Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at one of the antique pistols that's coming up in their April of 2020 Premier Auction.
This is a Venditti, it is a copy of the ... Volcanic that was manufactured in Salerno, ... Southern Italy, in the 1870s.
Despite, by the way, the enthusiastic protestations of a few Italian collectors who will claim that this
actually predates all of the American Volcanic development, and Hunt, and the Volitional Repeater.
The story is not true, this is actually an after the fact copy.
But Venditti had some neat ideas, and this is not exactly the same as a Volcanic. So let's take a closer look.
Just for comparison's sake, here is a New Haven Volcanic, and here's a Venditti.
So you can pretty clearly see the similarities. This is a lever action manually operated pistol.
We've got our elevator that runs up and down here. We've got our magazine tube underneath the barrel.
Both exactly as in the Volcanic.
The magazine tube, they both work through the same sort of toggle action system. However, there are some differences.
So Pietro Venditti was a mechanically inclined guy, but it took a little while for that talent to come out.
... His initial work was in the textile industry, he was actually a weaver for a monastery.
But apparently he had a bit of a temper, got in a fight, and killed a co-worker. And that got him
arrested and thrown into a chain gang until about 1860, when he ... managed to get himself paroled somehow.
The details of a lot of this are pretty vague.
But at that point that's when his interest in guns really kicks off, because when he gets paroled from chain-gang prison
he goes and gets himself a job at the State Arsenal in Lancusi.
Pretty quickly becomes the foreman there, and he clearly has some mechanical aptitude.
He would start working on his own designs about ten years later, and his first ... Italian patent
(now remember this is only two years after the unification of Italy, so his patents are all newly issued
by the new nation, they're not holdovers from the previous Kingdom of the Two Sicilies),
and in 1872 he gets a patent for a double-barrelled pistol, single-shot barrels.
So a two-shot pistol that fires Rocket Ball style ammunition,
which is the same sort of ammunition that was used in the original Volcanics, like this guy.
It is basically a bullet that has a big hollow core at the back, which is filled with powder, has a little percussion primer in it.
It's the original self-contained, caseless ammunition.
So in 1872 Venditti patents a pistol to shoot that.
Then in 1875 he patents his first lever action pistol. And it's not this, this is his second model.
His first model actually had three magazine tubes on it. It had one actual magazine like this,
that held 9 rounds, plus one in the chamber.
And then it had two additional tubes on the sides,
permanently fixed on the sides, that were basically storage tubes that each held another 8 rounds
that you could (if you held the gun in the right direction pointing downward, used gravity and adjusted a little lever),
you could feed your ... main magazine, you could refill it from these two side tubes.
So what he had was a pistol that held 26 rounds of ammunition, despite being about this size.
So that was kind of cool. And that used the original Rocket Ball style of ammunition.
The problem is Rocket Ball ammo is pretty wimpy. There's a good reason that it did not last very long at all
in the United States with the Volcanic, and it was quickly replaced by ... self-contained metallic cartridge ammunition.
And Venditti followed that development track himself as well.
And so his final patent was in 1877 when he patented
(I don't have a copy of the patent so I can't give you the exact details),
but it was his own style of cartridge. I'm not sure exactly what feature of the cartridge he patented,
but he was getting away from the self-contained Rocket Ball and into an actual metallic cartridge case.
And this, his second style, second series, of pistols used that metallic cartridge ammunition.
We can tell because the bolt here has a pair of extractors, one on each side.
If it was firing Rocket Balls there would be nothing to extract and you wouldn't need those.
So this is pretty typical of his second series pistols.
There are a couple markings on the barrel. We have "Venditti E Ci", so Venditti and Company,
indicating that he had some collaborators, some investors, some financial backing.
And Lancusi, which is the locality where he was making these.
The barrel on this one is a little under 6.5 inches, like 160mm.
7 inch was apparently a pretty typical barrel length for these.
The magazine held a total of 9 cartridges in here, so you can tell they're very short cartridges.
I mean you can also see the lifter here, that's the full length of the cartridge.
Plus you could get a 10th round onto the lifter, and in theory you could have an 11th round in the chamber,
but ... there is no manual safety on this. So you don't want to run around with this thing
ready to fire, like cocked and loaded, because there's no safety.
His first pattern of gun used a 10mm Rocket Ball.
This, the second pattern, he had actually reduced that diameter a little bit to 9mm.
Still, because of the short length of the cartridge case, this would have been a pretty wimpy cartridge.
Loading is done just like the Volcanic. You pull your magazine follower all the way up here to the top,
and then rotate this off to the side. That exposes the magazine tube.
You can then load your cartridges in there. Once you have the thing fully loaded you
rotate this piece back. And at that point the follower is going to be sitting right up here pushing on the stack of cartridges.
And as you shoot them, the follower will drop all the way down the magazine tube, so.
First cartridge comes out of the magazine tube onto the lifter.
When you open the ... lever, the bolt retracts backward, the lifter brings that cartridge up into line.
When you pull the lever back, the bolt is going to push it into the chamber
and then drop the lifter down where it picks up the next cartridge.
It's a single action gun, so it gets re-cocked when you open the lever
in theory. There we go,
ready to fire. ...
In total there were only a few hundred of these made between both the first and the second series of guns.
There were a number of other Italian inventors, manufacturers, designers who built copies of the Volcanic system.
But Venditti is I think by far the best known, the best understood, the best researched.
If you're interested in this one, if you're a Volcanic collector, or you like early repeating pistols,
this of course is in the upcoming April of 2020 Rock Island auction.
You can check out their pictures and description in their catalogue on their website,
and also check out everything else they've got in that sale.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]