchant and naval forces
were having trouble with Ottoman pirates.
Not really that different from what we still have today, with piracy around the Horn of Africa
and Somalia. The problem was you'd have Turkish pirates who were raiding,
well frankly they were raiding England, but they're also raiding British naval vessels
and merchant vessels in these small little boats that were too fast and too manoeuverable
to be effectively engaged with, say, the broadside cannon that a British naval
ship of the line might have.
What they needed instead was something that was smaller and more
manoeuverable and more rapid-fire to engage these small boats.
It's really funny to note that this is exactly the same sort of problem that has continued
for literally hundreds of years, where large naval vessels still have to have large guns
to engage other main naval vessels, and they also have to have much smaller
flexible fast firing guns to engage, say, torpedo boats.
Well this goes all the way back to that exact same concept.
What Puckle came up with was a relatively small gun, the bore size of
these vary, this one is about 1 and 3/16 inches. Some of them are listed as being
1 inch. Some people say they were, like, 32mm, you know, an inch and a quarter.
But the idea was you had a relatively small gun, you can mount this anywhere around
the perimeter of a ship and you had, in this case, nine rounds on tap that you
could fire pretty quickly. So you can see you could empty this gun in a minute.
And then you'd have some spare cylinders, you could reload it quickly.
And it would give you a flexible and responsive way to deal with small torpedo boats.
Now the British Navy tested these in 1717, this was actually before Puckle had gotten his patent.
He developed it, he took it straight to the Navy first.
They turned it down, they didn't actually like it. It appears that one of the problems
was that the flintlock mechanism wasn't all that reliable. And the Navy probably
saw this as some new-fangled, never going to work right, gizmo from some
guy trying to get a bunch of money out of the military. So they turned it down.
In response Puckle applied for and received a patent in 1718. It was patent
number 418. And what's interesting as a side note, is that this was one of the very
first British patents that actually required the patentee to describe in detail how the
weapon, or how the idea, would actually work. So we have a really cool set of
diagrams of this gun from his original patent.
Now, he got that patent in 1718, and he proceeded to get some capital and set up
a company to manufacture these and sell them on the commercial market.
As you heard me read on his patent, it was marketed as a gun pretty much good for anything.
And by 1721 he had commercial production of these guns,
and there was actually a display in the Woolwich Gardens in 1722 where he
fired that sixty three rounds in nine minutes.
Quite an impressive public display for the time.
Unfortunately for Puckle, it turns out, it appears he only really had one customer.
So a British Duke, John Montagu, purchased a couple of these guns for a
naval expedition down into the West Indies. And I don't know what the result was,
but apparently it didn't go very well.
And ... the result of this today is nothing having to do with the West Indies,
but instead two complete original Puckle guns still exist in England that were
originally purchased by Montagu. This third gun is partially original and partially
reproduction made from the other parts from that same collection of two guns.
So while this isn't completely original, it is modelled off two existing originals,
and it does use a substantial number of original parts, which is really cool.
Now this is a flintlock mechanism, we have a repeating action here.
It doesn't cycle itself, you have to cycle it manually.
But why don't we go ahead and take a look at exactly how this works.
Actually before we go up close, I want to point one thing out.
This is on a kind of awkward looking tripod, but
Puckle did his math and he balanced this gun really nicely. We have a thumb screw
(it's on the other side here),
we have a thumb screw right here, that allows me to loosen this elevation bar.
And when I do that now, the gun balances really well. So it wants to come to rest right about there,
but it takes only a little bit of pressure to bring it up or to bring it down.
This is an early flexible mount.
It does of course pivot 360 degrees.
This is exactly the sort of flexibility you need for tracking a fast-moving vessel.
Now looking at this from the front, you can see we have,
basically, an early cylinder here with nine individual firing chambers.
And we have a flintlock firing mechanism that can lift up out of the way.
This whole cylinder is removable, so you could have multiple cylinders like this all pre-loaded.
To remove them we just unscrew this,
it is quite heavy, but that is our cylinder.
So this cylinder slides onto the central axis here and threads in place.
I should point out we have a cam, a ratchet wheel here and a ratchet tooth here.
This means when you're operating the gun, once you get a chamber in position,
it's impossible to accidentally slide backwards.
Just line it up with it's threads,
there we go.
Now, note that the cylinder can rotate while the crank handle stays in place.
So I'm going to line up one of my chambers. I'm going to thread this all the way on,
until I'm locked up in position.
Notice that the face of the barrel here is tapered, and there's a matching taper
on each of the chambers. That is what gives you a gas seal.
So each of these chambers has a flat hole in it, and that's where you have a little bit of priming powder.
And you ignite this powder, ... the spark goes through the hole, ignites the main charge
and fires the projectile out of that chamber.
Each of those little cover plates is nice and tight so we can rotate it on there,
and it will keep the priming pan charged, sealed and safe.
So here's our firing mechanism all ready to go. We have a hammer here, or a striker,
a cock, that would have a flint in it (of course there isn't one in there now),
and then this is our frizzen, and this is the trigger.
So when you're ready to fire, you just press down on this trigger,
that releases this, goes forward, the flint (if it was there) would hit this plate,
pop it backwards, a shower of sparks is going to fall down into
the priming powder right there, and fire the charge.
Once that happens, of course, what we're really interested in is how this cycles
to the next charge. So what we would do (we can leave this alone),
we will rotate this back to unlock it (notice that we've got our priming pan cover here),
I'm going to bring this back until this lifts up.
What Puckle has done here is this really clever system where this plate is operating these covers.
So what popped that up right now is the little divot on top of the cover of that charge.
Now by right here, I've unscrewed the cylinder far enough that the chambers are no longer
interfacing with the barrel and now I can rotate this to the next cylinder, the next chamber.
This is going to drop down here and now the edge of this plate is going to push
that priming cover open like that, and then because the top of this is rounded,
it's going to pop up, lift the plate up, and now I just line up my powder charge there,
I crank this back in. You can see that a tapered bore is going to guide
that nicely into place, and now our next priming pan is open and lined up with the flintlock mechanism.
So now I can recock the hammer,
replace the frizzen, and I'm ready to fire again.
Let's take another look at that from the side.
When I crank this back,
that cover pin is going to lift the pan up like that,
then
drops down.
Right there it's pushing open the next priming pan,
which then pops it up like that, and now I'm ready to
run this
back
into place.
And that is how James Puckle developed repeating firepower in 1720.
Now there is one other iconic element to this gun, and this story, that I haven't mentioned yet.
And that's the fact that the patent describes two different chambers,
two different types of chamber, that were going to be available for this gun.
You had round ones, which is what we have here, you also had square chambers
for firing square bullets. And according to the patent the round chambers were
for firing at Christians, good and humane. The square bullets because they had
sharp corners, and they would tumble and do a lot more damage,
those would be used specifically and only for shooting at Turks.
How exactly that would work because you have a round barrel on this gun is a bit of a question.
One presumes that the barrel would be removed and replaced with a square bore barrel.
Something like that with, say, Whitworth rifling is not unknown, and would be theoretically feasible.
I don't think anybody ever would have wanted to deal with square bullets for this thing.
As it was, he only had one guy who actually was willing to buy the guns in the first place.
I don't know what the cost was, but one can only presume that this would
have been a very expensive firearm to buy. A lot of brass casting
and a lot of workmanship went into making these.
Thank you for watching, guys. I hope you enjoyed the video. The Puckle gun here is
an extremely cool piece of firearms history that everybody knows about,
but nobody's really ever seen. So I'm thrilled to have been able to take a
close look at this one, demonstrate to you guys how it works.
And many thanks to the Institute of Military Technology for facilitating this.
If you're interested in firearms history, their mission is to preserve it
and educate people about it, very much like Forgotten Weapons.
So, they're not open to the public, but they are open by appointment. So if you're interested,
definitely get in contact and check it out.
And of course if you like this sort of content on-line, please do consider
checking out my Patreon page. It's a buck a month from supporters there that
makes it feasible for me to travel to places like the IMT, and bring you guys
iconic, cool firearms like the Puckle gun.
Thanks for watching.