Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at some of the guns
that they'll be selling in their September of 2015 Premier Auction.
There's one in here that, well you know just the name alone is pretty cool, this is a Collette gravity pistol.
What is a gravity pistol you say? Well, it's a ... repeating pistol whose feed mechanism is entirely based on gravity.
There's no magazine spring, there's no actual forceful mechanism. It just relies on gravity to feed.
So ... there are eight different patents involved in these, and those range from 1850 to 1854.
When these pistols were finally ready, which would have been about 1854,
they were then actually taken and shown at the Paris Exhibition in 1855, got some notoriety.
And ... they're a pretty interesting little mechanism. This thing holds 20 cartridges, believe it or not.
Why don't I go ahead and bring the camera back here, and let me show you
how it holds those cartridges, and how it feeds and fires them.
So I want to begin by pointing out that this wasn't meant to be a military or a self-defence pistol really.
This was a parlour pistol for sport shooting really.
And let's start with the ammunition. It was pretty low powered ammunition.
It was an 11mm cartridge, but a very, very short one.
And it was actually a Rocket Ball type of projectile, where you had a large hollow base inside the bullet,
and that was filled with powder and a primer and a sealing patch at the back.
Very much like the ammunition for the American Volcanic series.
So you actually had a self-contained cartridge in this gun in 1854, 1855, which is
really as early as the Volcanics and the Volition repeaters in the United States.
Now to load the gun we would actually start by popping open this cap at the muzzle,
and you drop your cartridges down in here.
It's not even a fully contained tube, but it is contained enough to keep the cartridges from falling out.
You could fit 20 of them in this area. Once you had it full just
snap that back shut. Then you're ready to start going to work.
What we have here is a little rammer (sort of),
and when I cock the hammer there are actually two positions. There's sort of a half-cock,
and when the gun is at half-cock it has lifted the breech block up in line with this tube full of cartridges.
You can see a hole right down there. That is the breech of the gun. That's where the cartridge to be fired sits.
So the reason this is called a gravity pistol is that you would put the hammer at half cock like this,
and then hold the muzzle up like I am now, maybe jiggle it a little bit,
get a cartridge to fall into your breech block there.
Then when you cock the hammer the rest of the way, the breech block is going to snap down into place.
So .... we've now cut off the the supply of cartridges, so the rest are still sitting up here.
We now have the one cartridge that we just loaded in this breech block lined up with the barrel, ready to fire.
There is a hole in the back of the breech block for this big fixed firing pin.
And when I pull the trigger,
hammer goes forward, detonates the primer inside the bullet, fires the projectile, and out it goes.
Rocket Ball style cartridges like this were never able to contain all that much gunpowder.
They were always pretty weak cartridges, and this is no exception.
But of course this was meant for, frankly, parlour shooting,
and having a light underpowered cartridge was kind of the idea.
It wouldn't make all that much noise, it wouldn't make very much recoil at all.
It'd be a very pleasant, entertaining thing to shoot in your parlour for sport.
So once you've fired a cartridge (of course it is a self- contained cartridge so everything goes out the bore,
there's no empty case left to eject), you simply put the hammer at half-cock again, tilt the pistol up,
drop another cartridge into the breech,
fully cock the hammer and you're ready to fire again. You can do this, like I said, 20 times.
Now I do also want to point out there's an interesting feature on these.
When I have the gun at half-cock, you can see there's another hole in the breech block.
Now that hole is connected directly to the main breech block, they're the same component,
so this hole down here will never have a cartridge in it.
Instead this is there to allow cleaning access, because
with this sealed breech block it's effectively kind of like cleaning a muzzle loader.
You don't have any way to run a patch all the way through the barrel.
So we have a second hole down here just to give you access for cleaning.
You'll notice there's a little spiked post. That fits into (let's see if I can get some light on it)
that fits into a locating hole in the bottom of the breech block just to keep everything lined up.
So Collette was the name of the gun making company that actually produced these.
They are marked very small around the screw hole in the back of the tang there.
The inventor was actually a man named Hermann Jean Nicholas who was an employee of Collette at the time.
The patent is in his name and transferred. The patents are typically granted to him and then transferred to Collette to use.
Well, thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
I think this is probably a safe bet to say this is the sort of thing a lot of people haven't heard of,
and that's what we're always trying to look for here.
So if you'd like to add this to your own personal collection, it is of course coming up for sale.
If you check the description text below you'll see a link to Rock Island's catalogue page for it.
You can go ahead and check out their high res pictures,
create an account on-line if you don't already have one with Rock Island,
and place a bid if this is the sort of thing you're into, so.
Thanks for watching.