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,
part of the Grand Curtius Museum Complex in downtown Liège.
And we are taking a look at a very cool American early volley-fire machine gun.
A flintlock volley-fire machine gun first developed in the 1790s. This is a Chambers pattern gun.
And this particular one fires 224 rounds at a rate of fire of approximately 120 rounds per minute.
Making it potentially, I think, the first actual machine gun. Because,
unlike the early manually operated hand crank guns, this actually is full-auto.
In fact, it's a runaway full-auto by design. You pull the trigger once and it will fire for about two minutes straight,
until all 224 rounds have been expended.
So how does this work? What's the story on this thing?
Well, it was developed by a guy named Joseph Chambers, who was a farmer in Pennsylvania,
who came up with the concept. And he initially designed this as a rifle,
not a machine gun, swivel mount, naval thing.
As a rifle, the way that it worked was he had a flintlock mechanism at the front end of the barrel,
and you would actually load 7 rounds in the barrel. So superposed charges, but they weren't regular bullets.
He had a special bullet design that had a little tip, a little pointer coming off the back of the bullet, that was hollow.
And when the powder charge fired for the front round,
this hollow tip would allow the burning powder to come backwards
through the second bullet into the second powder charge.
And it took a little bit of time for this to happen because black powder burns relatively slowly,
and so the first charge would ignite, the first bullet would go downrange,
and then the second charge would automatically already be igniting, the second round would go downrange,
and when the second round ignited this burning powder would go through the third bullet into the third powder charge,
and it would function like a burst fire machine gun. Braaagh.
Seven rounds all in one trigger pull. Now in 1792 Chambers wrote to George Washington
inquiring as to how he might present this gun for testing.
The brand-new US War Department he thought would be quite interested in something like this,
he advertised it to them as a musket capable of firing 20 rounds in a single minute.
And the War Department was indeed quite interested, and they arranged to do some testing at Alexander Hamilton's place.
Testing happens, testing doesn't go well. I don't have the details of exactly what happened
but I suspect it was found to be a little bit unreliable, because if one of those bullets,
the little powder tube in the bullet, if that gets clogged somehow,
well, then the gun stops firing and there's no good, easy way to restart it.
So the War Department is not interested in 1792.
Chambers is very interested in the French Revolution that's going on, and so he tries to get Thomas Jefferson
(there's like all sorts of Founding Fathers name dropping going on in this story),
he tries to get Jefferson to help him introduce this gun to the French, thinking that perhaps they would be interested in it,
but that doesn't go anywhere either. And so the story kind of goes dead for about 20 years.
And it comes back when the War of 1812 was declared between the US and Great Britain.
And Chambers comes back again, "Aha, the US is now at war and maybe now they'll be interested in my crazy gun."
And he has also at this point improved the design to this.
This is meant to be a naval mounted machine gun, really is I think the appropriate description for it.
So instead of with his rifle where you would load seven rounds in ... the barrel,
this thing has seven barrels, and every barrel you load 32 ... bullets in, giving you a total of 224 rounds.
You have one flintlock mechanism, and when you pull this trigger wire
you're gonna trip that, and (we'll talk about the exact mechanics in a moment)
but you're going to get a Roman candle-esque 7 barrelled machine gun
that's going to fire at about 120 rounds a minute for almost two full minutes.
So you put this thing up on the top of the fighting platform on a ship mast,
and pull that trigger like a chainsaw and you have continuous fire for about two minutes
that you can direct down onto the decks of an enemy ship, and clear them of all the enemy sailors.
So he presents this idea to the War Department in 1812, and the War Department is not interested.
The Navy however is operated independently, and the Navy is very interested.
The Navy thinks this is a pretty sweet idea.
So they go to Philadelphia and they arrange with a couple manufacturers,
and they get at least 53 of these made.
I don't know the exact number, but it was no less than 53 of them.
In addition, they also manufacture and purchase 200 of Chambers' rifle type guns, and 100 pistols with this sort of system.
And they're manufactured between September of 1813 and April of 1814.
By the summer of 1814 these guns are in service with the United States Navy.
We know for sure they were in service on Lake Ontario, probably elsewhere as well.
There's a really cool painting of the USS Constitution where you can see a bunch of guys firing
from up on one of the masts, and right there amongst them is one of these Chambers 7 barrelled machine guns.
And in fact ... there're only three of these guns that survived, by the way.
We have this one here at Liège, and we have one that was on display at the US Navy Museum.
That actually is the gun that came off of the USS Constitution, or one of the guns.
Like I said earlier, typical Navy procedure was to mount several of these on each ship. And you would preload the thing
and have it ready for action and then it could stay stored and loaded. You'd leave the priming pan empty.
And then when you got into a fight all you'd have to do is prime it, cock it, and fire it.
And it wasn't the sort of thing that you were intended to reload during combat, because
loading 224 rounds in this, very carefully to make sure everything's proper and in sequence, that's a tricky thing.
This was intended as a single use combat weapon. You reloaded after the fight was done for the next fight.
But in the ... 1790s for sure, even in the eighteen teens, in the War of 1812, this would have been
a tremendous amount of firepower.
So let's take a little bit of a look at exactly how this worked.
So we've got our seven barrels up here. We're gonna go ahead and load 32 rounds into each barrel.
In order to do that properly you have to have a ramrod that is precisely marked
so that you know exactly how far down you need to push each one of those bullets.
So if you look here on this ramrod we have the hash marks on it to indicate the exact placement of each bullet. That's really important.
Once you've got all the rounds loaded, you then have a slightly oversized flintlock mechanism here.
You're going to put some priming powder in there, close the frizzen, cock the thing.
And then you have a trigger wire, right there that runs underneath the trunnion,
and then all the way back here to the end of the gun, where it is secured to a little hook.
When you pull that trigger it's going to drop the flintlock,
fire off that mechanism, and that's going to start your firing sequence.
You have a big ol' handle there to control the gun. And we actually have a set of sights.
So there is your notch rear sight,
and there's a nice pointed post front sight.
And we have this very helpful diagram to explain how one flintlock charge can fire off all of the 7 barrels.
So your flint is here, it's going to ignite the first charge in the first barrel,
and then you have holes in this first barrel that lead into barrels two, three and four.
So as soon as this one ignites, it will then set off those three rounds. And once the first round in each of these barrels
ignites, it will start a chain reaction that will ignite all the successive rounds behind them.
Then our centre barrel, number four here, has three more vent holes in it that connect to barrels [five, six and seven].
So our first barrel to fire is this one.
It's going to just start running, and as soon as it fires the first round
these three are then going to start firing.
And as soon as this one starts firing, then these last three are going to start firing.
And because of the design of the bullets, and the way that the powder burns through each bullet into each
successive powder charge, this will continue running until all 224 rounds have been fired. There is no way to stop it.
We have one additional diagram here that shows sort of the loading procedure,
and the thing that I want to point out on here is that, again,
barrel number one right here, it has the initial access point where the flint fires.
But the first round in each barrel is not one of these hollowed out bullets.
It's actually just a standard round lead ball with a nice patch on it.
The idea was you wanted to load this prior to combat and leave it basically sealed.
I presume they would have a cloth cover on the gun. You leave it loaded and ready to go until you get into a fight.
And in order to make sure that everything stayed sealed, you didn't want a bullet with a vent in it in the very front.
So a standard bullet in the front, which we see here.
The lock on here is really a pretty standard flintlock system. It doesn't have any markings on the lock body.
And it's got this connection to the wire to act as the trigger
It is really easy to imagine how actually tremendously effective this would have been in 1814.
It actually has sights, they're actually pretty darn good sights for this time period.
It's mounted to a solid pintle, you've got a nice sturdy handle here to control the thing. It's got a low rate of fire,
I mean 120 rounds a minute. This thing's just gonna go and go and go and go.
And I wish we had some, you know, first-hand account of how ... effective these actually were in combat,
because they seem like they would have been quite the high-tech, leading edge weapon.
So we've got a couple dozen of these in US service and, well, once one country has it, now everyone else starts to get interested.
There were some reports that these were pretty effective intimidating sorts of weapons that the US Navy had.
So the British captured at least one, they wrote up a little report on how it worked
and they sent it back to England, where they apparently successfully reverse engineered it.
Not that there's a whole lot of you know, it's not particularly difficult to do that.
But they built their own, but primarily due to financial issues
they just never really followed up on it, they never made more of them.
The French became quite interested, Chambers was invited to do a demonstration
of the gun for the French Ambassador to the US. He thought it was pretty cool, he warned Chambers that
(and by the way, remember that Napoleon is running France at this point, and in the middle of basically conquering Europe),
the French Ambassador warns Chambers that if he wants a contract with the French, he'll have to keep it secret from the Russians.
... There's there some international diplomacy for you.
The Dutch get interested, the Dutch find out about this in 1816. And their initial ... thought is,
"Well, let's see if we can find some sneaky way to get our hands on one to try it out."
And then they realise, "Oh, it's the United States."
They just go to Philadelphia, find one of the manufacturers and buy a couple of them.
They bring one of them actually back here to Liège, which is of course a major centre of firearms manufacture
and testing at the time. And they do some testing on it, and apparently the one they got they managed to blow up.
Oops, that's kind of one of the downsides of this is it's not super-reliable.
When it works, it's great. When it doesn't work, a little disappointing.
So the Dutch, they're ... warned off a little bit by this problematic testing.
And apparently they start talking to one of the US Admirals who was aware of them,
who says, "Yeah, you know, cool when it works, not all that reliable."
So the Dutch get more interested in guns like the Hall repeaters instead, and they leave this alone.
The Spanish were also interested in it. There was a Spanish emissary in the US who got his hands on one,
he sent it to the Spanish government in Havana at the time.
And ... writes in 1822 that he was rather disappointed that nothing ever came of that.
The Spanish government never followed through either.
So this gun design kind of disappeared after the War of 1812. There was a whole bunch of foreign interest,
nothing ended up coming of it. Really because of, I presume, problems with reliability.
You can imagine, you know, you get one or two just slight errors in your loading
and all of a sudden your 224 shot gun becomes, I don't know, a 30 shot gun, a 60 shot gun.
Still cool, but it's hard to plan on using these if you aren't really sure that you can count on them.
That remains the case for military arms to this day.
If it's not 100%, even if it's potentially pretty impressive and pretty effective,
militaries aren't really interested unless they know that they can actually count on it.
So the gun kind of disappeared into obscurity. Most of them, the vast majority of them, were simply scrapped
when the naval ships that they were mounted on became obsolete.
And like I said we only have three of them surviving today. This one, the one in the United States off the Constitution,
and then the third one ... actually it's a much shorter version, kind of a different style, that is in a museum in Amsterdam.
So, a big thank you to the Arms Museum here in Liège for giving me the opportunity
to take a look at this one and bring it to you guys.
You can probably tell I am sitting in their currently under construction arms gallery
where this is on display, and this will be on display for the foreseeable future.
So if you want to get a look at it up close and personal, come to Liège, check out the museum.
There's a lot of other cool stuff on display here, and one of the only surviving Chambers 1700s machine gun.
Thanks for watching.