Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we get to take a look at a
British SMLE equipped with optical sights.
Not telescopic sights, but optical sights.
The British in 1915 distinguished between these two.
The British didn't have a sniping program when World War One began.
The Germans did, and German snipers quickly convinced the British
that the British really needed to have a sniping program too.
The British then kind of had to rush to come up with
scopes and mounts and how do we do this? What's the right pattern?
And they contracted with a bunch of different companies.
And before they were able to really get telescopic scopes, telescopic mounts and rifles into service and into production
they found another option. And this was something that they got off of the competition ranges at Bisley.
They're called Galilean scopes or Galilean optical sights. And the idea is this is basically a telescope without a tube.
So there is a little tiny, tiny little lens in the rear sight here.
And there's a rather larger lens attached to the front sight here.
And looking through the two, you actually get about x2.5 power magnification
with a system that ... you can hold in the palm of your hand. It's this little tiny thing,
mounted just right on to the rifles, easy to ship, easy to attach, relatively cheap.
The British would buy ... about like 14,000 of these sights,
ship them to Europe and actually issued them and used them in the field. ...
Well, tell you what, before we talk about what happened to them, let me go ahead and show you this.
This is a Martin/BSA, really it's a Martin, Galilean sight.
Alright, we'll start with the front sight here. This just sort of clips onto the nose cap of an SMLE.
There's a cross screw that holds the nose cap in place. This just replaces it to hold that nice and securely in position.
There are some markings on this but, boy, they're really hard to see. They're right down on there and over here,
and they say Martin of Glasgow and Aberdeen. This was actually one of the smaller contracts for Galilean sights.
The most common was the Lattey with 9,000 made, next after that was the Barnett with 4,250.
Martin did 695 of these that he sold to the British government. They were formally added to the list of changes in March of 1915.
So relatively early, and they were probably in use actually in the field before that.
Alright, so you can see that there's a little round dot inscribed in the centre of the sight there.
That's your aiming point. And of course this isn't just plain flat glass, this is a lens.
So you'll get about x2.5 power magnification from this.
And you look at that through what ... at first glance looks like just a rear aperture sight.
But that is actually an aperture with another little tiny lens inside it.
Now the way that you actually line this up is actually kind of like iron sights.
You have the round aperture here concentric with the round front sight, and the dot in the centre is your point of aim.
That rear lens is actually part of a larger assembly. It was assembled onto a BSA Model 9C adjustable rear sight.
So this was originally like a micrometer adjustable aperture rear sight, and it does some cool stuff like folding.
So that folds up, this folds forward, and that kind of gets things out of the way so that this doesn't
get, you know, destroyed in transit. And as a result I can actually show you...
So this is your windage adjustment. This is your elevation adjustment.
If I fold this down, you can get a little bit better view into that.
So there is indeed a little tiny lens there. I'll do my best to show you what the sight picture looks like,
the camera doesn't quite work the same way as a human eye though. You can see that there is a change in focal point
through the lens versus not through the lens, that's about the best I can show you, unfortunately.
So this was something that was originally used in rifle competition at Bisley.
There was, of course, a big hullabaloo when they were first introduced about
whether this sort of optical sight was competition legal.
And this really is sort of an interesting example of, like, the push and pull that you get between
competition and target shooters versus the military. Because the military of course is quite interested in marksmanship,
and you will often find technology bouncing back and forth between the competition range and the military system.
So sometimes things like this will transition from, you know, the Bisley match field over to actual military use.
And you ... still see that today with things like low- power variable optics being adopted by the US military.
... Sighting systems that originally came out of multi-gun competition shooting.
So these Galilean sights did not last long in active field service, it turned out they had a lot of problems.
Perhaps better than iron sights, however they were clearly inferior in a whole bunch of ways to proper telescopes mounted on rifles.
So the field of view was very, very small. As small as like 5 feet at 100 yards, really tiny.
You had a lot of potential to get dirt on either one of the lenses, or
poor lighting would have a much worse impact on these than it would on telescopic sights,
they were obviously kind of exposed.
... And frankly they're just a little bit hard to use.
I wish I could give you guys a better view through the camera of how these actually look in use.
This was actually my first opportunity to finally get a chance to test one of these out.
We didn't do any shooting with it, but just in the open in good sunlight looking at
stuff through these Galilean sights. And man, it does actually magnify, but just a little bit.
Your aiming point is really pretty hard to see in actual practice.
And, wow, honestly if someone offered me these versus iron sights for a combat rifle,
I would have to think pretty hard about which one I actually wanted.
So, this was an opinion that was fairly widely shared I think, because these optics tended to get thrown away.
As soon as there were scopes available, these things just went away.
To the point that very few of them survive today.
... It's interesting, ... some things are too big to have been kept as souvenirs.
These are kind of too small, these get taken off and then just kind of lost or abandoned.
They don't really look like anything, they don't have all that much in the way of markings on them, and they just didn't survive well.
So finding them today is quite difficult and they bring huge amounts of money, like, embarrassingly huge amounts of money.
So, I am very grateful to the collector who has this one, who gave me the opportunity to bring it out
and take a look through it and show it to you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.