■ FRENCH PEPPERBOX-STYLE OF THE XIX CENTURY from the collection of the Tula Museum. The scheme of the pepperbox made it possible to "surround" any round or polyhedral tube with trunks.
Man has always dreamed of killing two birds with one stone. Better not two, but twenty at once. Therefore, hand-held small arms were overgrown with trunks, like a hedgehog - needles. Pistols of the "duck's paw" type, double-barreled guns, and multi-barreled machine guns appeared. As a result, evolution came to the multiply-charged single-barreled weapon, but there was another forgotten branch in it, the products of which were not very functional, but very beautiful. Their name is pepperboxes.
If you literally translate the word "pepperbox" from English, you get "a box of pepper", or "pepper shaker". This word was applied at first to any multiple-shot pistols - even to ordinary single-barreled revolvers. But it took root precisely in relation to historical monsters, resembling either a huge revolver, or a small machine gun.
The Pepperbox is a multi-barreled pistol with a rotating barrel assembly. He does not have a drum as such, but the half-revolver is mounted on a hinge. Pepperboxes were usually charged from the muzzle side - like old flintlock pistols, but later designs appeared closer to a revolver, with a reclining mechanism and access to the breech. Pepperboxes appeared in the United Kingdom and the United States around 1780-1800 and quickly spread throughout the world. Almost every arms company boasts at least one Pepperbox model. Moreover, many private traders, trying to outmaneuver their competitors more seriously, created such designs that it would be right to call them mutants, freaks, or something else more fun.
According to the traditional scheme, the pepperbox had six short barrels screwed into a rotating block. Common were a seed shelf and a flintlock. Naturally, at first, the block of barrels did not turn on its own, it was rotated by hand (and with a glove, since the just "spent" barrel had a very uncomfortable temperature for the skin]. Moreover, each time it was necessary to add gunpowder to the shelf, which reduced the functionality of the pepperbox. compared to conventional double-barreled pistols, it is practically nonexistent.
■ MULTI-STYLES according to the European model were also made in Russia - mostly by private craftsmen. The Tula Arms Museum contains about 20 such "guns".
There are no peculiarities in these pistols: pepperboxes were not typical for the Russian weapon tradition, rare samples are copies of European and American models.
The flintlock severely limited the capabilities of the pepperboxes. But the appearance of the capsule lock gave a new impetus to this direction. First of all, the protorevolver (sometimes pepperboxes are called this way) with a capsule lock had the advantage of continuous firing.
The classic revolver, familiar to us from Westerns, appeared in the first half of the 19th century. As you know, the famous Samuel Colt did not invent it, but improved it by adding a device for automatically turning the barrel after each shot. This invention, coupled with the streamlined production of revolvers (since 1836), doomed the pepperboxes to death, not even allowing them to be truly born.
■ KNOWN MODERN traumatic pistol PB 4-1 ML "Wasp" can also be attributed to pepperboxes. True, the tiny pistol has no rotating parts, but there are four barrels. "Wasp" refers to the "barrelless firearms" family of weapons - it is allowed for civil circulation on the territory of the Russian Federation. The "Wasp" uses an 18x45 cartridge with a rubber bullet with a diameter of 15.3 mm, and the capsule is initialized not by hitting the striker, but by electric current. The effect of hitting a bullet from the "Wasp" can be compared to the blow of a heavyweight boxer.
But, as mentioned earlier, many companies wanted to come up with something constructively new and improve the classic "Colt", which, to be honest, at that time was almost perfect. This is how the "second generation" pepperbox bundel revolvers appeared.
Second generation
The first capsule pepperbox was patented simultaneously with the first Colt revolver - in 1836. Its creator was the Massachusetts entrepreneur and gunsmith Ethan Allen. At that time, it was not yet clear which concept would conquer the market - many rotating barrels or one barrel with a rotating drum. Allen believed in pepperboxes and was almost never wrong at first. Allen's Pepperbox was launched in 1837 and was a success. True, not in the legendary Wild West, which at that time was just beginning to be mastered, but in the eastern part of the country. Gunfighters with Allen's Bundel Revolvers were as common as those armed with classic Colt cannons. The formidable, heavy, clumsy appearance of this weapon played a significant role: the numerous holes in the barrels frightened much more than one "pathetic" barrel of a revolver.
Allen's pistols, like modern revolvers, had a double-acting capsule lock. Pressing the trigger carried out both the platoon, and the rotation of the barrel block, and the shot. There were several modifications of the Allen pepperbox - with calibers from 31 to 36 and a different number of barrels (up to six).
Around the same time as Allen in Europe, another pepperbox was patented - the Belgian Marriette. The Europeans were not as conservative as the Americans. Marriette made pepperboxes with the number of barrels from 4 to 24 (!). Several copies of the last freak have survived to our times - sometimes they pop up at various online auctions and go for? 15-20 thousand apiece. It's hard to imagine how to hold a 24-barreled cannon in one hand: even an ordinary automatic pistol pulls noticeably to the ground.
By the way, in order to load a pistol made under the Mariette patent, each barrel had to be unscrewed separately and a cartridge from the breech was inserted into it. Allen's pepperboxes were easier to use: it was possible to remove the entire block of barrels at the same time.
In addition to the degree of intimidation of the enemy, the Europeans paid attention to design. Both the Marriette and other European pepperboxes were adorned with spectacular patterns, sometimes gilded, and the escapement was in the form of a ring rather than a hook. Actually, Bundel revolvers like Marriette were produced by all and sundry, and in the collections a fair number of samples, similar to the Marietta model, but difficult to identify, have survived.
English gunsmiths preferred the Allen system. It is understandable - the British would hardly have borrowed something from the Belgian. Allen had no time to track the copyists of his development.
All bundel revolvers, as one would expect, had a high rate of fire for their time [naturally, with a long reload], but at the same time, low combat accuracy due to a tight trigger and poor balance and were suitable for shooting only at short distances. They were used as a weapon of self-defense, while the revolvers of Colt and other gunsmiths were bought in huge quantities, for example, by the army.
In addition to Allen and Mariette, it is worth mentioning several more leading manufacturers of pepperboxes of the first half of the 19th century - the English firms of Cooper and Turner, as well as the Americans Blunt and Sime.
By the 1870s, almost all firms had abandoned pepperboxes. Even a fan of his own invention, Allen switched to the production of classic revolvers. Rare gunsmiths turned to the pepperbox scheme only in order to achieve the maximum compactness of the weapon: the location of the barrels directly in the drum made it possible to shorten the pistol by the length of the muzzle itself. But even such cases were isolated.
Today the classic revolver seems logical and understandable to us. How could pepperboxes compete with him? The popularity of the Pepper Bundel Revolvers was due, among other things, to the visual power. Six or even more barrels looking at the enemy - it looks intimidating. And it doesn't matter that only one of them shoots. After all, the psychological aspect in the popularity of this or that type of weapon plays a significant role.
■ The pepperbox was not necessarily a pistol. For example, in the Tula Museum there is a short-barreled shotgun made according to the same principle.
Monstrous freaks
However, gunsmiths could not stop at pepperboxes and revolvers. Everyone wanted to stand out and produce something new and even more deadly. So at different times, pistols appeared that could not be attributed to any of the categories at all.
For example, in 1860, American manufacturer Jones released a stunningly beautiful 36-caliber 10-barrel pistol. The barrels were located not in a circle, but in two columns of five each. There were two "dogs" on both sides. Each new pull on the trigger "snapped" the dog to the next barrel. Thus, the pistol fired alternately in a Z-shaped sequence: first right barrel - first left - second right - second left - etc. Not long ago, one of the Jones Pepperboxes was auctioned for $ 9,000.
In the same 1860s, a 22-caliber 30-round double-barreled revolver was produced in France. The revolver drum was two-level and fed two cartridges at once to the upper and lower barrels, the shot was fired from both barrels at the same time.
In the middle of the 19th century, the French company Lefauchet produced several "harmonica" type pepperboxes. Six or ten "harmonica" barrels are located in one horizontal row, and with each shot a row of barrels moves relative to the percussion mechanism like a typewriter carriage. The main disadvantage of such a weapon was inaccuracy: when firing from the side barrels, it was monstrously difficult to keep the pistol in a horizontal position.
There were also vertical "harmonics" - for example, by Auslands. In such pistols, a block of four barrels moved vertically.
And in Cairo, in the Abdeen Palace museum, revolvers are kept for all revolvers. The unique design based on an ordinary "Colt" is equipped with eight (!) Drums. As soon as one six-round drum is consumed, the shooter turns a large ring with a special handle, replacing the drum with a new one, and the shooting continues.
Museum staff are inclined to believe that this is a local handicraft alteration of the "Colt" brought from the USA.
In addition, pepperboxes were actively used as a "hidden" weapon - for example, in a cane or even in a Sdad bicycle handlebar, in France in 1880 this design was also used)! The fact is that the scheme of the pepperbox made it possible to "surround" any round or polyhedral tube with barrels, for example, the base of the blade, and hide the weapon in any suitable case.
Today, pepperboxes are part of history (although today multi-barreled rocket launchers are mass-produced, made according to the same principle). They can be found in movies, and most often not in westerns, but in genre stylizations in the spirit of steampunk and post-apocalypse. This is easily explained by the spectacular appearance of such a weapon. But to be honest: if a 19th century Mariette pepperbox is pointed at me in a dark alley, I will hardly admire its magnificent external design and ring-shaped descent. Because a weapon is always a weapon, no matter how it looks.
■ Bundesrevolver Marrieta
Country: Belgium Length: 184 mm H Barrel length: 71 mm Weight: 0.7 kg Caliber: 9.6 mm Rifling: no Magazine capacity: 6 rounds H Muzzle velocity: 152 m / s
Multi-barrel revolving pistol with primer ignition designed by Jules Mariette. In 1839 (sometimes they indicate 1837, when the first samples were actually created, but the patent dates back to 1839), the Belgian J. Mariette patented the so-called bundelrevolver. This weapon had a block of barrels, each of which had a cap screw in the end. Each barrel has four rectangular notches in the muzzle so that it can be removed more easily with a special key. The barrels are bolted to a spindle on a fixed breech, access to which is provided by a hole left in the center of the barrel block. In the form of a ring, the block of barrels rotated, substituting the primer under the percussion mechanism. At the same time, the lower trigger was cocked, and with further pulling of the annular descent, it broke off the cocking position and hit the primer, as a result of which a shot followed.
■ FRENCH PEPPERBOX OF HORIZONTAL HARMONIC TYPE
Ten barrels of "harmonica" are located in one horizontal row, and with each shot the row of barrels moves relative to the percussion mechanism like a typewriter carriage. It was very difficult to get into any of such weapons, as well as to keep it from skewing. In addition, such a pistol could be extremely small-bore (0.22, for example} and was only suitable for self-defense at close distances.
■ JONES DESIGN GUN. USA, I860 YEAR Caliber - 0.36. Each "column" of barrels had its own dog, which "clicked" one division down after each shot. The pistol fired alternately in a Z-shaped sequence: first right barrel - first left - second right - second left - etc. Last year, one of the Jones Pepperboxes was auctioned for $ 9,000.
