This is a really early underhammer pinfire pistol made in 1849 by the French gunsmith, Joseph-Célestin Dumonthier who lived in Houdan, Seine-et-Oise, France. It follows his 2 July 1849 French patent.

The whole barrel unscrews from the frame and allows you to load a single 12mm pinfire cartridge.

The Lefaucheux model 1859 carbine was a small carbine Eugène Lefaucheux made with hopes to gain military acceptance. It is a very simple design with few moving parts. It only weighs 4.5 pounds and has an overall length of 3 feet 4 inches.

There are multiple variations of this gun; some with a full metal frame, some with an automatic cartridge extractor, a percussion cap version, a double barrel version, pistols, and various bores.

This example is chambered for 12mm pinfire cartridges, has a manual extractor and a solid wood stock.

There are two levers on the gun. The one on the right is the cocking lever and also serves as the breechblock. When you raise it it opens the breech, allowing you to insert a new pinfire cartridge or remove a spent cartridge. It also cocks the extra-long hammer. The following video and image shows how this works.

There have been many articles written about Jean Samuel Pauly and his contribution to the history of firearms development. One excellent source recently looks in detail at the patents by Pauly, Roux, Picherau and Lefaucheux. You can read about it here:

Priestel dives deep into the modifications by Pauly and the successors to Pauly’s company, but there are a few other improvements to the Pauly system by other prominent gunmakers of the day that are not addressed in this publication. A couple of these were mentioned in a French gun magazine’s article in the 1970s, but other than the brief mention there, there is nothing I could find published that goes into detail on the following improvements to the Pauly gun and cartridges.

So I gathered the patents, transcribed them and will detail the improvements here!

Jacques-Joseph Plomdeur | 1825-03-31

Jacques-Joseph Plomdeur was a well known gunmaker who had a business at 25 rue des Fossés-Montmartre and later at 5 bis, rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. He was best known for his improvements to primers and percussion caps which he held a few patents on. In the 1830s he took out many advertisements for his improvements to guns and primers such as the following:

On 31 Mar 1825, Plomdeur took out a French patent for 5 years for an improvement on Pauly guns.

There are two main areas that he addresses. First is how the hammer is connected to the plate, passing all the way through, which allowed for considerable fouling throughout the inside.

James Erskine, a gunmaker and inventor from Newton Stewart, Scotland had a prolific career inventing and patenting many improvements to guns and cartridge loading machines. His patented cartridge filler was universally accepted and used by all of the great British gunmakers of the day!

Erskine was born on September 12, 1812, in Penninghame, Wigtownshire, Scotland, the son of Mary Watson and Thomas Erskine. He married Elizabeth Sinclair on December 4, 1854, in his hometown. They had eight children over 21 years. He died on November 20, 1891, in Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire, Scotland, having lived a long life of 79 years.

During most of those 79 years Erskine was active learning and then working in the gun trade. The IGC Historical Database indicates that Erskine began his apprenticeship at 14 years old, working as a gun finisher for Williams & Powell, or their predecessor, Edward Patrick in Liverpool.

Sometime after 1841 and before the 1851 Scotland Census, Erskine moved to Newton Stewart and began working for himself as a gun maker.

He displayed two guns at the 1851 Great Exhibition and was awarded a bronze metal.

On July 20, 1859 he delivered the following provisional specification to the British patent office for an update to the Lefaucheux-style pinfire shotgun:

August G. Genez was a French Gunsmith that began working in the gun-making industry at 13 years old in France. He died on June 17, 1897 and over the course of his career he had many successful ventures as well as challenging tragedies.

This article will take a look at A. G. Genez, the gunsmith in New York, New York, and follow his 50-year career in the gun industry. We will also take a look at his successors of his gun shop, Vincent Bissig and John P. Dannefelser.

When August Genez was 21 years old he immigrated to the United States from a port in Le Havre, France on a ship named Charles Thompson and arrived in New York, New York on April 10, 1854. The ship log of his emigration record states he was from Germany but his naturalization record, son’s wedding record, various ads of his, son’s various census records all state his birthplace was France.

The Genez name first shows up in the 1856/1857 issue of Trow’s New York City Directory where Genez August is listed as a gunsmith at 221 William. The same year the Wilson’s business directory of New-York City list him under the Gunsmiths section with his business at 221 William.

The story of Coirier à Clermont is a interweaved tale of partnerships and encounters that begins in 1848.

In 1848 a Frenchman named Francis Marquis founded a company that made carbines for cavalry. In French this is the term, harquebusier. He was known for making high quality guns and displayed some of his work at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 in Paris, the 1862 Great London Exposition and the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition.

Shortly after the London Exposition, La Chasse Illustrée, an illustrated journal dedicated to all things hunting, featured an article about some of the high grade guns presented at the exposition. They described Marquis’s gun as “remarkable” and “a real masterpiece.”

Charles Millichamp of Presteign, Radnorshire, Wales was a watchmaker who owned a fishing tackle shop. Over a few decades he made significant use of advertising to inform people about his new endeavors. One of his earliest ads was for his business, County Sporting Tackle House, where he advertised his custom trout & grayling flies as well as all kinds of fishing tackle that he sold.

In 1888 Millichamp worked with William Maund who was a landowner that lives about 6 miles away in the village of Shobdon, Herefordshire, England to invent a new mechanical scarecrow in the form of a self-acting field clock gun. They patented this new invention on May 3, 1888. You can read more about the patent and see high quality images of my example of this gun in my earlier article.

Maund and Millichamp very quickly began getting press and reviews written about their invention in various publications. You will notice that sometimes the review mentions both inventors and other times it mentions only one or the other.

We talked before about John Hall and his patented automatic clock gun (linked below.) This article will explore another gun that draws heavily on the concept and design, likely because it was probably also made by John Hall. Make sure to watch the video of it in action at the very bottom!

The last article stopped around 1902, when John Hall patented his automatic clock gun and received reviews and media attention for it. However, John Hall did not stop making automatic clock-gun bird scarers then. John Hall & Son made them for at least another 50 years! In 1951 they were still listed under the Bird Scarers category in the Commercial Growers’ Directory & Buyer’s Guide.

The Journal Des Débats was an influential French newspaper that was published between 1789 and 1944. The following advertisements by Maison Lefaucheux were in various issues.

The earliest one I have acquired so far was from the August 18, 1839 issue. It lists the address of House Lefaucheux as 10, rue de la Bourse, This is the address that Casimir Lefaucheux worked out of from 1834 – 1835 and then again from 1845 to 1850.

One of the most famous American ammunition manufacturers was William Tibbals. William Tibbals was the partner in the company, Crittenden & Tibbals, who supplied mostof the rimfire ammunition during the American Civil War.

Part of what made Crittenden & Tibbals so successful was their early relationship with firearms manufacturers such as Smith & Wesson. Crittenden & Tibbals made some of the earliest rimfire cartridges for Smith & Wesson, Bacon, Spencer and others. I am sure that within their relationship with Smith & Wesson they were well aware with the issues of many people trying to circumvent or infringe on the Rollin White patent that Smith & Wesson had an exclusive license to use; especially since some of their main customers were some of the infringing companies.

The Rollin White patent was actually a fairly ridiculous pistol design that would have unlikely ever been made. However, there was one interesting feature about it that Daniel B. Wesson was interested in; the concept of a revolver with a bored-through cylinder which allowed metallic cartridges to be inserted from the back. This concept already existed with pinfire revolvers in Europe but it was the first time the concept was patented in the United States. So from 1855, through the next 17 years, anyone who wanted to make a revolver that loaded from the back had to go through Smith & Wesson.

During this time period there were a few notable designs that effectively evaded this patent such as the cupfire, teatfire and thuer cartridges. The revolvers that used these were designed to be loaded from the front of the cylinder and have a back that was not bored all the way through.

John H. Hall was a US gunsmith that invented a hybrid breechloading and muzzleloading rifle adopted by the US Army in 1819. But that’s not who we will be talking about. The John Hall we will be talking about was an auto mechanic. He lived in the small town of Wigton, Cumberland (present day Cumbria), in northwest England. Wigton had a population of 4000 people and was designated as a market town which gave it the legal right to hold a weekly market. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were a lot of agricultural activities in the surrounding area including notable berry farms, livestock farms and many other types of farms.

John Hall owned a company called Station Road Works which was located on Station Road and very likely was the building that is the current Station Road Garage.

Hall was officially appointed by the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland and the Motor Union of Great Britain and Ireland as an automobile repairer for the Wigton area and listed in their Automobile Handbook. He referred to himself as an engineer and was likely a machinist that could fabricate parts needed to repair automobiles.

On April 2nd in the year 1902, Hall applied for a British patent for “Improvements in Apparatus for Scaring Purposes, Especially Applicable for Scaring Birds.” This application for his clock gun mentions existing similar devices that used a clock and had hands attached to levers that would release weights. He mentioned that these devices were very expensive and prone to wear over time. He also mention the dangers of how each barrel was loaded at the muzzle and detonated by a cap and that sometimes people would steal or mess with the powder since everything was loaded from the outside.

This self-acting, field clock gun was patented in England by William Maund and Charles Millichamp on May 3, 1888. It is essentially a giant revolver that holds eight 16 gauge pinfire shotshells. The clockwork mechanism inside it can be set to fire the cartridges intermittently at intervals of as often as every 15 minutes up to every 1.5 hours. It can also be set to fire a single shot at a chosen time.

It was sold in two variations. One option had a handle on the top allowing it to be suspended from a tree or a barn. This is the example that I have and is shown in the pictures. There was also a variation that was sold at a 25% premium with a figurine of a person holding a gun as shown in the advertisement above and patent image below.

The last few posts of our exploration of the relationship between pinfire cartridges and the United States has focused on their use in the American Civil War. In this article we will take a look at some lesser known pinfire cartridges that played their part in the constantly evolving history of ammunition in the United States. First up is the .58 Schubarth.

The .58 Schubarth.

The .58 Schubarth was patented and made in 1861 by Casper D. Schubarth who resided at 6 North Main Street, Providence, RI. 

The whole idea of the cartridge and rifle is based on a modification and improvement of Gallager & Gladding’s cartridge and rifle that was created a couple years prior. It is an inside-primed pinfire that was made to be easily reloadable with the common Minié bullets and percussion caps. Schubarth’s improvement also made it gas-tight and waterproof by dipping the cartridge in melted tallow after inserting the bullet. The design also called for a small cork wad to be placed between the bullet and the powder to clean the barrel on each shot.

In Schubarth’s interview with The Scientific American he described a rimfire variation of this cartridge by stating that “for army use a ridge may be formed entirely around the cartridge and filled with fulminating powder, in place of the wire, and cap, so that the cartridge may be inserted in any position. But for sporting it is more economical to adopt the arrangement represented, as the same case may be refilled and used many times.”

While I do not have ballistic information on the cartridge, in 1861 Schubarth said that “the powder is fired in the middle of the charge thus causing a rapid combustion […] that causes so great force be generated that 60 grains of powder has driven a bullet through 15 one-inch boards at a distance of one hundred yards” so it sounds like a fairly powerful cartridge!

You can see and read this whole Scientific American article here:

The example in my collection was once owned by the well-known author and ammunition researcher, Colonel Berkeley R. Lewis of the United States Army Ordnance Corps. He acquired it from the Smithsonian Institution.

This is a 10g pinfire shotgun that was manufactured in Liège, Belgium by the luxury gun maker, E. Bernard. It was retailed by Brun-Latrige of Saint-Étienne, France.