Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and today I am looking at a very interesting
high capacity pistol from the 1870s. Specifically
this was patented in France in 1878, and in the UK in 1879.
It is a Guycot pistol, G-u-y-c-o-t. It's an interesting name,
I believe it was actually somehow the amalgam
of the names of its two principal participants.
This was designed by a French engineer named Paulin Gay,
and his partner in the project who was described as a merchant,
so probably the marketing/finance end of the partnership,
was a fellow named Henri Guenot, G-u-e-n-o-t.
And they came up with this idea, like I said they patented it in both the UK and France,
and what we have here is actually a 40 shot basically semi-auto, double action pistol.
Very cool, and, holy cow, 40 shots in the 1870s is really quite a thing.
So, why don't we go ahead and take a closer look at this right now, because
the fellow who owns this has done something very cool, and replaced the side plate with a piece of plexiglass,
so we can see exactly how this very cool, very odd thing is working.
Alright, so this is what we would call a chain gun, because it literally has a chain full of chambers inside.
This is 1878, so these are black powder cartridges.
What happens is this is a double action piece, now like I mentioned, this side plate has been replaced by plexiglass, so.
And, of course, the original side plate is still here. It's over in a box outside of the camera's field of view.
Originally it would look like this on both sides,
and having that plexiglass really lets us see the internals and see what's actually going on.
So what happens is every time you pull the trigger it pulls this striker back,
it cams this chain one position,
and something else to notice here is it actually pulls the barrel backwards.
So the barrel is inside this sleeve, and see I've still got the trigger held and the barrel is at its rearward end of travel.
The barrel comes back and it makes a seal against this chamber, the firing pin is released,
runs through the centre of this cog wheel, and hits the back of the ... cartridge, fires the cartridge.
When you release the trigger the striker resets, the barrel moves back.
Now I actually have the safety on.
The safety lever here simply pivots up and down.
And when it's down it catches the striker before it's able to drop all the way.
When it's up it does not. However, again in order to safely aid in demonstration,
what we've done is actually added a piece of rubber tubing around the striker to dampen its blow,
so that it doesn't get damaged and we can safely dry fire it.
So that's how this thing works. Now...
Oh, and to load it, I should point that out.
We have sights on the back which are small by today's standards,
but actually pretty darn reasonably effective by the standards of the 1870s.
I'd rather have these sights than what you got on a Colt revolver from the period.
To load the gun the rear sight slides open, and now we have access to our chambers.
The kind of nerve-racking, sphincter clenching element of loading this is
what you do is engage the safety and then you have to pull the trigger to cycle the chain.
So you load one [click], load one [click], load the next one [click, click, click], like so,
until all 40 rounds are loaded. And you hope that the safety doesn't flip off like it just did to me.
Because what the safety is doing is holding the striker back.
If you forget to engage the safety, or you forget ... whether up or down was safe,
you'll end up accidentally firing rounds while you're trying to load the thing up.
Which is not a good situation to be in.
Now this is a reasonably big, bulky, heavy pistol.
Although 40 rounds of semi-auto effective capacity makes up for a lot.
This is serial number 58, by the way. We have a very small serial number right there on the butt.
There's a "B", and then below it, there you go, there's the serial number.
Now you may be thinking about this and it may have occurred to some folks,
how do you get the empty cartridge cases out?
Because if you stuff them down in there, there doesn't seem to be any sort of extraction mechanism.
And that's a very important observation. And the answer to that question is actually
that these used Rocket Ball type ammunition, just like you would use in a Volcanic.
The idea here is that you have a projectile with a big hollow base,
and the base is actually filled with powder and has an impact sensitive primer built into it.
So it's ... literally caseless ammunition, and there is no brass case left to extract after you fire.
So that's why you can press a cartridge in there, and then once you fire it there is nothing left.
You're just left with an empty chain that you're ready to reload.
Now the downside of that sort of ammunition is that this is ... roughly .25 calibre.
And you can see just how tiny these chambers are.
You have very little space for propellant in those projectiles, this was really quite an anaemic cartridge.
Even for the time, you know, black powder pistol cartridges, this is a really wimpy cartridge.
I don't have any actual data on bullet weight or velocity but it would have been a light bullet, and it would have been going fairly slow.
The ... French guys who invented this were hoping, obviously, for military contracts.
And I'm sure the primary reason that they didn't get any is the really ... wimpy power of this cartridge.
To the point that even a 40 round handgun ... because the power was just so lacking that it still wasn't militarily viable.
I'll also point out while this is a 40 round variant, where this chain comes down under the grip area,
there's also ... there are photos out there of a 25 round version which looks exactly the same,
except that this guide pulls down here and the chain wraps around right there.
So it's got a shorter chain and a 25 round capacity.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
Only a couple hundred of these were originally made, maybe a dozen or so are known to exist still today as pistols like this.
... The rifles are actually a little bit more prevalent. It kind of makes sense that more rifles would have been produced than pistols,
because this does make for a pretty bulky, heavy pistol. Where as a carbine that weight gets distributed and it is easier to deal with.
And in fact the carbine/rifle versions had a capacity of no less than 80 rounds, which is really substantial.
So at any rate, if you enjoy this sort of content, please consider checking out my Patreon account and supporting me if you're able.
It's support from Patreon folks that allows me to continue to do this as a full-time occupation,
and bring you guys really cool interesting guns like this one.
Thanks for watching.