[ Pottet Shotgun ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Liège Arms Museum,
the Musée d’Armes, in Liège,
taking a look at another step in the development of the modern centrefire cartridge.
So this story really began with Samuel Pauly,
who in 1812 got a patent for the first basically self-contained cartridge.
It was a constructed assembly, it wasn't sort of the single-piece brass case that we're used to today.
But it was a single complete unit that contained a primer, and a powder charge, and a projectile.
And he got this patent in 1812, really extremely early.
Now, Pauly wasn't able to really follow up very much on this work.
And so the next step that we look at in this progression,
or one of the next steps, is a guy named Clement Pottet.
Who was a Parisian, French inventor, who had a pair of major patents.
The first in 1829, so not that long after Pauly as these things go in the early 1800s,
and then a follow-up patent in 1855.
And with these two he basically created the modern shotgun shell.
Now his work would be improved upon by others, in particular some folks in England.
But that's a little bit beyond the scope of what we're looking at today,
which is one of the guns that he produced to use his new shotgun shells.
Because of course if you're designing new ammunition,
you really have to give people a gun that they can actually shoot it in.
So, this has a pretty unique action that I thought would be cool to show you.
I have said this before, but I'll repeat it again:
if you are an inventor, and you want to make sure that you get credit for your work,
put your name on it - in gold if possible.
So, Pottet, this was Clement Pottet, and ... this is his invention, patented in Paris.
And just to be doubly sure, he went ahead and repeated his name on one side of the action.
And the fact that this was patented in Paris on the other side of the action.
The whole gun is rather nicely embellished with some kind of typical flower scroll type work.
It is an early enough gun that the barrels are all Damascus.
We have a sling ring here on the bottom.
And otherwise it looks like kind of a typical double-barrel side-by-side shotgun.
Except that it has no forestock, and no obvious way to open it, like there's no loading lever.
Well, what you do actually is rotate the whole assembly 90 degrees clockwise.
You can then pull the barrels forward and tip them open,
which automatically extracts your two shells,
and ... allows you to insert
two new shells, rotate this assembly closed,
push the barrels back, rotate the whole thing, and then you're ready to fire again.
It is the initial rotation action that re-cocks your two hammers.
So if the gun has been dry fired, that is a bit stiff.
But then, once we open it up, you can see
the two firing pins protruding right there through the two breech faces.
For what really looks like
two very modern shotgun chambers.
And, of course, once this is rotated into the firing position
it's thoroughly locked, and that seals the breech.
So Pottet's cartridge was basically, in a nutshell, a metallic base with a paper cartridge body.
Very much like you would see shotgun shells continue to exist basically up into the 1920s,
paper ... shotgun shells.
And then the paper would be replaced with plastic, which was of course much more water resistant.
But that original base cartridge with a fulminate style primer built into it,
and then a paper body, that was the result of Pottet and his patents.
He was aided by another French inventor by the name of Schneider.
But Schneider is one that we can cover in a future video.
Well, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, I always enjoy tracing the development
of some of these early technological systems, like modern cartridges.
So, a big thanks to the Liège Museum for giving me the opportunity to pull this
out of display and bring it here to show to you guys.
The museum in Liège is one of the premier firearms museums really in the world.
It's one of the few that actually has quite a lot of guns on display.
So if you have the opportunity, if you find yourself in Belgium in Liège,
don't hesitate to stop by and check the place out.
Thanks for watching.