Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at RIA
with the very first American military breech-loading rifle.
This is a Model of 1819 Hall breech-loader, and it's really cool.
It's perhaps more cool and interesting than you may realise.
Now this is in fact the first breech-loading rifle adopted
on a wide basis by a military force.
It's not the absolute first breech-loader to be used by a military. Guns like, for example, the Ferguson rifle
do predate this by in fact a couple of decades, but those were only issued in very small numbers.
The Ferguson in particular was something like 100 guns, where the Hall, its very first military contract was 1,000 guns,
and the quantities only went up from there.
This was not a US primary infantry rifle. That would remain in fact a muzzle-loading, smoothbore musket for quite some time.
But this was a specialist's weapon, sort of.
This was to be issued to specialised units who could make the most use of them really.
Now the design comes from one John Hall of Maine, and he patented this system in 1811,
really, really early for a breech-loading rifle.
And started making them commercially in Maine, while attempting to get some government interest.
And eventually he was able to. It was delayed for a number of years by the War of 1812,
but finally in 1817 he convinces the US government to purchase 100 of his rifles for 25 dollars apiece.
And they accept this deal, which is really kind of an outlier in military procurement.
This is not normally how this sort of thing works, but Hall was able to do it.
Probably because the nation was so very young at that point, and there were fewer people,
there was less military innovation, and to be honest, he had a really good, innovative and effective design here.
He had used those years between 1811 and 1817 to make guns commercially and refine his design.
Now Hall also had some very interesting ideas about manufacturing technology,
and these would go hand in hand with the rifles.
So he initially submits 100 guns for basically military testing, and they really pass with flying colours.
They are in fact really good guns. What the military finds is that this rifle
(and it is in fact rifled at a time when the standard US military arm was a smoothbore musket),
this rifle is more accurate than the military rifles that were then in use.
And it's faster firing than the smoothbore muskets that were then in use.
So at this time the trade-off you had, and the reason why smoothbore guns continued in service,
was that you could load a smoothbore ... musket a lot faster than you could load a rifled musket.
The reason is of course with rifling you have to ram a bullet down, engraving the rifling on it as it goes.
You have to get a tight fit into that rifling or else it's not going to be particularly accurate, or you're going to get gas blow by.
With a smooth bore it's a lot easier. Once you've got that bullet or ball swaged down to the size of the bore,
it just slides back relatively easily. So it was a well-known and accepted thing that you
could get a much higher rate of fire out of troops with smoothbores than rifles.
However, on the other hand, the rifles are more accurate. So which do you want? It's a trade-off.
And Hall was able to completely break that paradigm.
In fact in one of the very early military tests (I'm skipping forward a little bit here),
after they had got the first batch of 1,000 production rifles from Hall,
they went and took like 38 men, a couple of groups of them,
and gave one group rifles, and one group smoothbore muskets, and one group Hall rifles,
and had them all fire for 10 minutes at a target 100 yards away.
And then they counted up how many shots, and how many hits, there had been from each group.
And they found in fact that the Hall was the fastest firing of all three rifles,
and it was the most accurate. And that's really impressive at the time.
Anyway, once the US military decides that it is going to in fact adopt these,
or Congress actually at that point, decided it was going to adopt these on a limited basis.
Not as a standard rifle for everybody, but as a specialist's rifle to equip certain units that could
make the most out of this sort of firepower.
Because, as I say, these are definitely more expensive guns than your typical smoothbore musket.
Once they decide to do that, they need to set up production. And they do this at the Harper's Ferry ... arsenal in Virginia.
It's close to Washington DC, which kind of makes sense.
However this is not the easiest thing to make,
and they bring John Hall down from Maine to supervise and assist in the manufacture.
And he would end up staying at Harper's Ferry for the entire rest of his life.
Ultimately he would ... take charge of ... the rifle works at the whole arsenal.
And I started to get into: Hall had some interesting ideas about manufacturing technology,
specifically parts interchangeability.
Now there are a couple other manufacturers, firearms manufacturers, who can put out a claim
to being the first, or very early, adopters of interchangeable parts.
The idea of course is that you could take multiple guns, disassemble them all, mix up the parts,
rebuild the guns and they would all work.
And this was not normal ... at this time period, every gun would have normally been hand fitted.
So if you need to replace a part you have to get a gunsmith, who is a true smith of firearms,
who can hand-fit parts to fit whatever's broken.
There is an obvious advantage to interchangeable parts.
Now, Eli Whitney in ... some of his early work and Simeon North in some of his early work,
they both claimed to have interchangeable parts, and they did in fact.
You could mix up the parts from multiple guns and they'd all work.
However the way that they achieved that was by hand fitting every part to a set of jigs, so that
while the end product was interchangeable, they were not able to develop automated machine tools
that would spit out interchangeable parts. Everything had to be hand-fitted.
They just hand-fit everything to the same standard, so it became interchangeable.
What John Hall did over the course of ... almost 10 years setting up the rifle works at Harper's Ferry,
(... by the way he got that first contract in 1819, there were no guns delivered until like late 1824, early 1825),
what he did was develop machine tools that would actually spit out parts that were interchangeable.
The way that he built these guns in batches of 1,000 at Harper's Ferry
... he had like one big set of machine tools, and he would manufacture one part at a time.
He would do all of part A, 1,000 of them, and he'd make 1,000 of part B, and 1,000 of part C,
and couldn't assemble a single rifle until he had finished the very last part
and had all these bins of a thousand parts each. And then, because they were interchangeable,
you could take a stock and a barrel and an action and one of every other part,
and bolt them all together and have a functioning rifle.
And the US was leery of this, the military didn't necessarily believe him,
and so they did a test on I think it was 100 of his guns.
They stripped down 100 guns, randomly mixed up the parts, put them all back together,
and what do you know, they all actually worked.
So I have been going on at some length about the origins of Hall,
let's go ahead and actually take a closer look at how this rifle works.
This is certainly a unique looking arm,
and it definitely would have attracted some attention anywhere it went.
It does not have a lock on the side of the stock, which is a huge departure
from everything that was standard at that time, instead the lock's on the very top.
Now the way this works is you have this hook on the bottom, and if you ... pull that back
you can lift up this whole breech block assembly.
And in effect you're really still muzzle loading the gun,
but you're muzzle loading it from here back, instead of from all the way at the front end of the barrel.
What you have here is basically a separation between the chamber and the actual barrel.
And this is the chamber, so you would pour your powder charge in there, press in a projectile,
and then you can close this back down.
It will lock in place, and there are a couple of big locking lugs right there
to keep this from coming backwards under recoil.
And then you have your flint lock here, you would prime it.
One of the other interesting advantages that maybe isn't obvious at first glance,
is that the priming hole on this is vertical, it just goes straight down into the powder charge.
On a typical flintlock (that's where the lock's out on the side of the gun),
the priming hole is actually horizontal. You have a priming pan out here,
and then a hole that goes over into the chamber and so it's a little more difficult,
well, I should say, this is going to give you a little more reliable ignition,
because powder grains can go all the way down that priming hole, and make for ... more reliable ignition.
Anyway, we've got the flintlock system there.
It's kind of crazy to think about this as a breech-loading flintlock,
there just were very few guns that combined that sort of old-style and new-style technology.
Anyway, there are our markings on the breech block itself. J.H. Hall, that's John Hall, from Harper's Ferry, US.
And this is a relatively late production gun from 1837.
But even at that point the long rifles were still being made as flintlocks.
I should point out that late in the production run these guns would also be subcontracted to Simeon North,
so you will run into guns manufactured by North.
And the whole story of North developing parts that were interchangeable
with Hall's Harper Ferry parts, that's a whole story in itself.
Now we've got a lot of fairly conventional features for the rest of the rifle,
this is actually a very nice handling rifle. The trigger guard extends down here to give it
in effect a pretty substantial fake pistol grip that is quite comfortable to hold.
We have a sling swivel back here, which is typical for the period.
Nothing in particular on the buttstock.
Here is our front sling swivel right there, so you'd run it from the front of the trigger guard to the barrel band.
Nose cap, cleaning rod, front sight.
You'll notice the front sight is not centred,
it is offset just slightly to the left
and the rear sight here is also offset slightly to the left.
That's done of course because you have this big flintlock mechanism that's sitting mostly in the centre of the action,
so your line of sight can come right down here along the side of the lock.
Now I can take the breech block out of this, and you can really get a feel for the
sort of industrial production vibe of the rifle that I think is pretty cool.
All I have to do is take this front screw out, this is what the breech block is pivoting on.
So we take that out, and then we just hit that release trigger,
there we go, and presto,
that is the breech block for a Hall rifle.
We can ... basically see all the parts right here, it's really pretty simple.
You've got a couple of flat springs on the bottom,
they're going to put pressure on the locking latch and on the trigger.
When I go to cock this you can see that this rotates back, and that's going to hit a locking sear
so that when you pull the trigger down it'll release it.
I don't want to do that because I don't want that to snap on me.
... There was no obturation with the Hall, so what you had to seal the gun was a simple
metal to metal tight fit between this surface on the front
and this surface on the back of the rifle.
And that wasn't perfect, there was gas leakage.
I do also want to point out while we're in here that you've got these metal bars forming a receiver,
and then this is the surface, the block, that [fits] against these two shoulders on the front of the breech block.
Anyway, with regard to gas leakage, it's I think important to remember that this is a flintlock.
Part of what people expect, part of the regular process of shooting,
is that you're going to have this big flash of powder and smoke from the priming pan.
And so if you have that going off here, a little bit of gas leakage a few inches forward of that
isn't necessarily something that people are going to be particularly concerned about, or maybe even notice.
Now that would change a bit when the guns were adapted to and converted to percussion firing.
But by that time they're guns that are already in service,
and so there wasn't this question of, "Should we build this system or not?"
Back when they were flintlocks I just don't think that was all that big of a deal.
... There are vent holes, ... slots, here in the side of the action to allow some of that gas to escape
rather than burn the inside of the stock.
And of course, as the guns were fired more, and wore more and more, that gas leakage would increase.
But ... it's a fundamental flaw in the guns, but it's not one that would really interfere with their ability to work.
Production of the Hall was, by today's standards, kind of relatively slow over several decades of time.
Now there would be a few improvements to the gun, there would be technical improvements to it,
just tweaks to make things easier to manufacture and more durable over the long term. That sort of thing that you always see.
There would be ... new variations. They had some Dragoon ... rifles in larger calibre.
The standard Hall, by the way, is 52.5 calibre. The Dragoon muskets that they built were 69 calibre.
They would make carbine versions.
Perhaps the most substantial change that they made over the course of production was to
eventually adopt a percussion system instead of a flintlock system.
That would in fact be the first percussion rifle adopted by any military.
And that would be one of the Hall carbine patterns.
Later on a lot of the flintlock versions would be converted into percussion guns,
because that's really fairly simple to do on this system.
The guns didn't see a lot of military combat. I think that's probably part of the reason
why they're not all that well recognised compared to other military arms of the period.
The first actual combat use of these wasn't until 1834, and that was in the Black Hawk War
in what was then the Northwest, which would today be like Iowa or thereabouts.
against Black Hawk and a couple of tribes of native Americans. They were also used in the Seminole Wars.
These saw some use in the Civil War, but not a whole lot. By that point the guns were relatively old,
... a lot of them were worn out, and they ... had never been standard, universal issue weapons. So.
A grand total of 51-52,000 of them were manufactured in all patterns, and that's not a lot by Civil War standards.
So, there are a few interesting anecdotes.
At one point in the 1820s, the US Marine Corps discovers that these things are being manufactured and,
"Wow, a breech-loading rifle, and it's fast and accurate, we like the idea of that.
Army, could you like loan us 1,000 of them to try out and see what they're like?"
And the Army replied that no they would not, they would be happy to sell them to the Marine Corps,
or transfer them with compensation for the value.
But they didn't expect that the rifles would be in firing condition by the time the Marines were done with them.
Thus suggesting that the Marine Corps stereotype has been around since at least the 1820s.
Ultimately Hall would pass away in 1841.
His rifle would continue to see a little bit of development after that. But he really is, I think,
a fundamentally under-appreciated contributor to firearms design and general industry in the United States.
While ... he only built firearms, but it was his system of interchangeable parts, and machine-made interchangeable parts,
not just hand-fitting everything to the same standard, that would really lead the way
in what would become known as the American system of manufacture
that would revolutionise a whole swathe of industry worldwide.
So there are a lot of versions and iterations of the Hall that I would like to go into,
and we'll cover those in some future videos.
For the time being, I just wanted to give you an introduction to a rifle that you may have heard of,
but you may not have actually looked at up close. So, hopefully you enjoyed this.
Thanks for watching.
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