Damonby wrote:I have to applaud RFC for allowing me to learn a wealth of information about early designs of breech loading weapons at the turn of the century.
It reminds me of the early wildcatting days of PC creation. A host of companies where out there designing and producing them, leaving many buyers wondering if they were getting the next great thing or a pig in a poke. This far removed from the process it seems so simple; at the time each country and military had ample opportunities to completely screw up the development/procurement process.
Another of the many reasons to enjoy this forum. Thank you all.
I've always used that very comparison when talking about 19th Century firearms development.
Remember when the newest and greatest CPU advancement would end up being obsolete 6 months or a year later? Pretty much the whole 19th Century was that way when you are talking about firearms. Firearms designers had to strike while the iron was hot if they were going to make anything off their designs because there was
always someone, somewhere, that was a couple steps behind them in the process with something better.
When it comes to breechloading in the mid 19th Century when it was really taking off, if you can imagine a way to do it, there's been a gun (or 3) developed that worked that way. Barrels moving up, down, left and right, sliding forward, pulling back,.... Breech blocks rolling, sliding, falling, raising, flipping, pivoting and sometimes in some unique combinations of the above, too. Some designs leave you wondering why they didn't catch on while many just leave you scratching your head as you wonder exactly why they thought it was a good enough idea to actually build a gun like that in the first place.
By the time things settled down a bit in the latter 1/3 of the Century, the firearms business was just cutthroat. Smith and Wesson started the ball rolling when they rabidly defended the Rollin White patent. Winchester, after 1887, bought absolutely anything Browning designed, the filed the patents for the designs and went after anyone they thought was infringing on them. (Seriously, they bought and patented EVERYTHING Browning brought to them. Browning challenged his brothers to come up the the cheapest, shootable .22 boy's rifle they could think up as a joke nad friendly ocntest. One of the designs became the Winchester Model 1900.) Many times, Browning was asked to come up with something in particular and would show up back East with 3 or 4 guns that fit the bill but did it in completely different ways. Winchester would buy the designs, blueprint the guns, file the patents on all of them to keep the competition from developing something similar and build one of the designs.
If I’d wanted to go immediately to a better action, or if I’d decided the Temple would be able to mass produce metallic cartridges and I wanted to give them a qualitative edge there, the rolling block would have arrived on the scene, as used in the Remington, because it's a very strong, very simple, and much more easily machined action than the one I actually adopted. For that matter, in my opinion, it's also much better than the Sharps' sliding block. 