Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling
in their upcoming April of 2018 Premier Firearms Auction.
Although this one isn't actually really technically a firearm,
this is an air gun. It is a smoothbore, 32 bore,
32 gauge you'd call it, approximately .50 calibre air gun.
Dating from between the 1830s and the 1850s or '60s, there's no actual date on it.
It was manufactured by a guy named William Pritchard, who operated out of Birmingham, England,
and was a purveyor, a manufacturer of fine rifles, well, firearms and air guns.
Now, a lot of people think of air guns as a pretty modern thing, and often as a toy, really.
... An air gun is a BB gun, it's something that you use for
teaching people ... you know, gun safety, before you actually give them a real firearm.
Or something for, you know, shooting little varmints at close range, that sort of thing.
Well air guns have a history that is ... in fact as long as proper firearms.
And they've been used for every serious purpose that firearms have, including military purposes.
... Let me first off show you exactly how this works,
then we'll talk about why these aren't used more, or why they weren't.
So, we know that this is a Pritchard manufactured gun, because he signed it right here on the side of the receiver.
In a kind of a Gothic script that may be a little hard to make out there, but it does in fact say "Pritchard".
And the rest of the gun is pretty nicely, ornately engraved there.
And that engraving carries over to the top and also the other side of the receiver.
But obviously the elephant in the room here is this giant sphere hanging off the bottom of the gun.
And that is its air reservoir. So this is threaded onto the bottom of the gun, and I can take it off here.
And the gun would have come with a little air pump, which
looks and operates very much like a modern bicycle tire pump.
And you would hook this up to your air pump and pressurise it.
Probably take a couple hundred pumps to fill this thing up. And then this would be good,
it's hard to say, but good probably for at least a couple dozen shots before you had to refill it.
So, let's think of this as the equivalent of a powder flask that you would carry for a muzzleloading firearm.
It is spherical of course because that's the optimal shape to retain pressure.
This thing had to be made pretty strong.
The pressure capacity varied over time of course. When these were first manufactured
the pressure capacity was much lower (not this particular one, but air guns in general),
and then over time by the end of the 1800s you are looking at 800 psi, at the beginning, maybe 400, 450.
And that would be enough to generate muzzle velocities of something on the order of 500 to 600 feet per second.
Typically the muzzle velocity kind of maxed out there regardless of the size of the gun,
so if you wanted a more powerful air gun you would get a larger bore one.
And you'd end up with about the same velocity with a larger projectile.
This one could probably be reasonably expected to fire about 500, maybe 600 feet per second.
And that's not trivial with a .50 calibre round ball. Certainly be sufficient for hunting.
It is a smoothbore, so you're ... not losing some of your energy to engraving rifling on a projectile.
At the same time you're also not getting the accuracy of a rifled projectile. ...
So this is a simple single-shot arm, you have a rotating chamber here, you would open this up,
put in a projectile, and then close it like so. So that projectile is then in line with the bore.
Then on top we have what looks like a hammer, and that's done intentionally.
These were made to mimic the the operating procedure of a firearm. So to fire it you cock the hammer.
And then this is kind of a loose piston down there. And the way it works is when you pull the trigger
there's a powerful spring behind this hammer, and it is going to push that little piston down.
That piston can then immediately retract, but when it pushes down
it hits a pressure valve here in the air reservoir.
That gets pushed in just momentarily, which is enough for it to release a burst of compressed air before that valve closes again.
That burst of compressed air travels up through this open section,
into the chamber behind the projectile,
and shoots it down the bore. Firing.
So this would be quite rapid to reload and fire.
Certainly faster than a typical firearm, because once you fire it all you have to do is
open this, put in a projectile, close it, cock the hammer and you're ready to fire again.
And if you're doing then a lot of shooting and you actually run out of air, well this is just
threaded on, and you could have another one of those and just swap it over and continue.
Or have a little folding pump with you and recharge this during a little break from your shooting session.
Probably the most notable historical use in the United States of an air gun like this
was the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which actually carried a Girardoni repeating air gun.
I have a separate video about those linked at the end of this one if you're interested.
They actually carried one of those on their famous expedition west,
because of, well, because of some of the advantages that an air gun has.
In particular for them, supplies, they didn't have to carry black powder to use it.
They certainly carried regular firearms as well, but
should they need it and not have access to powder, that Girardoni gave them another option.
So large bore air guns like this originated in the 1500s.
There's documentation of them in particular in Germany.
And not just any air gun, but like all the different types that we still recognise today.
This would be an example of a pre-charged (you'd call it today a PCP), air gun,
where you have a reservoir that's charged with air.
Back as far as the 1500s they had pump air guns where you actually had a pressure canister in the gun
and a pump somewhere on it, and you would pump up each shot individually.
This technology isn't brand new. People thought of this way back when.
And there were some substantial advantages to air guns. They were quieter, not
silent because you are releasing pressure at the end of the barrel and that makes noise.
They were quieter than firearms. They didn't produce the smoke. Because they didn't use black powder they were much cleaner.
You're still gonna probably have some residue or fouling from the projectiles
that you have to clean out of the bore, but you don't have that nasty black powder fouling.
You could use a gun like this in the rain,
in a way that often you'd have trouble with ... black powder getting wet.
The problem was the power on these is limited.
... They're not weak, there's plenty of power in a large-bore air gun like this to take down almost any sort of proper game.
You can certainly hunt with these. The Austrian military adopted a Girardoni pattern air gun in the 1700s for a brief time,
and under limited circumstances. But they did actually adopt them and use them in combat.
In fact they were a repeating air gun long before the advent of a practical repeating firearm for military use.
So there's really a quite rich history in air guns.
But like I said, the problem was that the power kind of tops off, especially with older technology.
You are limited in the pressure that you could actually safely and reliably carry in the guns,
and that meant that you're only able to get so much velocity out of them.
And if you wanted anything more powerful you had to switch to firearms.
These were also very expensive guns to manufacture, because getting the airtight seal
is kind of a different issue than a firearm, especially a muzzleloading firearm.
And especially manufacturing the pressure cylinders for these. They're expensive.
You know, even today there are firearms that a lot of people have,
and then there are firearms that pretty much everyone acknowledges are better,
but ... not everyone gets the better ones. And the reason is often just cost.
This is a particularly nice example of a vintage ... 150 plus year old air gun.
If you'd like to add it to your own collection, take a look at the description text below,
you'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page for it. That has their pictures, their description,
their value estimate, everything else, and an option to put a bid on it right through their website.
Thanks for watching.
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