For a long time, Russian small arms were patterned closely after French designs – the Russian 1809 family was based on the French 1777 muskets, and the Russian 1828 model – like this one – […]
Lot 1193 in the September 2020 RIA Premier auction. John Hall designed the first breechloading rifle to be used by the United States military, and the first breechloader issued in substantial numbers by any military […]
Lot 1173 in the RIA September 2020 Premier auction. During the 1600s and 1700s, flintlock and wheel lock systems were used to make “hand mortars”; firearm-like apparatuses to throw objects. Some of these were military […]
Colonel Thomas Thornton was a wealthy and somewhat flamboyant character in England in the late 18th and early 19th century. He commanded a militia unit with which he had some disagreement, and which mutinied against […]
Joseph Chambers invented a repeating flintlock weapon in the 1790s, and I think it is appropriate to consider it a “machine gun”. The design used a series of superposed charges in one or more barrels, […]
This is Lot 2137 in the upcoming October 2019 Morphy Extraordinary auction. The US Congress passed a Militia Act in 1808 to provide funding for military supplies, and one of the immediate resulting contracts was […]
Lot 1421 in the September 2019 RIA auction. In 1798, the US Congress allocated a huge sum of money – $800,000 – to the procurement of military equipment to supplement the output of the Springfield […]
Lot 391 in the September 2019 RIA auction. Duck’s foot pistols are one of the iconic classic “weird gun” categories. The one exemplifies the typical pattern, with four barrels arranged in a wedge, fired simultaneously […]
This Ferguson rifle sold for $96,000. Captain Patrick Ferguson was a British officer who designed and patented a breechloading rifle in 1776, which would actually see service in the American Revolution at the Battle of […]
The Wilson family was a gunmaking dynasty in London that began in 1730 when Richard Wilson was accepted as a Master Gunmaker by the Gunmakers’ Company. Wilson’s eldest son William Wilson would receive the same […]
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