"When building a village, the Swiss first build a shooting gallery, then a bank, and only then a church."
(Old Swiss proverb)
How did it all begin?
I would like to start this material with the question: which country has the most banks per capita? And it is clear that there will be only one answer - in Switzerland! The second question is more complicated. What is the most democratic country in the world? Here someone will name one country, someone else … However, you need to name only one, and this country will also be Switzerland! Why? Yes, because there is only one criterion of democracy: it is the authorities' consideration of public opinion. So it was in Switzerland that it was staged in an exemplary manner. No government decision is made without the approval of 80% of its population, which is why public opinion polls are conducted there regularly. It happens that twice a month! Well, what does all this have to do with the history of Swiss rifles? Yes, the most direct!
Gendarmes of the Swiss Confederation at the parade with rifles F. Wetterli.
Switzerland is a nation of shooters. From William Tell to the modern era, the interest in precision shooting has literally been indelibly ingrained in their national character. It all started with crossbows, which in Switzerland were owned by everyone from small to large, well, but ended up with rifles. Therefore, it is not surprising that Swiss rifles are such precision instruments. If the legendary gunsmith Townsend Velen was right when he said that "only precision rifles are interesting", in Switzerland this was expressed in the fact that it almost always chose its own unique path of developing small arms, and was armed with the longest rifles. At different times, Swiss rifles, of course, differed from each other, but they were always very well made, and always accurate. A small but well-trained army in defensive positions wanted and wants its soldiers to have weapons with better range characteristics. And the Swiss are quite successful in this.
"Federal carbine" 1851.
Well, we will begin our story about Swiss rifles from the late 1860s of the 19th century, when they began to look for a replacement for Milbank-Amsler conversion rifles in Switzerland. The Swiss rifle of Isaac Milbank and Rudolf Amsler M1842 / 59/67 was a conversion of the old M1842 primer rifle (improved in 1859). It used a hinged bolt, leaning forward, connected to an extractor and a drummer passing through it obliquely. The rather unusually arranged sight was graduated at 750 steps.
The bolt of the Milbank-Amsler rifle.
The shutter is open.
The shutter is open. The extractor lever is clearly visible.
The original V-shaped sight.
When they started looking for a replacement, they first settled on a Peabody system with a 10.4x38 rimfire cartridge. But then it was decided to adopt the Winchester model of the 1866 model of the year, which, on tests from October 1 and 13, 1866, surpassed all competitors by a wide margin. The Commission of the Swiss Confederation for the introduction of new rifles unanimously decided that the Winchester would be adopted, and the government approved this decision. However, the Swiss public held a different point of view, and this popular opinion outweighed all the reasons of the government!
F. Wetterly rifle 1868 - 1869 Museum of Swiss Shooters in Bern.
The device of the shutter and the store of the Vetterly rifle 1869
Almost immediately, voters began to pressure the Swiss parliament to reverse the deal and adopt a different system's rifle. And the government had no choice but to adopt the rifle of Friedrich Wetterli from the famous Swiss company Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft (SIG). Moreover, the Vetterly rifle was found unfit for military service during tests in England, but it was also the best among domestic Swiss developments. I must say that Wetterly managed to please everyone with his rifle. So, he put a 12-round magazine on it (one more cartridge could have been in the barrel), for which many Swiss liked the Winchester of 1866, but connected it with a sliding bolt. In addition, he used the 10.4x38R cartridge that was used in the Peabody rifle, and was considered exemplary by many Swiss. This is how he gave out earrings to all the sisters and, as a result, achieved that his model 1869 infantry rifle was put into service: on February 27, 1868, the Swiss government placed an order for 80,000 rifles of his system.
But this is not quite an ordinary sample of a serial rifle of the 1869 model. Please note - it has two triggers! We need a second hook because this is not a rifle, but according to the terminology adopted in the Swiss army … a fitting, that is, a rifle for particularly accurate shooting. The second trigger makes the trigger very soft. Moreover, the sight has a standard notch of 1000 m. That is, the rifle is not intended for long-range shooting. It is simply intended for more accurate shooters and nothing more. The elite units of the Swiss army were armed with fittings. This sample is from 1871.
The 1869 gendarme model rifle had a differently designed shop window cover and did not have a magazine cutoff on the left.
This rifle can be easily distinguished from other Swiss rifles by the magazine window cover on the right, designed to protect it from dirt. And its other distinguishing feature is the leaf spring (mounted on the left side of the bolt box), which is a magazine cut-off. Interestingly, the rifle scope was calibrated in schritt, an obsolete Swiss unit of measurement. The maximum firing range at her sight was 1000 schritt, which was approximately 750 m. Later, already in 1870, it was calibrated in meters and set a range of 1000 m. Note that Witterley went to this design of his by its successive improvements. The first sample of his rifle, model 1867, had an under-barrel magazine, a cylindrical rotary bolt and … a hammer located behind the bolt and cocked when it was moved back. On the sample of 1869, the hammer is no longer there. It was replaced by the cocking of the drummer with a mainspring at the rear of the bolt. We can say that Wetterli was the first who managed to combine a sliding bolt with a rotary handle at the level of the trigger and a multi-shot magazine under the barrel. The barrel was screwed into a massive receiver. When the bolt moved back, the feeder lifted the cartridge from the store, threw out the spent cartridge case, already removed from the barrel by the extractor, and cocked the drummer's spring. When moving forward, the cartridge hits the barrel, the bolt turns and locks the cartridge in the barrel using two lugs. The striker, which has a fork-shaped striker at the end (the striker and striker in this rifle are two different parts!) And spring-loaded with a strong spring, hit the head of the cartridge in two places at once, since annular ignition was used in the cartridge. This decision was very reasonable, as it sharply reduced the likelihood of a misfire when fired.
The rifle used a powerful cartridge of 10, 4 mm caliber. The liner was bottle-shaped, with welt and rimfire. The bullet was cast from an alloy of lead and antimony, but in fact it was purely lead (99.5% lead, 0.5% antimony), with holes for sludge. The mass of the bullet was 20.4 g, the charge of black powder was 3.75 g. The muzzle velocity of the bullet was high enough and could reach 437 - 440 m / s.
On February 9, 1871, a carbine based on it was adopted, which had a store door (but there was no cutoff on it) and differed only in the length of the barrel, the magazine capacity (6 + 1) and the muzzle characteristic of cavalry carbines of that time. The Swiss called such carbines … blunderbuss!
The Vetterli rifle was distinguished by a very high rate of fire, and according to this indicator, it remained the fastest-firing rifle in Europe for many years. True, her weight was 4600 g - that is, somewhat more than that of rifles - analogues, but on the other hand, her quality was … Swiss!
1871 Vetterly rifle with a needle bayonet.
The 1870 cadet rifle was single-shot.
Cleaver bayonet model 1881.
