Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction Company taking a look
at a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon that probably came off San Juan Hill after Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders took it.
We don't know for sure because, honestly, at that point in history,
people didn't put that much significance on the Battle of San Juan Hill.
We know for a fact that this gun came out of Cuba right at the end of the Spanish-American War.
And we know that there were Hotchkiss Revolving Cannons on San Juan Hill.
It's a pretty good bet that this was one of them, although you can't say with 100% certainty.
Anyway, what is a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon? Well, aside from being about the coolest thing
you can possibly put in your living room, this is a creation of an American guy by the name of Benjamin Hotchkiss.
He ... was an artillery designer and he came up with a number of interesting products, innovations,
in the United States and wasn't able to get any significant interest in them and thought,
as did more than a few other Americans around this time period, "You know what?
I'm never gonna make any serious military sales here in the United States. This is a backwater of a country
that's never gonna go to war because, you know, there's a big ocean between us and everyone else."
So he went France. He took up residence in Paris in 1867, and started working on some of his ideas there.
And he was actually there during the Franco-Prussian war and the Siege of Paris.
And one of the things that he was maybe not a direct witness to, but recognised, was the utter
failure of the French Mitrailleuse, which was the repeating gun, a 25 barrelled volley gun sort of concept.
... The French thought this was going to be a tremendously successful secret weapon
that would annihilate the Germans. The problem was it was so secret they didn't really train with it,
they didn't have any good doctrine for it, and ended up using it like artillery
at extended ranges where it got demolished by Prussian Krupp artillery guns.
So the Mitrailleuse was an ignominious failure, and really left a bad taste in the mouths of
European militaries worldwide about machine guns.
Well, Hotchkiss saw that, and what he thought was, "That Mitrailleuse used just rifle ammunition, it used solid lead bullets,
and they were trying to have, you know, a significant effect with these at 1,200 metres or more.
And obviously that's not going to work. What you need is exploding projectiles.
You need a gun that has the power of an explosive artillery shell, but the rapidity of fire of one of these early
manually operated machine guns." And that is where the Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon came from.
So let's start with the calibre of this thing. This is a 37mm gun, that's about a 1.5 inch bore.
Why that? Well, the Congress of St Petersburg at the time had set out some rules of civilised warfare.
And one of them was that civilised nations would not use exploding projectiles that weighed less than 14 ounces.
That's about 400 grams.
So Hotchkiss took that, scaled it up just a little bit, you know a little bit of error correction there,
and went with a 16 ounce, or about a 450 gram projectile, which equated out to a 37mm bore.
So that was the basis for this. He knew that the explosive capability of the projectile was really
one of the important core elements of his Revolving Cannon. Hence it had to be big enough to do that legally.
Now it's easy to look at this and assume, "Oh, Hotchkiss was just ripping off the Gatling gun. It's crank fired,
it's got a bunch of barrels, it's got you know, a top feed. It's obviously ... it's just a big Gatling gun, right?"
Well, the answer is no. This is actually substantially different from a Gatling gun in a number of ways.
Fundamentally the Hotchkiss gun only has one bolt, where the Gatling gun works by having a bolt paired to each individual barrel.
So if you have a 10 barrel Gatling, you've got 10 bolts in it cycling around as you turn the crank.
With the Hotchkiss there's just one. And on top of that
as you turn the crank on the Hotchkiss gun the barrels do not continuously revolve.
As I turn this crank there is a cam inside, and we'll take a look at it in just a moment,
but it will rotate one barrel into position. And then it will let the barrel stay in position,
even while the crank's turning, while a round is chambered and fired.
So this does a couple things. First off it provides some safety against a hang fire,
because the barrel does not immediately continue turning.
And secondly, it ... means the barrel's not actually moving when the shot's fired.
Which means you don't have any potential accuracy issues as a result.
It's more important with the lower rate of fire with a gun that's this huge.
So you can see as I turn the crank, right in here I'm turning the crank and the mechanics are moving inside,
but the barrel doesn't actually rotate until the bottom half of the crank.
So up here it's firing, down here it's rotating.
That's cool, I'm just gonna keep doing this for a minute.
This thing is basically the Mark 18 Automatic Grenade Launcher of the 19th century,
because every one of those rounds is effectively a 37mm high explosive shell going downrange.
Got a tower feed here. This was actually run by a three person team.
You had one guy who is the gunner, who would adjust aim, and run the crank to actually fire the gun.
You'd have a second guy whose job was loading. As you suspect, he keeps this topped up with ammunition.
And you had a third guy, whose job was to basically shuttle ammo from the limber
(the standard production limber for this gun would hold 200 rounds),
he'd shovel it from that limber to the loader, the loader would then load it into the gun.
So how does one actually load a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon? Well, with magazines.
That's the cartridge that you're using, and you could fit 10 of those into one of these magazines.
Now, this isn't really a magazine as we think of it today because there's no spring in it.
It's just a box that will hold ten rounds and has a little lid on the bottom,
with a lever that allows the lid to open or, like that, remain closed.
So what you would do is take your 10 round magazine.
Your loader would insert that into the feed tower here, and then trip that lever,
then the weight of the cartridges is going to push this gate open,
they're all going to ... shuttle down here into the feed tower. Where they are then good to go.
The gunner can keep firing while this is done. The loader would then hand this off
to his ammunition bearer assistant, get another loaded one,
drop it in, flip the lever, cartridges all come out. And so on until you run completely out of ammunition.
The effective practical rate of fire for ... a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon
was between 60 and 80 rounds per minute depending on the skill of the gunners.
Now the actual aiming is done with a pair of hand cranks. This is fixed on its pedestal,
... this thing is too heavy to just free mount and have a gunner swing around.
This thing weighs 225 kilos, which is about 500 pounds, 450, 500 pounds.
It's a very heavy gun. And that's just the gun, not the carriage. So you have an elevation wheel here
that adjusts your elevation up and down. And you have a traverse wheel right here.
This is a gun that was sold to the Spanish, of course, used on Cuba, so it's marked in Spanish, "Izquierda" and "Derecha".
And running this pivots the gun left and right. Well, right and left.
You don't have a whole lot of traverse available.
If you need to do more than this [wheel] will do, you just adjust the entire gun side to side.
Now to access the internals we have a screw plug right here,
loosen this up and then conveniently the whole thing opens up for access.
Looking in the back of the gun we have a couple of things going on.
Obviously our crank handle is connected to this giant cam wheel.
And you'll notice that there is a diagonal section of the cam here, and a straight section here.
This is operating on the barrel cluster.
So there is a little spindle at the end of the barrel cluster that has some lugs on it,
those lugs interact with this. In fact, you should be able to see them up in there.
What that does is it locks the barrels in position during the top half of the rotation.
During the bottom half it forces them to rotate 72 degrees,
one of five barrels coming into position.
Now we also have a firing pin. The firing pin is actually a completely removable unit.
That's probably the biggest firing pin I've ever seen in a gun. And we have a firing pin spring that is here
on the rear cover of the gun. This is a V spring that is pushing on the firing pin at all times.
This actually fires from ... about the five o'clock position, which isn't what you would expect,
but there's another cam here on the crank handle, and what that does is it pulls the firing pin back
until the gun's ready to fire. So at this position the barrels have been locked, they're not moving,
this spring is pushing on the firing pin,
and as soon as you drop it past, right there, the firing pin snaps forward and fires the cartridge.
Then lastly, we have this cam coming back and forth there, and that is what is pulling the bolt back and forth.
There's a set of gears in there so that as this goes forward, the bolt comes back.
And in this case the bolt, when I say "bolt" it's actually maybe a little bit misleading, because
this is really just like a loading rammer, it's not a bolt as we think of it today.
So let's go ahead and take a look inside the ejection port. Which means I'm gonna take our feeding tower,
and wiggle it out here. This of course comes off because it'll just get in the way when you're transporting the gun.
And you then of course have a little cover, a ... big, hefty solid brass door to cover that opening in the gun.
So looking at this as we cycle the bolt, you can see the bolt comes forward,
but it only goes this far. It doesn't actually push the cartridge completely into the chamber.
It gets it most of the way in and then it's going to retract back.
By the way, we also have this interrupter, so what this allows is when it's down, the ... bottom cartridge in the magazine
drops into the opening here, and then as soon as this starts to push it forward,
it pushes this up, which is going to cut off the magazine, so that the next cartridge doesn't try to drop in,
until the bolt is all the way retracted and ready to push another cartridge into the next barrel.
Now if we look closely down there, and I don't know that you can quite see it because it's pretty dark,
but this this part of the actual back end of the receiver is sloped, and it is going to slowly cam
the cartridge all the way into the barrel. As the barrel rotates past, that cartridge gets pushed slowly in.
What that does is it gives you a lot of leverage with the crank lever to force a cartridge into the chamber.
So that if the gun has gotten dirty, or the ammunition is slightly out of specification,
you're not just relying on the bolt pushing a cartridge in
straight in, instead you're using leverage and extra time and distance in its travel to get,
well, a more efficient, more effective, push of the cartridge into the chamber.
You can also see the front of the bolt face here,
which is just solid, there's no firing pin in there at all.
So there's a pro tip: if you're trying to negotiate a better price buying yourself a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon,
if they don't know how it works you can tell them it's deactivated or something and get a better price.
I should also point out in the carriage here we have a compartment for storage
that holds a bunch of the critical components, so the firing pin comes out and gets stored here,
as does the crank handle. And then a selection of tools, some of which are here and some aren't.
There's hammer there of course, probably a punch that's been replaced by a smaller more modern punch, but
it's a cool shaped wood block in there for storage of all the important tools and components.
As you might gather from the fact that the Spanish had these on Cuba,
they became very popular. They were expensive guns, but they were also extremely effective guns.
They were reliable, they were durable and they could lay down a withering amount of firepower.
There were actually three different types of cartridges that were used with these.
They had the high explosive that it was really designed around, but then they also had
armour-piercing ammunition for firing at ships. These were used quite substantially in a naval role,
in fact more in a naval role than in a land role. And they also had canister shot full of, basically, buckshot,
you know a 37mm buckshot round that was devastatingly effective against, say, sailors on a deck.
So they were purchased by a lot of different countries in Europe, in South America, the US Navy bought a bunch of them.
The French bought a tremendous number of them. Now the French had been kind of once bitten twice
shy by the Mitrailleuse, and so they spent close to 10 years testing these guns
before they really took ownership of them and started to buy them in quantity.
But they were very popular guns, especially for naval applications.
The height of the use of the Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon really was naval warfare
during the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
However, these guns did stay in service through World War One.
Think about it, that was only less than 20 years after the Spanish-American War when this one was captured.
They would be used as, you know, rear echelon sort of fortress defensive guns in places where they were available.
And these were actually repurposed as anti-aircraft guns in World War One, which would have been
an interesting combination of a relatively low rate of fire, but a pretty devastatingly effective shell should you manage to hit.
So this particular one of course has the really exceptional provenance of having been captured by the American military
almost certainly on San Juan Hill, but absolutely in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.
It came back here to the United States to a museum in Florida for many years before going through a couple of
private collector's hands, and is now coming up for sale here at the Morphy Auction House.
So if you would like a gun that is both a very cool piece of firearms history,
really the crème de la crème of the manually operated machine gun era,
as well as being just a fantastic piece of very direct US military history.
And, of course, this is an antique under law, so this is not a destructive device.
Of course it's crank fired, so it's not a machine gun.
This in fact transfers as if it were not a firearm at all.
And it comes with some cool accessories. If you take a look at the description text below the video,
you'll find a link to ForgottenWeapons.com, and from there you can click over
to Morphy's catalogue page for this guy and check out all their pictures, description, etc.
And if you're interested you can place a bid up there on-line for it,
come down here to Pennsylvania and take a look at it in person, or just
just window shop at all the other cool stuff in the catalogue.
Thanks for watching.