Ackart

That’s a lot of fox

  • He/Him

bruno
@bruno

I think a lot of people have this idea that the patent system has been distorted by software patent trolls and giant corporations, and that at one point in time it was a reasonable and sensible system. Here's a counterexample.

In the 1830s and 1840s, Samuel Colt had an actual patent on the manufacture of revolvers. The idea of a revolving cylinder that you'd load with powder and ball – these were the days of percussion cap revolvers, so you'd load from the front of the cylinder – was patented and exclusive to Colt's company or someone who licensed from him.

This prompted a lot of people, especially in the US where Colt was most effectively able to enforce his patent, to try and develop some kind of repeating firearm that didn't infringe on the patent and could compete with Colt. Hence, the turret gun. In a normal revolver cylinder, all the bullets point forward and they revolve around that longitudinal line. In a turret revolver, the bullets point in all directions like a pinwheel, and the cylinder revolves around the vertical axis.

Now, this may not seem like such an awful idea until you stop and think about one of the failure modes of percussion-cap revolvers, which is chain fire. You see, a percussion cap revolver is fired by a percussion cap – a little lump of mercury fulminate – that's struck and then ignites the gunpowder inside the cylinder. One of the ways this can go bad is a chainfire. If a percussion cap is a little too eager about exploding, it can ignite its neighbor on the next chamber over, and so on around the whole cylinder.

When this happens with a conventional percussion revolver, the gun fires all six shots all at once; one out the barrel, and the remaining out of the naked cylinder. This will typically damage the gun, and the kick might injure the shooter's arm, but it is a reasonably tolerable failure in this era.

What happens when a turret gun has a chainfire is left as an exercise to the reader.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @bruno's post:

yessssss turret revolvers are so 'i beg your pardon you want me to hold WHAT?', i really want a video game rendition of one (complete with chainfires please)

the patents that came in to evade the (very questionably assigned) rollin white patent are perhaps not as inherently dangerous but they're SO FUNNY god, i think my favorite is the one with removable individual chambers that you put the cartridge into and then slide into the cylinder???

Gun Jesus has covered a glorious plethora of designs that tried to work around the damned Rollin White patent (which didn't even make sense - Rollin White was an idiot and his gun didn't work - but Colt knew what the patent implied and absolutely exploited it!). Honestly if you like wacky firearms you should just watch every video in the Forgotten Weapons channel - they're glorious.

And yes, as an example of "has the patent system always been this stupid?" - yes, yes it is has.

As I recall, Colt's patent was specifically on the manufacturing process for making a revolver cylinder - that you had a big round blank and you drilled right through it to the other side to make the chambers.

There were some patent revolvers that had blind holes for chambers and percussion caps off to one side (like an old-timey cannon barrel) to try and get around that. Colt's revolvers with the percussion caps on the opposite end of the cylinder to the chamber were way better, obviously.

That's the Rollin White patent, which came later and was licensed by Smith & Wesson; it covered the idea of a 'bored through' cylinder for a breech-loading cartridge-firing revolver. Colt's patent covered, mainly, the lockwork required to make a single action revolver (so, cocking the hammer would automatically turn and lock the cylinder). Boring the cylinder through was not really a practical idea for cap and ball guns, since the lack of a metal cartridge meant that there was nothing to create an effective gas seal in the open back of a cylinder.