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 beautiful Italian, specifically from Naples,
gold inlaid, Collier pattern percussion revolver.
Elisha Collier was an American who patented the idea of a revolver in 1818.
And I actually have a full video on a series of early Collier pattern firearms
because he started off making flintlock revolvers.
But when the percussion cap was invented,
... the percussion cap was far superior to the flintlock system,
and people started transitioning to percussion guns.
So some original Colliers were actually converted from flint to percussion,
and the ... Collier shop, he himself, started making percussion guns from scratch.
And he wasn't the only person, there were other people who were copying his revolver concept.
And one of them was Salvatore Mazza in Naples,
who manufactured this sometime between 1820 and 1830.
We don't know exactly, and he didn't have the forethought to date the pistol for us.
So, let me show what this is, it's beautiful, and it's also
mechanically interesting because it, of course, pre-dates all of the Colt revolvers.
Salvatore Mazza was the Director of the Royal Arms Factory at Torre Annunziata
(maybe I'm getting that right?) in Italy, until in 1820 he set up his own private shop in Naples
and did really quite well as a gun maker.
As evidenced by the fact that by 1828 he had to move to larger premises
because he had got to the point of employing 60 people in his gunsmithing shop.
So obviously he made some pretty fancy stuff. If we take a look at this ...
he has ... inlaid on the top of the barrel his name, Mazza,
and then, I'm not going to try and pronounce that all in Italian, what it translates to is
"Armourer to his Highness, the Prince of Salerno".
So this is actually not a presentation inscription,
you know, highlighting who the gun was made for,
this is highlighting who made the gun.
And then he's also added his name in gold on the side plate there, Mazza, Napoli (Naples).
Now what makes this interesting of course is that it is an early manually-operated revolver.
So once I cock the hammer (which is pretty stiff),
I then have a 5 shot cylinder.
And you can see each cylinder has been inscribed with a number.
Which is important, because you can't easily remove the cylinder.
What you do is you fire the one shot, and then you pull the cylinder back,
and you can rotate it
until it snaps into position to fire the next cylinder.
So there is a little bit of ... sort of a nested ... cone sort of arrangement here.
So you've got this front shield that's going to prevent gas leakage
out of the barrel/cylinder interface, which is nice.
It's very nicely machined, everything fits together quite well.
As you would hope for what I can only expect the original
sale price of a fancy revolver like this was.
Now the reason that I said it is important that you have these numbered is ...
we think of muzzleloading revolvers as having a loading lever here,
and a set up for loading the ... chambers somewhere down on the bottom.
Well, this doesn't have any effective way to do that.
And it's got this shield in place so you don't have access to the chambers.
So what you do is actually use a standard ramrod,
and you load each chamber, as best I can tell, through the barrel itself.
So you pour your powder down, put in the ball, and then ram the ball down.
And when you are doing that, you can't really see what's going on in the chambers.
... On a later, a traditional, like a Colt percussion revolver
you can actually see the bullets in the front of the cylinder, you can't here.
So it's important that you have these numbers
so that you can keep track of what you've loaded and what you haven't.
I mean, you can always go back and check by seeing how far the ramrod will go down.
But better to be able to just keep track of what you are doing in the first place.
So this is the sort of revolver system that was around and theoretically available
before Sam Colt came around and popularised the mechanical idea of
connecting the hammer to the cylinder. So that when you cocked the hammer
it just automatically rotates the cylinder for you.
Up until that point, if you wanted a revolver you could have one, but it would be one like this.
I think it's really neat to take a look at the early mechanical systems like this,
the early solutions that didn't quite take off, but were certainly cutting edge.
And one of the things about cutting-edge technology is it tends to be expensive.
It's not really more practical than the standard stuff when it first comes out, and it costs more.
We see that even today in all sorts of technology.
But what that means is it tends to get adopted by wealthier folks
who have the money to spend on something that they think is pretty cool,
even though it's not necessarily practically better - yet.
And so you see that also happening with developmental firearms,
where you'll have early manually-rotated revolvers like this
that are purchased by the more wealthy folks who can afford them.
And so they are gold embellished and very fancy, and as a result
they tend to survive very well because they are very valuable items.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.