Did you know that Napoleon turned down the opportunity to buy cartridge-loading firearms?
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction House
taking a look at one of the guns that they're going to be selling
in their upcoming April of 2019 Premiere firearms auction.
And this is a Pauly breech-loading shotgun.
It's not a military arm, because Pauly wasn't able to get any military contracts.
Maybe it would have been a good idea for guys like Napoleon if he had,
but he turned his attention to making high-end sporting and civilian firearms instead.
Now Pauly was born Samuel Johannes Pauli, outside of Bern, Switzerland, in the 1760s.
Grew up, educated himself as an engineer and, from the somewhat limited sources available,
it appears he was a pretty interesting guy with a pretty wide variety of hobbies and interests,
all in the sort of engineering field. He was interested in firearms, both large and small.
He was in the artillery corps of his local militia, as one does in Switzerland.
He was interested in designing, or did design, some new artillery for the militia.
Did some bridge design, but was unable to get any funding to actually construct the bridge.
Got interested in aeronautics and was designing passenger carrying balloons,
but again was unable to get any financing or funding to really take those projects to fruition.
And that led him in 1802 to move out of Switzerland, to move away from Bern, and to move to Paris.
Big, huge metropolis, there's money there, there are people there who are
interested in actually financing the sorts of things that Pauly really wants to do.
So he moves there and initially gets interested in aviation, in balloon building, and actually
built some balloons, and was kind of a remarkable known figure in that area at the time.
Well, he also gets interested in firearms.
Right about this time a guy in Scotland by the name of Forsyth, who apparently according to,
basically, popular legend, apparently he's tired of his flintlock hunting guns being too slow to fire,
and you know, between when you pull the trigger and when the whole flint system actually works and fires,
birds have moved, small game have moved, can't hit anything.
You know, it sucks in the rain because the powder gets wet, and of course
he's in Scotland where it is always raining. And so his solution to this is to invent fulminate.
Basically the raw material for what we know today as a primer, an impact detonated powder.
Pauly just within a few years finds out about this and he starts tinkering with the idea.
And what he does that Forsyth didn't come up with, is he puts this fulminate priming powder
into a brass cartridge base that is then connected by screw, apparently, to
a cardboard (or paste board), a paper type material, cartridge case
that has a charge of gunpowder in it, and a projectile in it, and it's all capped off.
And it is, in one self-contained canister, everything you need to fire a shot.
And then he devises a firearm system, which is this one, to actually use that.
This is 1812 when he patents this in France.
... It's hard to exaggerate how revolutionary of a change this was at the time.
This is the same year that Napoleon is marching into Russia,
and we're talking about the development of cartridge firearms.
This is something that wouldn't really become mainstream for, what, 60 years after this.
... It really is the 1860s (maybe 50 years), it's the 1860s before self-contained cartridges truly become a universal standard.
Now, there are advances in this area earlier, there are things like needle fire cartridges,
there are pin fire cartridges, and we can see the influence of Pauly in these because
the guys who developed all of those technologies worked for Pauly.
Nicolaus von Dreyse, who was the first guy to develop a successful military needle rifle,
he was an apprentice of Pauly. Casimir Lefaucheux, who was the guy who was behind the
basically the entirety of the pin fire system, which was the European cartridge firing system for many decades,
Casimir Lefaucheux was also an apprentice of Pauly. This guy had a tremendous amount of influence,
and really doesn't get the recognition today that he ought to for it.
So let me go ahead and show you the gun, and then we'll talk about what else happened with Pauly.
I'm gonna start here, because once I say this you'll never be able to unsee it. That is a duck.
If I put it upside down you can really see it. I've seen some pictures of Pauly guns of this same style
that were a little more elaborately checkered and engraved, where they actually specifically
have all the features of a duck's head, right in the wrist there.
I think it's important to remember when looking at this gun that this was the first of its kind.
It includes a lot of features, or a lot of design elements, that we think of today as, you know, well
that's old-fashioned. Like that's how they did it before they really knew what they were doing.
And that's exactly the case. This is how they did it before anyone else was doing it.
So, we have a pair of what look like hammers, you know, holdovers from the old flint systems.
These are in fact just cocking levers. So if I pull these back I can cock the two hammers,
or two strikers, that are inside the action, and then I can lift up the back here
and expose the two breeches.
So this is a 24 bore shotgun and you'll notice that ... there's a recessed lip in each barrel
because that's where this was ... basically today you can think of it as a brass rimmed
cartridge case, and they both go in there.
... That lip prevents the cartridge from sliding in, and it also helps seal the breech against gas.
We then have a couple of powerful springs inside here. So when I pull the trigger, this is going to snap forward.
And when it goes forward, it's going to hit one of the two of these firing pins. And you can see right there,
(if we cock this, better view), you can see right down there
that firing pin striking right through the breech block
and it would hit the primer in the cartridge.
Now this is the first firearm to actually have a primer in the cartridge.
It's got two types of powder in it, it's got a priming powder that will ignite upon impact,
and then it's got a regular charge of gunpowder that will actually propel the bullet.
And that is something that's so fundamentally obvious to us now, so familiar to us,
that it's hard, I think, for a lot of people to consider, like,
... what was it like when the very first gun of that type was actually invented?
And we can get an idea for how revolutionary of a change that was by referring to some of
the reviews of Pauly's guns at that time, you know, in 1812, '13, '14, 1815.
And what we have are people who are describing this as ...
just describing the advantages you got from this, you know, revolutionary system.
It was far easier to clean because both ends of the barrel are open, so you can run a cleaning rod
through it much more easily than you could clean a muzzle loader,
where you can only access it from one end of the barrel.
Obviously you could fire much more rapidly than a muzzle loader.
This allegedly was capable of something like 12 shots per minute,
which was like (according to Pauly and he's not far off), about ten times what most people could shoot,
the rate most people could shoot a muzzle loader.
It was safe. There's an element of consistency that you get with
pre-made cartridges where you know exactly how much powder is going to be in them.
You can't double charge this, you can't accidentally pour two powder charges in or
... you know, put in a complete load, powder and ball, and then lose track of what you are doing
and load a second ... powder charge and ball into the gun and create a dangerous situation,
like you can in a muzzle loader.
It's a waterproof system. These self-contained cartridges, you can't, you know, soak them in water,
but if they get a little bit of rain on them, they continue to actually work. Unlike,
you know, the loose powder that you have with a flintlock.
Remember, this is not an improvement on a percussion cap gun to a cartridge gun,
... this is contemporary to a percussion cap. Pauly jumped straight from flintlocks to cartridges.
And ... one of the other interesting advantages that's noted here is it's easier to shoot well,
because you don't have that flash of your flint and your pan powder going off in your face.
Especially in the days when you probably weren't really wearing shooting glasses very often,
like that wasn't so much a thing.
You have the possibility of getting some, you know, obnoxious burning powder in your eye
from the pan. And with this system, there's no gas ... venting at the back, there's no flash from the pan,
it becomes a much easier gun to shoot effectively.
I've been kind of talking up the whole concept here,
let's take a moment and actually take a closer look at the gun itself.
It has some markings on either side of the breech block. On the right says "Invention Pauly", P A U L Y,
and then on the other side "Brevetée à Paris", so patented in Paris.
It has two barrels, so it has two triggers, fairly typical.
The front one is the right barrel, the rear one is the left barrel.
You've got your two cocking levers which are obviously left and right.
There's a little bit of gold decoration here, but heavy, heavy patina on the barrels,
and this isn't in particularly good shape. On the other hand this gun is something like 200 years old now.
Interesting to note here on the right barrel, there's actually a section that was patched at some point in the past.
That's not something that we do very often anymore. But the gun itself was
valuable enough that when something happened, probably a dent in the barrel,
it was worth actually repairing it, patching it.
There's a little more old gold embellishment out here on the end, and a front sight,
more of a blade than a bead. That's right out at the muzzle.
And a little more nice decorative, light decorative work on the butt-stock.
So mechanically speaking, aside from the revolutionary nature of this system,
there's not a whole lot actually going on. As long as the hammers are cocked,
you can lift the the breech block up to load and unload.
Once you drop this down, there's a little spring-loaded catch back here. But then more significantly,
when the hammer goes forward, this actually locks the breach block in the downward position.
So it's a little bit loose today because it's 200 years old, but that
prevents this from lifting up and allowing the cartridge to come out of the barrel.
Pauly appears to have been a fairly impatient guy. He had more going on than he had time to do everything.
And so, having invented this in 1812, by 1814 he's decided to move to [England].
And by the way, he changes his name each time he moves, he kind of
nationalises his name to whatever country he's in. So he was Samuel Johannes Pauli in Switzerland.
And when he moved to France he changed that to Jean Samuel Pauly,
kind of frenchifying it, and then in 1814, when he moves to England,
he anglicises his name and becomes Samuel John Pauly.
At any rate, he moves there and actually continues his aeronautics experiments,
continues making some patent improvements on the gun, which he sends back to France
and they're incorporated into the production. But he fails to get any significant
purchases for this gun on a military scale. It is really an invention ahead of its time.
It's rejected by Napoleon allegedly because it would have required two separate powders,
and it would have been complex, and ... no one really knew, like, how safe is this really?
That's kind of one of the potential hazards of inventing something that really is
three steps ahead of its time, is people are unfamiliar with it. And they're hesitant about it.
And so despite glowing recommendations from the people who actually had a chance to fire these,
it never got any military acceptance. And part of this I think is that
Pauly was busy doing other things, he had other interests.
He wasn't one of these super-narrow, focused guys who would spend twenty years pursuing one
specific development. Instead if this didn't take off immediately and become hugely successful, well,
maybe the balloons will, he's excited about that. Or maybe he'll go do some more bridge design, or,
you know, who knows what? Can you imagine if this guy had been around
at the development of the automobile? He would've been all over that.
At any rate, a lot of this is cut short because in 1829 he gets sick
and he dies somewhere in London. And that is the end of Pauly himself.
For a long time he didn't get really any recognition for this work, He kind of was was a bit lost to history.
Now his company was taken over by a succession of, a couple of, superintendents
... when he moved to England he put it in the care of one of his co-workers, one of his friends.
Eventually by 1827 the whole company would be purchased by Casimir Lefaucheux.
And he would go on to pass it down to his son, Eugene Lefaucheux, and they would basically create the
whole dynasty of pinfire firearms in Europe. And that's the direct legacy that Pauly has.
But even indirectly, we see his influence in the Dreyse, all of the needle fire systems starting with Dreyse,
and ultimately every cartridge system that we have today owes its roots to this guy, Jean Samuel Pauly.
So I think this is a gun that doesn't look like a whole lot from the outside,
It's got some, you know, it's a little bit different style because it's old and it's a little bit unique.
But I think a lot of people would look at this and just kind of pass it by as just another old,
double-barrelled, antique shotgun. When in reality
this is a gun that has a tremendous amount of history and influence to it.
So I think if you're a serious collector of historical firearms and firearms development over time,
I think Pauly is an essential element in that chain. If you don't have a Pauly firearm, they are out there.
And interestingly they don't seem to be valued all that highly.
I think a lot of people don't recognise who the guy was, and just how influential his work was.
So this particular one is coming up for sale here at Morphy's. If you're interested in it,
take a look at the description text below the video, you'll find a link there to ForgottenWeapons.com,
and from there you can click over to Morphy's catalogue page on this particular gun.
You can see their pictures, their description, their price estimate, their bidding system on-line,
everything like that. You can place a bid for it, or if it's not something that you're looking for
specifically, you can browse through everything else that they have in their catalogue.
Thanks for watching.