Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at RIA
taking a look at a Colt-Berdan 1868, or Berdan I rifle.
This was the first Russian rifle to be adopted
using a centrefire metallic cartridge.
And it came right on the heels of the US Civil War,
and it's an interesting example of the work done by Hiram Berdan.
So Hiram Berdan is probably best known
for having raised a unit of sharpshooters in the US Civil War.
But he was actually also a very talented inventor.
And before the ... Civil War basically secured his own fortune inventing,
among other things, a machine for separating gold and quartz.
That, because of the periodic ongoing gold rushes in the United States at the time,
would make him a nice sum of money.
Now his wartime behaviour and service is a bit sketchy.
He was actually brought up on charges of, among other things,
actual cowardice in battle.
... He was acquitted, and then the thing was reviewed,
and he was found guilty, he was acquitted, ... it's a long story.
After the war he gets into firearms development.
And in particular he's working with both the Colt and Remington companies,
and he has a bunch of ideas for converting ... muzzleloaders into breech loaders.
This is the hot technology of the time.
And Berdan is a hustler, ... 1866-67 period he's got three different versions of
breech-loader conversion that he's got Colt building him samples of.
He's coming to them asking for quotes on like,
"What would it cost me to get 100,000 of these for this contract, or 50,000 of them for this one?"
He's talking about selling guns to the State of New York, to Canada,
to Spain, to Egypt, and then to Russia.
There are two officers from the Russian Imperial government,
a Colonel Gorlov and a Captain Gunnius (whose name I'm probably mispronouncing),
who show up in the United States looking for new armaments.
And one of the people that they talk to is Hiram Berdan.
And Hiram Berdan manages to sell them on
... basically a version of the Trapdoor rifle.
This is what Berdan's been working on ... with Colt.
And he manages to put together a sufficiently convincing package
that the Russians go ahead and purchase 30,000 of these rifles.
They also decide to chamber them in a unique new cartridge, the .42 Berdan.
Berdan has also invented his own priming system, which we still use to this day.
You'll hear reference to "Berdan primers", and that's the same guy at this same time.
The cartridge that they use in this is .42 calibre, or 4.2 line in Russian terminology.
And it's a slightly bottlenecked cartridge, fairly powerful.
It fires a 386 grain bullet, 10.66mm, over 77 grains of black powder.
So if you compare that to .45-70, pretty comparable,
70 grains of black powder on a 405 grain bullet, so fairly similar.
The slight bottleneck I believe was done
because that actually helps to seal the cartridge slightly.
When the case expands that bottleneck helps prevent any gas or debris from getting
back around the into the base of the cartridge, and helps keep the gun cleaner.
So it was a pretty good cartridge, it was a pretty decent rifle.
And there was a substantial difference from the traditional Trapdoor Springfield design
that Berdan used in this particular model. So let's take a look at that.
The biggest difference between the Berdan I and the other trapdoor guns out there
really is that the trapdoor system was intended as a conversion mechanism.
To take an existing muzzleloading rifle,
and convert it into a breech loader as a way to save money.
But in the case of the Berdan I there was no conversion actually done.
These were all purpose-built original breech-loading single-shot rifles.
So one of the distinctive features of the Trapdoor in American service
is the big hammer on the side. And that's there because
... the US Trapdoors were converted from percussion cap firing muzzleloaders.
And what they did was simply keep the trigger mechanism and the hammer,
and get rid of the percussion cap and give it a firing pin mounted on the breech block.
Well, there was no existing muzzleloader to be converted in the case of the Berdan I,
and so why have that kind of awkward hammer on the side?
Now we know that Colonel Gorlov of the Russian delegation had a hand
in assisting in the design work of the Berdan I.
And it's really unclear exactly what he did.
Probably not anything specifically at a technical engineering level,
but he may well have been involved in choosing some of the configuration of features.
And he may have had a hand in the switch
from the hammer-mounted firing pin system to this rear striker.
So on the Berdan rifle you first have to cock the striker,
and that unlocks the breech block,
and allows you to lift it up like a trapdoor system.
You can then put in a cartridge.
Then close the breech block. And what actually locks this
and prevents it from bouncing up on firing is the body of this striker.
So if I leave that open, you can see that when I drop the striker
this whole huge thing comes in. And that would normally
go into the body of the breech block here, and hold the whole thing shut.
Like the US trapdoor system, there is a little extractor right there.
When you open the breech block that's going to kick the empty case out.
And as it moves back it will hit this little inclined ramp in the bottom of the receiver,
and that will bounce the cartridge out, as long as you open it with enough gusto.
We have Colt's markings on top of the barrel here
Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company, Hartford, Connecticut.
This particular example is not serial numbered because it never went to Russia.
And you can kind of infer that by its really minty condition here.
The guns were serialised upon acceptance with the Russian military when they got to Russia.
So the handful of ones that ... stayed in the US tend to be in much better condition,
because they never went through a whole series of wars
from the Russo-Turkish War through World War One.
And they also don't have the Russian markings that were placed on them.
Got a ladder sight here, which is fairly typical,
that lifts up and allows you to extend this guy for longer range.
That's just a tight friction fit there.
We have a couple of pretty basic-style barrel bands.
There is provision for a socket bayonet on the front. There is a cleaning rod on there.
We have a barleycorn-style pointed front post.
One sling swivel way out at the muzzle.
And the rear sling swivel in slightly archaic fashion
(although this was typical for the time, it would become archaic a few decades later),
having the rear sling swivel on the front of the trigger guard.
Also worth pointing out that it has like a hand rest back here
that is ... sort of distinctive to Russian firearms.
You would see that ... the very early Russian M91 Mosin-Nagants also had this feature.
Although it was fairly quickly dropped from them.
We have a really nice crisp stamp in the buttstock of this one
for J. Venables & Son, Gun Makers of Oxford.
So presumably this rifle found its way to the UK instead of to Russia.
The Russian delegation showed up at Colt ... about the middle/late spring, early summer of 1867.
They arranged this contract with Berdan,
they took over his account for development of these rifles.
As they got towards actual production, it's interesting, Colt ran a patent search basically.
... They know they're going to be making a lot of guns,
they bring in one of their lawyers to make sure that there's no one that's
going to come out of the woodwork with a patent infringement case.
And the lawyer determines that this does not actually violate Erskine Allin's patent
(he was the one who developed the actual Trapdoor Springfield),
because this uses its own newly-produced receiver, instead of being a conversion.
So they're good there. But there are two or three other more minor patents
that Colt's lawyer figures, "Yeah, we're violating this, that, and the other."
And so they pay off a number of patent holders to get licence rights to produce these.
The first ... sample gun is ready in December of 1868,
there's a little bit of a delay getting the tooling set up.
And then actual volume deliveries start in March of 1869, and run through May of 1870.
A total of 30,000 rifles were shipped out.
There were like ... I think it was 25 prototype carbines made,
but the Russians never actually purchased a carbine. So that was attempted, unsuccessful.
And Berdan himself, basically as soon as he had the contract for these
he immediately went on to redesigning it,
and coming up with something newer and better to sell to the Russians.
And that would actually succeed with the Berdan II.
Which is a single-shot bolt-action rifle, ... a little more modern in styling.
And the original idea was that this is something that they could actually
convert Berdan Is into Berdan IIs,
as well as converting existing muskets in Russian inventory (muzzleloaders).
I don't think any of that conversion ever happened.
And the Berdan II ended up being purchased as licensing rights
and produced at the Tula and the Izhevsk arsenals in Russia, starting ... around 1870.
The Berdan I was only ever produced at Colt, there were never any licences purchased for it.
It was never made in Russia, probably because it was so quickly supplanted by the Berdan II.
Anyway, we'll do a video on the Berdan II at a later date when I have access to a good one of those.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this look at this Berdan I.
These are extremely rare to find in the US. Most of them went to Russia,
were hard used all the way through World War One as second line rifles,
and never came back, so.
Thanks for watching.