I guess that depends on whether the The Rules require you as the offended party to offer your opponent one of your pistols to use, they might get the dud or the working pistol and it still being a 50/50 bet.
Since your opponent may get the choice of which one to use, I was half expecting there was a special 'safety' on both that the uninitiated wouldn't know how to deactivate.
@@spacewater7 I assume this would by accounted for by forcing the selection, similar to card tricks. If your second presents the box with pistols in a manner that would require you to twist you wrist in odd angle to grab one, most people will automatically go for the other.
@@evan12697 The Code Duello, covering the practice of dueling states. Rule 18. The seconds load in presence of each other, unless they give their mutual honors they have charged smooth and single, which should be held sufficient. BUT Rule 20. In all cases a miss-fire is equivalent to a shot, and a snap or non-cock is to be considered as a miss-fire.
'Hey, let me have a look at that' doesn't mean 'hey, let me stick my fingers up in the bore' or anything like that. Just for the record. Like Jonathan said something like that WOULD be cause for another duel.
Some years ago the Smithsonian examined the pair of pistols used in the 1804 Hamilton-Burr duel. The pistols belonged to a friend of Hamilton's and they had a hidden set trigger. Set triggers are normally two triggers, you pull one trigger and it 'sets' the other so you have a precise 'hair' trigger for precision shooting. In this case the pair had only one trigger that were 'set' by pushing that trigger forward. If you didn't know this you had an awful trigger pull of about 12 pounds. In the duel Hamilton's shot went into the trees over Burr's head, while Burr then took steady aim and killed Hamilton. It is supposed by many that Hamilton 'set' his trigger as an advantage, but then in his nervousness discharged the gun prematurely with that hair trigger. Burr, then had all the time he needed to take steady aim and shoot Hamilton even with that atrociously heavy trigger pull. You can google that Smithsonian article on the pistols.
That isn't really hidden per se. What you've described is a single set trigger, as opposed to double set triggers. It's not an uncommon feature, even today, to see on high-accuracy target rifles. Single set triggers are generally considered slightly newer and more efficient than the double set-up.
@@dark2023-1lovesoni True enough today, but not common back then. It just puts the duel in a new light. Hamilton supporters claim he honorably "threw away" his shot and that Burr was a dirty dog. Burr supporters say the opposite. Nobody mentions the set trigger, so if Hamilton knew and Burr didn't it puts Hamilton in a very bad light.
@@kodiakkeith Good points. However, just for the sake of argument, I'd like to mention that Hamilton didn't commission the building of the pistols himself. Plus it wasn't the first time the Hamilton family had borrowed or used those specific pistols either. Hamiltons own son was killed with the same set of pistols in his fateful duel as well. Which I would personally consider a bad omen. Those guns seem to have had a taste for Hamilton family blood. Would you really WANT to use the exact same guns that had already taken the life of a close loved one?
@@dark2023-1lovesoni Yeah, but misses the point. If Hamilton knew the guns could be set for a match trigger and Burr didn't then it was 'dishonorable.' Burr wasn't liked then, and this duel further colored him as a cad throughout American history. It sounds like (and it's all supposition 200 years later) that Hamilton was the cad, and in his nervousness had the bad luck to set off the pistol prematurely.
@@kodiakkeith So I did some of my own research and found a couple of interesting things. The best one being that there are numerous claims that Hamilton's second, Nathaniel Pendleton, asked him before the duel whether he would use the "hair-spring", and Hamilton reportedly replied, "Not this time." The really interesting part though is that this seems to originate from historian Charles H. Winfield. Who wrote in-depth about the duel in his book "History of the County of Hudson, New Jersey from Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time" (Chapter 8, page 219). This book was published in 1874 though. However, the inspection and reproduction of the pistols by itallian gunsmith Walter Agnoletto on behalf of the United States Historical Society, which the Smithsonian Article talks about, was done in 1976, the US Bicentennial (the article mentions this and its also marked on the reproductions pistols). Which means knowledge of the set-trigger was apparently already known about and historically documented nearly 100 years before the Smithsonian article suggests it was first discovered. I think this damages the veracity of that article in general, but also makes Charles H. Winfield seem a lot more credible. In the end I'm not sure what the exact truth of the matter is. But there's a lot of good arguments to be made either way at this point.
One the sources I read stated that "dueling pistols" were supposed to be smooth bore and sightless. This was supposed to make "a hit" to be "divine providence/judgement", not murder. That there would be "cheats" is to be expected as REAL "honor" is extremely rare in most human societies and survival trumps all else. IMO
I have this idea, based on my observations of the British aristocracy, is that duelling is less about killing and more about a display of bravado in which you and your adversary play a sort of flintlock roulette in which both or neither of you might be wounded or killed. I imagine it's preferable to duelling with sabres
That there would be macho braggarts is also to be expected. Dares, as it were. Both parties knew exactly what they were shooting when they used the tools in this box.
Jonathan says pistols made for duelling were smooth-bore and sightless to satisfy honour. To show courage, to face lethal danger but not kill (murder) the opponent. "Taking deliberate aim in the course of a duel that was very much frowned upon. The point of a duel was not to kill. That might sound bizarre, but it was true." I assume it was lowering the pistol and immediately taking a shot.
When people bring up honor in fighting I say: He fought with honor... And now he is dead. I don't know how real this is but I heard about duels where both duelists just fired the pistol in the air. Shots fired. Duel complete.
I recall James May mentioning this in his book about fighting a duel, your second would inspect the weapon, but few people knew about the french rifling.
I like it when Jonathan talks about the wider social implications of firearms. Plenty of gun tubers can show you a weapon and go through the features, but Jonathan gives you the wider context and meaning. Great work! #history
You can expect that they are significantly more accurate at a distance over 10m. At least if the barrel has been made to a high quality, that is. That the front end of the barrel is wider than the actual bullet (to hide the rifling) does not really help the accuracy, though.
It would seem to me the best idea for a set of dueling pistols given the general protocol that the person not supplying the set picks first would be to make rifling and/or a barrel that would shoot the bullet reliabily in same very unexpected manor like one that shoots very far left or right from what one would expect. That way the owner could practice and adjust his aim whereas someone looking at the gun would assume it to be fairly straight shooting. Perhaps you could use a very thick bull barrel coupled with a relativly small caliber and then drill your bore not inline with the barrel so it would appear youre pionting the pistol straight but really you‘re off by 10-12 degrees. Youd also want to make the match as many paces as possible to really get the most out of it. Then you practice and learn the holdover and maybe even have some sights with an inconspicous method for you to properly align the bore and sights something like aligning the front post with the edge of the back sight instead of middle notch.
Fascinating. I had looked on various gunsmithing channels and reddits about home rifling, and read that fine scratches were somewhat effective. I never dreamed that there was an incentive for concealed or semi concealed rifling and that this was a "thing". Once again richer for watching one of your videos. Also overdue a repeat trip to RA Leeds.
Indeed, considering here in the States rifling is required in everything except for shotguns. It kind of makes me wonder if the opposite has ever been tried. Or how common it might be to find concealed rifling in communist countries.
@@DaHoodedBandit It isn't required for black powder weapons such as flintlock pistols, muskets, cannons, etc. but with the exception of legal shotguns rifling is required. Shotguns are also the exception to the bore limit of above a half inch being a class 3 destructive device, which is why almost nobody has a 20mm Lahti but everyone has a fifty cal. The legal definition is very important for ownership or indeed the existence of things here, and the category AOW isn't one that you can legally aquire, so smooth bore rifles and pistols are basically outlawed. As for rifling makes everything better, Taofledermaus has the answer.
Dueling was really complicated ritual with all kinds of new rules and "conventions" appearing. Like, one or both participants could miss intentionally and declare that they are now satisfied after having fired the guns, even if they did so theatrically pointing into the air to make it clear to everyone that they intended to miss. And duels with pistols were sometimes seen as "more fair" as the inaccurate pistols bring luck into the game and not just skill. Meanwhile, in a duel with swords (or knives) if one of the participants was a young athletic fella and the other was ...not... it would be clear to everyone that while the fight may be honest and fair as far as rules and tools go, one person had a clear advantage. But with smoothbore pistols, even a marksman could miss and a poor shooter could have luck on their side.
@@Asko83 One has to remember, however, that back when sword duels were really popular, people weren't bothered as much with rules, hence all this talk of hidden mail shirts, longer rapiers etc. E.g., when playwright Ben Jonson fought actor Gabriel Spenser in 1598, the latter was reportedly using a much longer sword, although to little effect.
@@Asko83 the entire affair of dueling was mostly a show and a declaration, the willingness to risk injury or death, and not the actual act of injury or death. if both side shows up to the duel, than they both shown character and minor issues are solved with little or no chance of actual injury. but if one side cowardly failed to show up, the victor was obvious. and if one or both side wanted actual fight, than it was on (and in this case, it was the seconds job to make sure it did not went too far.)
@@Asko83 Those postols have big calibers like .57" or more, have also a pretty long barrel for a pistol, and shoot heavy lead balls, and the dueling distance was usualy from 10 to 20 paces and even only 3 paces sometimes. With 1 pace being 0.75m or 30", so 7.5m to 15m, with a .57" or bigger lead ball the accuracy was not a real problem even with smooth bore.
Interesting discussion. In my own experience dueling pistols were considered "cheaters" when they were supposed to be identical, but actually weren't, with one of the guns having some sort of hidden advantage. The best known example over here on this side of the pond is the Church pistols. These are the guns that were used in the most famous duel in American History, where then-Vice President Aaron Burr killed former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (who was also one of the moving forces behind the formulation of the nation's Constitution). Hamilton fired his gun in the air; Burr shot him and killed him afterwards. About 40-50 years ago the guns (which had remained in private hands) were sent to Italy so that a master gunsmith could make exact duplicates. During that process, which involved disassembling the guns (of course) the gunsmith discovered that Hamilton's pistol had an interesting feature. They were both rifled, and had the typical heavy trigger pull of the era. However, with Hamilton's gun, you could put your trigger finger *behind* the trigger, and push forward just a bit. This turned that trigger into a *hair* trigger. The other gun, the one Burr used to kill Hamilton, didn't have this feature. Ever since this discovery, Hamilton's biographers have argued with one another about what this means. Eventually people discovered veiled references to the feature in his letters, which no one had properly interpreted before. The general consensus these days is that he knew the feature was there, but didn't use it on the day in question. One of the interesting questions then is why the guns would be lent to Hamilton (he was the one who borrowed them). The feature would obviously be considered incredibly dishonest if it were ever discovered; why lend the guns out if the feature wasn't going to be used?
I've shot set-trigger rifles in the past, and it was difficult to learn the correct finger pressure to shoot them without them going off before I was properly in aim. I had previously shot regular rifles, small-bore as well as full-bore and they had a nice safe four-pound pull which I had to unlearn with the set-trigger rifles which went as low, IIRC, as four ounces. Just knowing that his pistol had the set-trigger option wouldn't necessarily have benefited Burr unless he had time to practice with it and learn its idiosyncrasies before the duel.
What you've described is called a single set trigger, they operate exactly like that. Single set triggers aren't that rare or uncommon. I don't think I'd honestly call it a "hidden advantage". Set triggers are a well-known way to increase potential accuracy, especially in single shot guns. They're even still made for target rifles even today. The older alternative is "double set triggers" where you have 2 triggers and one lightens the other. However, double set triggers are more complex and take up twice as much space to install. More importantly, both Church pistols have single set triggers. While Burr may not have known about this feature, the pistols were in fact identical. At least they were during the duel. One was later converted to percussion cap firing for use as a sidearm during the civil war, so they aren't identical anymore now.
I always believed that in a duel, the ‘challenged’ party had first choice of the two weapons, which would make it a crap shoot if only one of the weapons was equipped with a ‘set trigger’. It makes much more sense that both weapons were ‘rigged’, but only the owner was aware of how to operate the trigger.
@@gutshotgriz3936 I heard about the Burr duel pistols having set triggers a long time back but I understood that both pistols had the set triggers. I may be wrong in that remembrance. Even if only one had the set trigger and only you are aware of that it's still a method of improving your odds. There's a 50/50 chance you get the set-trigger pistol and a 100% chance your opponent doesn't know of the set trigger if he's given that pistol so it's not a disadvantage to you. From watching a documentary reconstruction of a formal flintlock pistol duel, typically the seconds would dry-fire the hammers without powder and ball in the barrels to ensure the triggers worked properly. Myself I would have insisted on a proper dry-fire of a powder-charge and wad to ensure the hole between the frizzen pan and the chamber was not blocked but that's just me. A pair of pistols with just one of them having a set trigger would have different pulls even if the set trigger wasn't engaged and a careful second might well pick up on that difference.
I did a BUNCH of research on this as part of a debate in another post on this same video. Here's what I found. There's some interesting things about this claim. It comes primarily from an article published in the Smithsonian Magazine. Where it was claimed that this 'feature' was only just recently discovered in 1976 by a gunsmith working on producing replicas of these pistols for the US Bicentennial. I found a lot of interesting info and points. The best one being that there are numerous claims that Hamilton's second, Nathaniel Pendleton, asked him before the duel whether he would use the "hair-spring", and Hamilton reportedly replied, "Not this time." The really interesting part though is that this seems to originate from historian Charles H. Winfield. Who wrote in-depth about the duel in his book "History of the County of Hudson, New Jersey from Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time" (Chapter 8, page 219). This book was published in 1874 though. However, the inspection and reproduction of the pistols by itallian gunsmith Walter Agnoletto on behalf of the United States Historical Society, which the Smithsonian Article talks about, was done in 1976, the US Bicentennial (the article mentions this and its also marked on the reproductions pistols). Which means knowledge of the set-trigger was apparently already known about and historically documented nearly 100 years before the Smithsonian article suggests it was first discovered. I think this damages the veracity of that article in general, but also makes Charles H. Winfield seem a lot more credible. In the end I'm not sure what the exact truth of the matter is. But there's a lot of good arguments to be made either way at this point. Lastly, these pistols weren't commissioned or built by the request of Hamilton himself. They were borrowed from an in-law. Even worse, these same exact pistols were used in the famous duel that killed Hamilton's son Philip. Which I personally wouldn't want to use in a duel. Guns that have already killed a close-loved one are "bad luck" in my opinion.
As far as I know, duels where everyone would come with their own gun were not frequent. A very significant insult was required for a duel according to such rules. Basically, the opponents fired from one set of pistols, which made dueling pistols very expensive. Because it was necessary to make two identical pistols using the simplest tools
I'm glad you guys have managed to get all the sound issues fixed in the latest videos you've done. Makes it much easier to understand what's going on without cranking the volume ridiculously
I remember an exhibit in the Smithsonian in 1972 of a set of dueling pistols that they had determined were built to shoot 18 inches to the right at 20 paces thus giving the owner a huge advantage in a duel .I was under the impression that they were the Hamilton/Burr pistols, if they were, Burr must have been the most suprised man on earth that the bullet hit Hamilton.
I am confident of the origin of the pair of duelling pistols being in the common civilian horse pistol that came in pairs to be carried in a pair of holsters on your horse’s neck. The obvious candidate for a pistol duel in being a matched pair commonly to hand. Only later did they become gentlemen’s duelling devices in the fashion of the period and be specially made to cater for duelling. The early common horse pistol being made to stop a man (or horse) at very close range and act as a club thereafter and less than wieldy on foot in the hand.
Yes! I remember when my dad bought a 'build-your-own-pair-of-cavalry-pistols'-kit! Ah the fond memories! My father calling me into the garden, giving me fire-arm safety course. Then hands his 8 year old son a halfcocked, loaded, flintlock pistol and points at the neighbours fence 🤣 Gotta do something with all that surplus blackpowder, and our backyard was too small for the cannon. Well, the neighbours fence was too close... Lol we are talking 26 years ago ofcourse, when having fun was different
That wouldn't be an "origin", that's a *very* transitory stage in the evolution of pistols. They're definitely part of the same lineage, but the origin of "dueling pistols" as a distinct concept is more broadly drawn from the fact that the gentleman class in the military had access to pistols at nearly every role and position. As an example, the clublike features of such pistols, that become increasingly detailed and significant once you cross the line into dueling pistols, are actually more prominent in pistols used in the Navy than the Cavalry.
@@rvanhees89I recall 26 years ago pretty well, and I don't think anyone would be too pleased with their neighbor shooting a gun in the backyard, much at their fence, unless this was like a 2 acre rural property.
@@gamemeister27I recall 26 years ago, too. I was shooting a .30-30 in the back yard at some coyotes because my stepdad saw a good opportunity to teach me how to hit a moving target. Just because you grew up soft doesn't mean the rest of us did.
Jonathan once said the history of duels with sabres or swords was way more lethal, while the idea was not to kill. More to have the courage at the place and face the danger. Later, noble ones favoured pistols over cold steel. A thrust with a sword or a deep cut ended up with the duellist's death. I'm not the best at English, but I think it was (this intention) shown in the movie "The Duellist" by Ridley Scott. It was shown in the picture "The Deluge" as well. I would rather not spoil the finale of the sabre duel scene. This single scene shows the insane skills of two Polish actors. It does not "show" a sabre fight. It IS a fight with sabres. I highly recommend it, even if it's old-style. It's the opposite of medieval and post-medieval Japanese history of nobles' honour fencing.
After reading about the Hamilton -Barr duel I recall another duel which had strong implications on Spanish history, the duel between the Duke of Montpensier (brother in law of the deposed queen Isabel II in 1868) and the infante (member of the royal family, as he was cousin and also brother in law to the former queen) Enrique de Borbón. In this case the cheating was almost impossible or at least very difficult as the guns were bought the day before, they were kept into custody by the duel referee. The morning of the duel the guns were raffled after being both examined by the seconds (with special attention to trigger pull), they also raffled the order of shooting and the Duke started. Both failed their first shots, the Duke hit and killed the infante at his second shot. The first of the many consequences was that there were two contenders out of the pool to replace the ousted queen: one obviously because he was dead, and the other because he had killed his oponent.
I think the purpose of this rifling was more to sell the guns to customers then anything else I shoot Flintlocks, both originals and reproductions, and at the ranges that duels were shot at a smooth bore pistol accuracy for practical purposes is the same as a rifled one especially with the sights used. I do see how a rifled bore could be a marketing “ gimmick “ I think more important would be a well made pistol that points well
Yeah, at that range the accuracy difference between a well made smoothbore and a well made rifled bore would have been negligible. At the time people would have been aware of that. Maybe from a bench rest you could detect a difference, but for practical purposes it wouldn't have mattered much. There might have been other beliefs as to why the smooth was preferable. Possibly it was thought a bullet flew faster through a rifled barrel, or maybe they expected a bullet marked by rifling caused a more grievous wound. However, the difference in price between a smoothbore pistol and a French rifled pistol was likely not insignificant. Marketing gimmick does seem possible. Although I wouldn't expect the gunmaker to actually advertise that they made "cheater guns" since that would cast suspicion on their weapons when they showed up at a duel. Might even put them afoul of the law. Perhaps it's a modification added after manufacture?
@@JoeSyxpack "Taking deliberate aim in the course of a duel that was very much frowned upon. The point of a duel was not to kill. That might sound bizarre, but it was true." Jonathan Ferguson
Even if the rifling has no effect on accuracy it it might be an advantage in a duel. If you believe you have an advantage you are likely a bit less nervous and that should improve your accuracy a bit or just reduce the risk you fire too early without really aiming he gun at the target.
The classical "sea serpent" as seen on charts is likely to be the Oarfish, which in illustrations often depicted with a wonderful serpentine shape. I wonder if the attribute of dolphin like is being made incorrectly at times, as artisans and engineers were embellishing suitable shapes as being like sea serpents, not dolphins?
I thought you were going to say they had oval bore riffling. Barrel very slightly oval with a twist. The degree of the oval becomes less pronounced at the muzzle end of the barrel. You would need a micrometer to detect it. Like the "British Lancaster's patent oval bore".
From the title I was imagining a secret button on the pistols that slows the trigger if not pushed so that you and your opponent both have the same gun, but yours will always be quicker to shoot.
Speaking from second-hand experience, those I've known to buy SUVs also tend to buy them because they have a use for the extra space inside. Either they're starting a family, they are the ubiquitous "soccer mom," or they have a profession involving moving various quantities of things (think grocery delivery drivers). The "cool factor" really only serves as the final incentive but is by no means the primary deciding factor.
A book i once read describes the second probing the barrels of the pistols to check for this. Cant remember if it was a a Patrick Obrien or Bernard Cornwell novel.
Just because I didn't hear this mentioned and maybe it's obvious to people dealing with older guns aka muzzleloaders...as someone who's used to dealing with breechloaders exclusively, this rifling would definitely be hard to spot as you couldn't simply put a light at the breech end and look down through the whole barrel like we do today. Doubly hard given the lack of very powerful small lights to assist that process that didn't exist back then.
Amongst german students duelling pistols were used for about a century. Depending on the insult they were riffled or not and were shot from different distances. If both missed their shot, they would continue duelling with a saber until one was incapable of continuing. Many of those duells ended fatally or with a useless arm for at least one of them. But few of them were won by the pistol
@@F1ghteR41 that was the normal mensur, but real duells were still fought. The pistols were important, as they brought in a form of luck, so even a superior swordman had still a risk. How the duell was exactly performed, was negotiated from duell to duell. After each round they could decide that their are both had their satisfaction. They could close further the distance, up to point blank ("über das (Sack-)Tuch schießen"), where each partitians held one end of the same handkerchief with one hand diagonally and the pistol in the other. Normally only one pistol was loaded in that case. Or they switched to blades.
I remember an episode of Lovejoy featured dueling pistols that were far more devastating in terms of cheating... due to some clever trickery, the shot actually came out the back of the pistol to hit the firer.
If the results from MLAIC competition are any indication, the rifling improves accuracy some...but not enough to make a large advantage in a duel. The smoothbores will hold a comfortable 3-inch group at 25 meters with the right loads. It would come in handy for winning impromptu contests like shooting playing cards or wine glass stems.
I feel like, if you played by the rules that it had to be from the same case of pistols you could artificially make the rifled pistol look more worn so your opponent thinks he is giving you a disadvantage. Or you would probably use a loaded coin or loaded means to guarantee you get to choose first. I'm sure some dastardly gentlemen in england probably engaged in having french rifled pistols.
You're over thinking my friend. After all that fiddling about you'd still leaving it to chance , Ockham's razor and all that 🧐. Surly it would be easier to just surreptitiously load a Minié ball with rifling already on it.
Intresting in german fraternitys pistol dueling used to be the last resort of a duel. It happened really rarely but some still upkeep their dueling pistols out of tradition. But if one happened in most rulesets both parties brought their set of guns then lots where drawn on whos set was used and then on who gets which gun. So tempering with the guns was a bad idea because the chance of getting the right gun was pretty low.
As always an excellent video, one of the few channels that I check 'like' before I watch because I know that I will indeed 'like' it. I once read in a reliable journal that the Hamilton Family pistols used in the Hamilton-Burr duel, had single trigger set triggers. They were used in a number of duels that the extended family engaged in. One would presume that they did not tell the opponent, given the nature of Hamilton. Best service Burr ever did for the country.
I hate to break it to you, but from what I've heard TH-cam algorithm treats likes clicked until about five minutes into the video as null and void in terms of promotion, considering them a work of bots or people acting as such.
I am in fact the one person who does go out and buy an SUV to then go carve up some mud off-road… As well as towing and hauling people. But I am fully aware that I am not the norm lol. Awesome video, I didn’t know much about these!
"Sir, I have this really bad pair of completely normal duelling pistols. I will volunteer to use one of them, but I highly recommend that you use your own smoothbore pistol" - That advice of your duelling opponent might catch your attention.
There can also be hidden set triggers. Such as the pair of pistols that Hamilton provided for his duel with Burr (Hamilton being the challenged party selected the weapons). The suspicion being that he wanted to take an unfair advantage and wound up accidentally discharging the weapon.
That is an absolutely false claim about ANY such suspicion of Hamilton. You couldn't substantiate it, and are merely speaking out of political ill-will, which is quite pathetic.
You're over thinking my friend To much fiddling about, Ockham's razor and all that 🧐. Surly it would be easier to just surreptitiously load a Minié ball with rifling already on it.
The term I have heard,by collectors and others has always been a matched pair or brace of pistols which may be used for duels,”hidden”rifling was often a bore that was not cylindrical I.e. not round and the bore was twisted,Lancaster pistols spring to mind,officers pistols ,smooth bored but rifled and far less prone to fouling.
The interesting point about the super shallow rifling is with a light charge it would be much more accurate. In a duel, the load would be lighter than normal. In a smoothbore, a lighter load would be a bit less accurate. So, ‘scratch rifling’ would be extremely unfair.
Scratch/hair rifling is definitely fairly common on Manton dueling pistols that I have cataloged, and I've seen it on a pairs by other makers as well. Sometimes it is very very faint. Sometimes the rifling is more noticeable, but the bore is smooth for the last inch or so before the muzzle as in the case of "French rifling" that Jonathan shows here.
I thought the protocol of dueling meant that the opponent of the provider of pistols would choose which to use. In the case of swords each duelist would bring and use their own.
I have to wonder if it was a thing to buy a quality pistol, then take it to a back-alley smith to have the rifling done separately? That might explain why it sometimes looks hand-done and less accurately formed than you'd expect. PS: regarding the idea that the rifling should be at the end of the barrel for best effect - I would suggest that this has already happened. You can see at 7:40 that the inside diameter is cut larger at the muzzle, so it's effectively not having a direct effect on the projectile. Consider it as a barrel that's about 1 inch shorter than the outside measurement would suggest - you could almost think of it as the equivalent of a crude, built-in flash hider of sorts. The point is that the barrel does effectively have rifling all the way until the end...or at least, to the point where it no longer is in contact with the ball, which is the same thing on a practical level.
As always it is a pleasure to see your videos Jonathan, and worry not, little is more entertaining than the ramblings and sidetracks of someone really knowledgeable and passionate on a subject.
The notch in the hammer, to my understanding, is to vent the back back blast from the charge away from one’s face. Having fired muskets and muzzle loaders for 50 years, yes, it is an issue.
It is absolutely preferable to engage rifling as close to the chamber as possible. Roughly 80% of acceleration is in the first 20% barrel length. Rotational velocity is linear velocity times rate of rifling twist. Rotational acceleration is nearly instantaneous on rifling engagement unless a variable rifling twist rate(gain rifling) is being used. Rifling only at the muzzle is a instant hard impact to spin the bullet up to speed instead a smooth efficient acceleration of rifling at the chamber. Unless heavily deformed bullets & low barrel life with a chance of bursting was desired. No gunsmith is going to choose to rifle the muzzle only on a laminated barrel. It is sometimes done on shotgun chokes, but that is with modern steel more stable consistent powder.
Thanks for your comment. My only question here would be the following: is black powder producing the same shape of the pressure curve as modern smokeless ones? I seem to recall that it burned slower, thus acceleration would be gained slower over the course of the barrel that your 80-20 rule (observed in modern firearms) would suggest.
@@F1ghteR41 Black powder actually burns faster than smokeless powders. It is a detonation verses smokeless which is deflagration. Detonation is a unstable supersonic explosion driven by high speed pressure waves. Deflagration is a subsonic explosion under heat/pressure . Nitrocellulose(smokeless) powders contain higher energy & burn consistently for higher longer pressure curves. Think of these as solid rocket fuel in a powder form. The grains rapidly combust building pressure as a smooth impulse. While black powder is a multitude of individual detonations with pressure rapidly rising and dropping. Most of the acceleration is still near the chamber, but longer barrels are needed to harvest required energy. Also evens out the inconsistent burn time of the powder for more consistent velocity. Engraving the bullet into the rifling at lowest velocity/pressure reduces shock loading to both the barrel & the bullet. Gunsmiths didn't have access advanced science they did have to fire every gun they crafted with a proof load in Europe. Finding out what works/what does not while manually firing the firearm with a overpressure load.
And to strengthen your metaphor... Similar to dueling predating "duelling pistols", the Willys Jeep utility wagon was essentially an SUV decades before that term became popular.
Another way to get the rifling effect, without true rifling, would be to have the barrel with a hexagonal interior cross-section, then have the borders between sections spiral down the barrel.
Both parties could use the same pistols, and it would benefit the owner if he knew the aim point. Have you checked that the bores are drilled true centre, not offset? This would be a major advantage because if your opponent aimed straight down the barrel he'd miss, you knowing the aim point wouldn't.
One would expect that were the pistols unequal in their capabilities, that one would have something visibly different to the other, if only a minuscule difference. You don't want your opponent to notice from a casual glance.
Robert wogdon is another maker whose dueling pistols used concealed rifling in his pistols which was proved durring the amnesty when pistols were banned , when a pair of wogdon pistols were being destroyed the barrels were cut long ways revealing rifling in the barrels apparently
Would be difficult to do effectively with the tools of the time. Very high degree of craftmanship, and few gunsmiths would stoop to (and risk their reputations) producing such pieces.
@@edi9892 It was, but the cutting of the grooves was fairly straight forward once they were started. You would not have that if you were basically honing a helical channel in the barrel with an oblong cutter. It would be easy to produce just a lumpy mess.
@@obsidianjane4413 Charles Lancaster started offering his oval-bore rifles in the early 1850s, would you say that it was in those 30 years that tooling changed radically to allow them to be made economically?
the comment at 8:08 about rifling the end of the barrel is just not correct. Rifling is the most effective at the rear of the bore, since it is way easier to get a bullet to spin if it is engaging the rifling when it starts to accelerate, since the bullet is at its slowest in the bore when it is starting to move. If only the end of the barrel is rifled, the bullet is already moving quickly, and the rifling has a harder time to start the spin.
In America a gentlemen and his son borrowed dueling pistols that killed them years apart that had set triggers. This was only discovered after the guns were in museums. Hamilton I think. Burr killed him.
I don't think this would make loading easier, forcing the patched ball into the lands is hard even at the front of the barrel where you might use a large "ball starter" to overcome the initial resistance. In my experience I'd think moving that point further down into the barrel would make it harder to load, not easier.
@@ZazuYen I have experience too and in my experience, the 'starter' rods make this a non issue... these days. In those days, there wasn't a starter rod and I don't think they were even patching the balls. That relief, which IS present on many modern and antique muzzleloaders, makes all the difference.
Deeper into the bore the rifling may well be profound, and there's no way to detect it without doing some sort of wax-casting that shrinks enough to be withdrawn and inspected. These days we have surgical inspection devices. A wee hint there.
It's pretty easy to cheat with a pair of rifled pistols if both have their sight off by the same (known only to you) degree. In fact that probably makes you safer than a smooth bore, as your opponent more accurately sends a ball 2 feet to your left and high.
A few people in the comments here are speculating about setting up pistols to shoot a specific distance to the right or left of the point of aim. I have read an apocryphal story about some collectors test firing pairs of pistols from that era and finding that the sights on a few were set to hit three feet to one side at twenty paces. Sneaky. But as I say, an apocryphal story. But it makes more sense than even French rifling. Sights were dovetailed into the barrels and could be tapped a tiny fraction of an inch this way or that without anyone noticing. I suppose you could use a laser bore sighting device to get an idea.
A properly patched ball in a smooth bore is essentially as accurate as a rifled barrel out to 75 yards in the shooting I have done. At dueling ranges you would not notice the difference. Smooth bores get a reputation for inacuracy due to the loose fitted balls in military muskets
I agree with you, only my experience comes from fullbore shotgun slugs, and those things are plenty accurate at 30 paces. I suspect the point of hidden rifling was that you felt more secure going into a potentially very deadly situation.
Don’t wish to quash your analogy but the main reason why people bought SUVs is because they provide several benefits over standard cars. 1: they tend to be larger so can carry more people and equipment. 2: they have a better visibility for drivers being higher than usual cars. 3: Are generally easier to access and exit for people with mobility problems than standard cars. 4: finally British people love to camp so towing is a great benefit of SUVs.
The patch engaging the rifling instead of the bullet means if they pulled a bullet from the loser, there wouldn't be any evidence of the rifling, meaning the victor wouldn't immediately be found out
Use your own pistols because a gunmaker could offset the sights for a customer so that an opponent would aim dead centre but the bullet would fly high or wide. The owner of the pistols would then offset his aim to compensate and hit dead centre.
For some reason one of those joke greetings card with a cartoon on the front or a fake old photo sprang to mind: Two people dueling, the guy furthest away has a very obvious laser sight on his dueling pistol trained on the guy in the foreground, "Sir Basil suddenly realized his opponent may not be strictly adhering to the gentlemanly rules of pistol dueling."
Isn’t the protocol that the person who does not provide the pistols chooses a pistol first, so sneaky attempts at accuracy are pointless? As others have noted a simple windage error in the sights that is the same for both pistols seems a much more life-protecting option for the pistol owner.
The rifling looks to be a pretty fast twist (can't really tell), my understanding is that round ball twist rate it quite slow. I wonder how much this would enhance accuracy.
What twist rate works effectively is also dependent on how fast the ball will be traveling. Out of the short pistol barrel it's not nearly as fast as it would be from a long rifle so to get the same stabilizing spin rate the twist must be quicker.
Was half expecting the other pistol to be completely smooth bore or, worse, intentionally defective.
I guess that depends on whether the The Rules require you as the offended party to offer your opponent one of your pistols to use, they might get the dud or the working pistol and it still being a 50/50 bet.
I was expecting that when I clicked on the video, I'm kind of disappointed that it wasn't.
Since your opponent may get the choice of which one to use, I was half expecting there was a special 'safety' on both that the uninitiated wouldn't know how to deactivate.
@@spacewater7 I assume this would by accounted for by forcing the selection, similar to card tricks. If your second presents the box with pistols in a manner that would require you to twist you wrist in odd angle to grab one, most people will automatically go for the other.
@@dj1NM3 The party who issues the challenge cedes the right of weapon selection to the challenged party according to the 1777 Code Duello (The Rules)
If duelling, your Second would likely be entitled to inspect the weapons to 'satisfaction' without causing offence.
Not only entitled but expected to - mutual inspection was part of the preparation
@@evan12697 The Code Duello, covering the practice of dueling states.
Rule 18. The seconds load in presence of each other, unless they give their mutual honors they have charged smooth and single, which should be held sufficient.
BUT
Rule 20. In all cases a miss-fire is equivalent to a shot, and a snap or non-cock is to be considered as a miss-fire.
Bribe him
'Hey, let me have a look at that' doesn't mean 'hey, let me stick my fingers up in the bore' or anything like that. Just for the record. Like Jonathan said something like that WOULD be cause for another duel.
the seconds job is to load the gun therefore the second would naturally inspect the gun!!
Some years ago the Smithsonian examined the pair of pistols used in the 1804 Hamilton-Burr duel. The pistols belonged to a friend of Hamilton's and they had a hidden set trigger. Set triggers are normally two triggers, you pull one trigger and it 'sets' the other so you have a precise 'hair' trigger for precision shooting. In this case the pair had only one trigger that were 'set' by pushing that trigger forward. If you didn't know this you had an awful trigger pull of about 12 pounds. In the duel Hamilton's shot went into the trees over Burr's head, while Burr then took steady aim and killed Hamilton. It is supposed by many that Hamilton 'set' his trigger as an advantage, but then in his nervousness discharged the gun prematurely with that hair trigger. Burr, then had all the time he needed to take steady aim and shoot Hamilton even with that atrociously heavy trigger pull. You can google that Smithsonian article on the pistols.
That isn't really hidden per se. What you've described is a single set trigger, as opposed to double set triggers. It's not an uncommon feature, even today, to see on high-accuracy target rifles. Single set triggers are generally considered slightly newer and more efficient than the double set-up.
@@dark2023-1lovesoni True enough today, but not common back then. It just puts the duel in a new light. Hamilton supporters claim he honorably "threw away" his shot and that Burr was a dirty dog. Burr supporters say the opposite. Nobody mentions the set trigger, so if Hamilton knew and Burr didn't it puts Hamilton in a very bad light.
@@kodiakkeith Good points. However, just for the sake of argument, I'd like to mention that Hamilton didn't commission the building of the pistols himself. Plus it wasn't the first time the Hamilton family had borrowed or used those specific pistols either. Hamiltons own son was killed with the same set of pistols in his fateful duel as well. Which I would personally consider a bad omen. Those guns seem to have had a taste for Hamilton family blood. Would you really WANT to use the exact same guns that had already taken the life of a close loved one?
@@dark2023-1lovesoni Yeah, but misses the point. If Hamilton knew the guns could be set for a match trigger and Burr didn't then it was 'dishonorable.' Burr wasn't liked then, and this duel further colored him as a cad throughout American history. It sounds like (and it's all supposition 200 years later) that Hamilton was the cad, and in his nervousness had the bad luck to set off the pistol prematurely.
@@kodiakkeith So I did some of my own research and found a couple of interesting things. The best one being that there are numerous claims that Hamilton's second, Nathaniel Pendleton, asked him before the duel whether he would use the "hair-spring", and Hamilton reportedly replied, "Not this time."
The really interesting part though is that this seems to originate from historian Charles H. Winfield. Who wrote in-depth about the duel in his book "History of the County of Hudson, New Jersey from Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time" (Chapter 8, page 219). This book was published in 1874 though. However, the inspection and reproduction of the pistols by itallian gunsmith Walter Agnoletto on behalf of the United States Historical Society, which the Smithsonian Article talks about, was done in 1976, the US Bicentennial (the article mentions this and its also marked on the reproductions pistols).
Which means knowledge of the set-trigger was apparently already known about and historically documented nearly 100 years before the Smithsonian article suggests it was first discovered. I think this damages the veracity of that article in general, but also makes Charles H. Winfield seem a lot more credible.
In the end I'm not sure what the exact truth of the matter is. But there's a lot of good arguments to be made either way at this point.
One the sources I read stated that "dueling pistols" were supposed to be smooth bore and sightless. This was supposed to make "a hit" to be "divine providence/judgement", not murder. That there would be "cheats" is to be expected as REAL "honor" is extremely rare in most human societies and survival trumps all else. IMO
I have this idea, based on my observations of the British aristocracy, is that duelling is less about killing and more about a display of bravado in which you and your adversary play a sort of flintlock roulette in which both or neither of you might be wounded or killed. I imagine it's preferable to duelling with sabres
That there would be macho braggarts is also to be expected. Dares, as it were. Both parties knew exactly what they were shooting when they used the tools in this box.
Jonathan says pistols made for duelling were smooth-bore and sightless to satisfy honour. To show courage, to face lethal danger but not kill (murder) the opponent.
"Taking deliberate aim in the course of a duel that was very much frowned upon. The point of a duel was not to kill. That might sound bizarre, but it was true."
I assume it was lowering the pistol and immediately taking a shot.
When people bring up honor in fighting I say: He fought with honor... And now he is dead.
I don't know how real this is but I heard about duels where both duelists just fired the pistol in the air. Shots fired. Duel complete.
I recall James May mentioning this in his book about fighting a duel, your second would inspect the weapon, but few people knew about the french rifling.
The ball thought it would be a smooth ride, but then things took an unexpected turn.
Cut that out before the children start imitating you.
What a twist ending.
😂
I like it when Jonathan talks about the wider social implications of firearms. Plenty of gun tubers can show you a weapon and go through the features, but Jonathan gives you the wider context and meaning. Great work! #history
The difference between being an academically trained historian and an educated enthusiast, and exactly how studying these weapons should be treated.
Well Jonathan is an academically trained archaeologist and an educated enthusiast. @@samwise7538
Would love to see a comparison of these vs normal duelling pistols at duelling range.
Definitely a video that's begging to be made.
You can expect that they are significantly more accurate at a distance over 10m.
At least if the barrel has been made to a high quality, that is. That the front end of the barrel is wider than the actual bullet (to hide the rifling) does not really help the accuracy, though.
It would seem to me the best idea for a set of dueling pistols given the general protocol that the person not supplying the set picks first would be to make rifling and/or a barrel that would shoot the bullet reliabily in same very unexpected manor like one that shoots very far left or right from what one would expect. That way the owner could practice and adjust his aim whereas someone looking at the gun would assume it to be fairly straight shooting. Perhaps you could use a very thick bull barrel coupled with a relativly small caliber and then drill your bore not inline with the barrel so it would appear youre pionting the pistol straight but really you‘re off by 10-12 degrees. Youd also want to make the match as many paces as possible to really get the most out of it. Then you practice and learn the holdover and maybe even have some sights with an inconspicous method for you to properly align the bore and sights something like aligning the front post with the edge of the back sight instead of middle notch.
Mr. Ferguson's delivery gets better with every video I watch. By this point, he would be great in a James Bond movie as one of the Q scientists!
That needs to be a thing.
Fascinating. I had looked on various gunsmithing channels and reddits about home rifling, and read that fine scratches were somewhat effective. I never dreamed that there was an incentive for concealed or semi concealed rifling and that this was a "thing". Once again richer for watching one of your videos. Also overdue a repeat trip to RA Leeds.
Indeed, considering here in the States rifling is required in everything except for shotguns. It kind of makes me wonder if the opposite has ever been tried. Or how common it might be to find concealed rifling in communist countries.
@@spacewater7rifling isn't required by any law or regulation except for classification type of firearm. However. It sure does help.
@@DaHoodedBandit It isn't required for black powder weapons such as flintlock pistols, muskets, cannons, etc. but with the exception of legal shotguns rifling is required. Shotguns are also the exception to the bore limit of above a half inch being a class 3 destructive device, which is why almost nobody has a 20mm Lahti but everyone has a fifty cal. The legal definition is very important for ownership or indeed the existence of things here, and the category AOW isn't one that you can legally aquire, so smooth bore rifles and pistols are basically outlawed. As for rifling makes everything better, Taofledermaus has the answer.
Often enough the duelists don't intend to kill each other so the rifling insures that an aimed to miss or graze shot does as intended.
Dueling was really complicated ritual with all kinds of new rules and "conventions" appearing. Like, one or both participants could miss intentionally and declare that they are now satisfied after having fired the guns, even if they did so theatrically pointing into the air to make it clear to everyone that they intended to miss. And duels with pistols were sometimes seen as "more fair" as the inaccurate pistols bring luck into the game and not just skill. Meanwhile, in a duel with swords (or knives) if one of the participants was a young athletic fella and the other was ...not... it would be clear to everyone that while the fight may be honest and fair as far as rules and tools go, one person had a clear advantage. But with smoothbore pistols, even a marksman could miss and a poor shooter could have luck on their side.
@@Asko83 One has to remember, however, that back when sword duels were really popular, people weren't bothered as much with rules, hence all this talk of hidden mail shirts, longer rapiers etc. E.g., when playwright Ben Jonson fought actor Gabriel Spenser in 1598, the latter was reportedly using a much longer sword, although to little effect.
@@Asko83 the entire affair of dueling was mostly a show and a declaration, the willingness to risk injury or death, and not the actual act of injury or death. if both side shows up to the duel, than they both shown character and minor issues are solved with little or no chance of actual injury. but if one side cowardly failed to show up, the victor was obvious. and if one or both side wanted actual fight, than it was on (and in this case, it was the seconds job to make sure it did not went too far.)
@@Asko83
Those postols have big calibers like .57" or more, have also a pretty long barrel for a pistol, and shoot heavy lead balls, and the dueling distance was usualy from 10 to 20 paces and even only 3 paces sometimes. With 1 pace being 0.75m or 30", so 7.5m to 15m, with a .57" or bigger lead ball the accuracy was not a real problem even with smooth bore.
Interesting discussion. In my own experience dueling pistols were considered "cheaters" when they were supposed to be identical, but actually weren't, with one of the guns having some sort of hidden advantage. The best known example over here on this side of the pond is the Church pistols. These are the guns that were used in the most famous duel in American History, where then-Vice President Aaron Burr killed former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (who was also one of the moving forces behind the formulation of the nation's Constitution). Hamilton fired his gun in the air; Burr shot him and killed him afterwards. About 40-50 years ago the guns (which had remained in private hands) were sent to Italy so that a master gunsmith could make exact duplicates. During that process, which involved disassembling the guns (of course) the gunsmith discovered that Hamilton's pistol had an interesting feature. They were both rifled, and had the typical heavy trigger pull of the era. However, with Hamilton's gun, you could put your trigger finger *behind* the trigger, and push forward just a bit. This turned that trigger into a *hair* trigger. The other gun, the one Burr used to kill Hamilton, didn't have this feature. Ever since this discovery, Hamilton's biographers have argued with one another about what this means. Eventually people discovered veiled references to the feature in his letters, which no one had properly interpreted before. The general consensus these days is that he knew the feature was there, but didn't use it on the day in question. One of the interesting questions then is why the guns would be lent to Hamilton (he was the one who borrowed them). The feature would obviously be considered incredibly dishonest if it were ever discovered; why lend the guns out if the feature wasn't going to be used?
I've shot set-trigger rifles in the past, and it was difficult to learn the correct finger pressure to shoot them without them going off before I was properly in aim. I had previously shot regular rifles, small-bore as well as full-bore and they had a nice safe four-pound pull which I had to unlearn with the set-trigger rifles which went as low, IIRC, as four ounces.
Just knowing that his pistol had the set-trigger option wouldn't necessarily have benefited Burr unless he had time to practice with it and learn its idiosyncrasies before the duel.
What you've described is called a single set trigger, they operate exactly like that. Single set triggers aren't that rare or uncommon. I don't think I'd honestly call it a "hidden advantage". Set triggers are a well-known way to increase potential accuracy, especially in single shot guns. They're even still made for target rifles even today. The older alternative is "double set triggers" where you have 2 triggers and one lightens the other. However, double set triggers are more complex and take up twice as much space to install.
More importantly, both Church pistols have single set triggers. While Burr may not have known about this feature, the pistols were in fact identical. At least they were during the duel. One was later converted to percussion cap firing for use as a sidearm during the civil war, so they aren't identical anymore now.
I always believed that in a duel, the ‘challenged’ party had first choice of the two weapons, which would make it a crap shoot if only one of the weapons was equipped with a ‘set trigger’. It makes much more sense that both weapons were ‘rigged’, but only the owner was aware of how to operate the trigger.
@@gutshotgriz3936 I heard about the Burr duel pistols having set triggers a long time back but I understood that both pistols had the set triggers. I may be wrong in that remembrance. Even if only one had the set trigger and only you are aware of that it's still a method of improving your odds. There's a 50/50 chance you get the set-trigger pistol and a 100% chance your opponent doesn't know of the set trigger if he's given that pistol so it's not a disadvantage to you.
From watching a documentary reconstruction of a formal flintlock pistol duel, typically the seconds would dry-fire the hammers without powder and ball in the barrels to ensure the triggers worked properly. Myself I would have insisted on a proper dry-fire of a powder-charge and wad to ensure the hole between the frizzen pan and the chamber was not blocked but that's just me. A pair of pistols with just one of them having a set trigger would have different pulls even if the set trigger wasn't engaged and a careful second might well pick up on that difference.
I did a BUNCH of research on this as part of a debate in another post on this same video. Here's what I found.
There's some interesting things about this claim. It comes primarily from an article published in the Smithsonian Magazine. Where it was claimed that this 'feature' was only just recently discovered in 1976 by a gunsmith working on producing replicas of these pistols for the US Bicentennial.
I found a lot of interesting info and points. The best one being that there are numerous claims that Hamilton's second, Nathaniel Pendleton, asked him before the duel whether he would use the "hair-spring", and Hamilton reportedly replied, "Not this time."
The really interesting part though is that this seems to originate from historian Charles H. Winfield. Who wrote in-depth about the duel in his book "History of the County of Hudson, New Jersey from Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time" (Chapter 8, page 219). This book was published in 1874 though. However, the inspection and reproduction of the pistols by itallian gunsmith Walter Agnoletto on behalf of the United States Historical Society, which the Smithsonian Article talks about, was done in 1976, the US Bicentennial (the article mentions this and its also marked on the reproductions pistols).
Which means knowledge of the set-trigger was apparently already known about and historically documented nearly 100 years before the Smithsonian article suggests it was first discovered. I think this damages the veracity of that article in general, but also makes Charles H. Winfield seem a lot more credible.
In the end I'm not sure what the exact truth of the matter is. But there's a lot of good arguments to be made either way at this point.
Lastly, these pistols weren't commissioned or built by the request of Hamilton himself. They were borrowed from an in-law. Even worse, these same exact pistols were used in the famous duel that killed Hamilton's son Philip. Which I personally wouldn't want to use in a duel. Guns that have already killed a close-loved one are "bad luck" in my opinion.
As far as I know, duels where everyone would come with their own gun were not frequent. A very significant insult was required for a duel according to such rules. Basically, the opponents fired from one set of pistols, which made dueling pistols very expensive. Because it was necessary to make two identical pistols using the simplest tools
I'm glad you guys have managed to get all the sound issues fixed in the latest videos you've done. Makes it much easier to understand what's going on without cranking the volume ridiculously
I remember an exhibit in the Smithsonian in 1972 of a set of dueling pistols that they had determined were built to shoot 18 inches to the right at 20 paces thus giving the owner a huge advantage in a duel .I was under the impression that they were the Hamilton/Burr pistols, if they were, Burr must have been the most suprised man on earth that the bullet hit Hamilton.
So you suggest that Burr intended to miss like Hamilton did but was shocked by hitting him dead center?
@zacharyrollick6169 that is a very real possibility if the guns I saw were the actual hamilton/Burr pistols
I am confident of the origin of the pair of duelling pistols being in the common civilian horse pistol that came in pairs to be carried in a pair of holsters on your horse’s neck. The obvious candidate for a pistol duel in being a matched pair commonly to hand. Only later did they become gentlemen’s duelling devices in the fashion of the period and be specially made to cater for duelling. The early common horse pistol being made to stop a man (or horse) at very close range and act as a club thereafter and less than wieldy on foot in the hand.
Yes!
I remember when my dad bought a 'build-your-own-pair-of-cavalry-pistols'-kit!
Ah the fond memories!
My father calling me into the garden, giving me fire-arm safety course.
Then hands his 8 year old son a halfcocked, loaded, flintlock pistol and points at the neighbours fence 🤣
Gotta do something with all that surplus blackpowder, and our backyard was too small for the cannon.
Well, the neighbours fence was too close...
Lol we are talking 26 years ago ofcourse, when having fun was different
That wouldn't be an "origin", that's a *very* transitory stage in the evolution of pistols. They're definitely part of the same lineage, but the origin of "dueling pistols" as a distinct concept is more broadly drawn from the fact that the gentleman class in the military had access to pistols at nearly every role and position. As an example, the clublike features of such pistols, that become increasingly detailed and significant once you cross the line into dueling pistols, are actually more prominent in pistols used in the Navy than the Cavalry.
Indeed but the key thing about horse pistols was that they came in matched pairs.@@InvictusByz
@@rvanhees89I recall 26 years ago pretty well, and I don't think anyone would be too pleased with their neighbor shooting a gun in the backyard, much at their fence, unless this was like a 2 acre rural property.
@@gamemeister27I recall 26 years ago, too. I was shooting a .30-30 in the back yard at some coyotes because my stepdad saw a good opportunity to teach me how to hit a moving target. Just because you grew up soft doesn't mean the rest of us did.
Fascinating in the most dastardly way
"An elegant weapon for a more civilized age." 🗿
*Weeks of excruciating pain before succumbing to infection*
@@TheSundayShooter A small price to pay for settling an inconsequential dispute over a minor disagreement!
Jonathan once said the history of duels with sabres or swords was way more lethal, while the idea was not to kill. More to have the courage at the place and face the danger.
Later, noble ones favoured pistols over cold steel. A thrust with a sword or a deep cut ended up with the duellist's death.
I'm not the best at English, but I think it was (this intention) shown in the movie "The Duellist" by Ridley Scott. It was shown in the picture "The Deluge" as well. I would rather not spoil the finale of the sabre duel scene. This single scene shows the insane skills of two Polish actors. It does not "show" a sabre fight. It IS a fight with sabres. I highly recommend it, even if it's old-style.
It's the opposite of medieval and post-medieval Japanese history of nobles' honour fencing.
After reading about the Hamilton -Barr duel I recall another duel which had strong implications on Spanish history, the duel between the Duke of Montpensier (brother in law of the deposed queen Isabel II in 1868) and the infante (member of the royal family, as he was cousin and also brother in law to the former queen) Enrique de Borbón.
In this case the cheating was almost impossible or at least very difficult as the guns were bought the day before, they were kept into custody by the duel referee. The morning of the duel the guns were raffled after being both examined by the seconds (with special attention to trigger pull), they also raffled the order of shooting and the Duke started. Both failed their first shots, the Duke hit and killed the infante at his second shot.
The first of the many consequences was that there were two contenders out of the pool to replace the ousted queen: one obviously because he was dead, and the other because he had killed his oponent.
I think the purpose of this rifling was more to sell the guns to customers then anything else
I shoot Flintlocks, both originals and reproductions, and at the ranges that duels were shot at a smooth bore pistol accuracy for practical purposes is the same as a rifled one especially with the sights used.
I do see how a rifled bore could be a marketing “ gimmick “
I think more important would be a well made pistol that points well
Yeah, at that range the accuracy difference between a well made smoothbore and a well made rifled bore would have been negligible. At the time people would have been aware of that. Maybe from a bench rest you could detect a difference, but for practical purposes it wouldn't have mattered much. There might have been other beliefs as to why the smooth was preferable. Possibly it was thought a bullet flew faster through a rifled barrel, or maybe they expected a bullet marked by rifling caused a more grievous wound.
However, the difference in price between a smoothbore pistol and a French rifled pistol was likely not insignificant. Marketing gimmick does seem possible. Although I wouldn't expect the gunmaker to actually advertise that they made "cheater guns" since that would cast suspicion on their weapons when they showed up at a duel. Might even put them afoul of the law. Perhaps it's a modification added after manufacture?
@@JoeSyxpack "Taking deliberate aim in the course of a duel that was very much frowned upon. The point of a duel was not to kill. That might sound bizarre, but it was true."
Jonathan Ferguson
Even if the rifling has no effect on accuracy it it might be an advantage in a duel. If you believe you have an advantage you are likely a bit less nervous and that should improve your accuracy a bit or just reduce the risk you fire too early without really aiming he gun at the target.
The classical "sea serpent" as seen on charts is likely to be the Oarfish, which in illustrations often depicted with a wonderful serpentine shape. I wonder if the attribute of dolphin like is being made incorrectly at times, as artisans and engineers were embellishing suitable shapes as being like sea serpents, not dolphins?
Their are dolphins which are mammals and quite different dolphin fish (mahi mahi)….
I thought you were going to say they had oval bore riffling. Barrel very slightly oval with a twist. The degree of the oval becomes less pronounced at the muzzle end of the barrel. You would need a micrometer to detect it. Like the "British Lancaster's patent oval bore".
That would be impressive on these. Now you're really making the big ask on him to check for recessed oval barrels.
From the title I was imagining a secret button on the pistols that slows the trigger if not pushed so that you and your opponent both have the same gun, but yours will always be quicker to shoot.
Speaking from second-hand experience, those I've known to buy SUVs also tend to buy them because they have a use for the extra space inside. Either they're starting a family, they are the ubiquitous "soccer mom," or they have a profession involving moving various quantities of things (think grocery delivery drivers). The "cool factor" really only serves as the final incentive but is by no means the primary deciding factor.
Cool! Marlin "Micro-Groove" rifling 200 years before they claimed it! LOL Thanks for the video, Jonathan.
A book i once read describes the second probing the barrels of the pistols to check for this. Cant remember if it was a a Patrick Obrien or Bernard Cornwell novel.
Kind of like the dueling version of scuffing up a cricket ball with sandpaper
I love Jonathan, its so calming and entertaining to just listen to him talking about historical guns
Scratch rifling, being small like you say, could have possibly been worn away over generations of maintenance and cleaning.
Just because I didn't hear this mentioned and maybe it's obvious to people dealing with older guns aka muzzleloaders...as someone who's used to dealing with breechloaders exclusively, this rifling would definitely be hard to spot as you couldn't simply put a light at the breech end and look down through the whole barrel like we do today. Doubly hard given the lack of very powerful small lights to assist that process that didn't exist back then.
Especially not when the prime dueling time was meeting at dawn!
Amongst german students duelling pistols were used for about a century. Depending on the insult they were riffled or not and were shot from different distances. If both missed their shot, they would continue duelling with a saber until one was incapable of continuing. Many of those duells ended fatally or with a useless arm for at least one of them. But few of them were won by the pistol
Some say that in austria they still use them today on very very rare occasions.
I thought the German _Mensur_ was fought with blades only, and the target areas were limited so as to function as a sort of ritual scarification.
@@F1ghteR41 that was the normal mensur, but real duells were still fought. The pistols were important, as they brought in a form of luck, so even a superior swordman had still a risk. How the duell was exactly performed, was negotiated from duell to duell. After each round they could decide that their are both had their satisfaction. They could close further the distance, up to point blank ("über das (Sack-)Tuch schießen"), where each partitians held one end of the same handkerchief with one hand diagonally and the pistol in the other. Normally only one pistol was loaded in that case. Or they switched to blades.
@@ciddax754 Thanks for the clarification, I didn't know that. The handkerchief custom was apparently practiced elsewhere as well, or so I recall.
The man with the coolest job title in the world.
As always great content.
I remember an episode of Lovejoy featured dueling pistols that were far more devastating in terms of cheating... due to some clever trickery, the shot actually came out the back of the pistol to hit the firer.
I loved the series Lovejoy, I think you are referring to the episode The Judas Pair.
On the point of "Sport Utility Vehicle" generally being a "mall crawler", that has a grain of truth to it, but not all SUVs are roadbound.
If the results from MLAIC competition are any indication, the rifling improves accuracy some...but not enough to make a large advantage in a duel. The smoothbores will hold a comfortable 3-inch group at 25 meters with the right loads. It would come in handy for winning impromptu contests like shooting playing cards or wine glass stems.
I feel like, if you played by the rules that it had to be from the same case of pistols you could artificially make the rifled pistol look more worn so your opponent thinks he is giving you a disadvantage. Or you would probably use a loaded coin or loaded means to guarantee you get to choose first. I'm sure some dastardly gentlemen in england probably engaged in having french rifled pistols.
You're over thinking my friend.
After all that fiddling about you'd still leaving it to chance , Ockham's razor and all that 🧐.
Surly it would be easier to just surreptitiously load a Minié ball with rifling already on it.
Where I live while working, I went places where a competent vehicle was a definite asset, if not a must.
Intresting in german fraternitys pistol dueling used to be the last resort of a duel. It happened really rarely but some still upkeep their dueling pistols out of tradition. But if one happened in most rulesets both parties brought their set of guns then lots where drawn on whos set was used and then on who gets which gun. So tempering with the guns was a bad idea because the chance of getting the right gun was pretty low.
Still find it wierd that the royal armories is so famous when its just down the road from me and nothing much is famous this neck of the woods
As always an excellent video, one of the few channels that I check 'like' before I watch because I know that I will indeed 'like' it.
I once read in a reliable journal that the Hamilton Family pistols used in the Hamilton-Burr duel, had single trigger set triggers. They were used in a number of duels that the extended family engaged in. One would presume that they did not tell the opponent, given the nature of Hamilton.
Best service Burr ever did for the country.
I hate to break it to you, but from what I've heard TH-cam algorithm treats likes clicked until about five minutes into the video as null and void in terms of promotion, considering them a work of bots or people acting as such.
Really, I had no idea. Thanks@@F1ghteR41
I am in fact the one person who does go out and buy an SUV to then go carve up some mud off-road… As well as towing and hauling people. But I am fully aware that I am not the norm lol.
Awesome video, I didn’t know much about these!
"Sir, I have this really bad pair of completely normal duelling pistols. I will volunteer to use one of them, but I highly recommend that you use your own smoothbore pistol" - That advice of your duelling opponent might catch your attention.
come on Jonathan, haven't you heard of the infamous vampire dolphins? lol
There can also be hidden set triggers. Such as the pair of pistols that Hamilton provided for his duel with Burr (Hamilton being the challenged party selected the weapons). The suspicion being that he wanted to take an unfair advantage and wound up accidentally discharging the weapon.
That is an absolutely false claim about ANY such suspicion of Hamilton.
You couldn't substantiate it, and are merely speaking out of political ill-will, which is quite pathetic.
You're over thinking my friend
To much fiddling about, Ockham's razor and all that 🧐. Surly it would be easier to just surreptitiously load a Minié ball with rifling already on it.
The term I have heard,by collectors and others has always been a matched pair or brace of pistols which may be used for duels,”hidden”rifling was often a bore that was not cylindrical I.e. not round and the bore was twisted,Lancaster pistols spring to mind,officers pistols ,smooth bored but rifled and far less prone to fouling.
The interesting point about the super shallow rifling is with a light charge it would be much more accurate. In a duel, the load would be lighter than normal. In a smoothbore, a lighter load would be a bit less accurate. So, ‘scratch rifling’ would be extremely unfair.
Scratch/hair rifling is definitely fairly common on Manton dueling pistols that I have cataloged, and I've seen it on a pairs by other makers as well. Sometimes it is very very faint. Sometimes the rifling is more noticeable, but the bore is smooth for the last inch or so before the muzzle as in the case of "French rifling" that Jonathan shows here.
I thought the protocol of dueling meant that the opponent of the provider of pistols would choose which to use.
In the case of swords each duelist would bring and use their own.
No French Postcards on hand here, only French Rifling.
No French ticklers either.
Or French letters, to protect against the French pox.
I have to wonder if it was a thing to buy a quality pistol, then take it to a back-alley smith to have the rifling done separately? That might explain why it sometimes looks hand-done and less accurately formed than you'd expect.
PS: regarding the idea that the rifling should be at the end of the barrel for best effect - I would suggest that this has already happened. You can see at 7:40 that the inside diameter is cut larger at the muzzle, so it's effectively not having a direct effect on the projectile. Consider it as a barrel that's about 1 inch shorter than the outside measurement would suggest - you could almost think of it as the equivalent of a crude, built-in flash hider of sorts. The point is that the barrel does effectively have rifling all the way until the end...or at least, to the point where it no longer is in contact with the ball, which is the same thing on a practical level.
Jonathan - ''Inept or clever trick''
Me - ''Well, that would be a very clever trick of course''
Tho owner was a little old lady who only used it for dueling in the church every sunday.
10:29: “…not seen too many vampire dolphins, um, in the ocean.” A very odd moment to drop back in, if your mind has wandered.
As always it is a pleasure to see your videos Jonathan, and worry not, little is more entertaining than the ramblings and sidetracks of someone really knowledgeable and passionate on a subject.
Interesting. I had thought that the 'code' would insist that both weapons be identical in all respects: hence the matched pairs...
0:12 some of us like suspicious boxes on the table, at least it's better than the buried ones, ya don't need a shovel.
The notch in the hammer, to my understanding, is to vent the back back blast from the charge away from one’s face. Having fired muskets and muzzle loaders for 50 years, yes, it is an issue.
Never knew of this as a Thing!
It is absolutely preferable to engage rifling as close to the chamber as possible. Roughly 80% of acceleration is in the first 20% barrel length. Rotational velocity is linear velocity times rate of rifling twist. Rotational acceleration is nearly instantaneous on rifling engagement unless a variable rifling twist rate(gain rifling) is being used. Rifling only at the muzzle is a instant hard impact to spin the bullet up to speed instead a smooth efficient acceleration of rifling at the chamber. Unless heavily deformed bullets & low barrel life with a chance of bursting was desired. No gunsmith is going to choose to rifle the muzzle only on a laminated barrel. It is sometimes done on shotgun chokes, but that is with modern steel more stable consistent powder.
Thanks for your comment. My only question here would be the following: is black powder producing the same shape of the pressure curve as modern smokeless ones? I seem to recall that it burned slower, thus acceleration would be gained slower over the course of the barrel that your 80-20 rule (observed in modern firearms) would suggest.
@@F1ghteR41 Black powder actually burns faster than smokeless powders. It is a detonation verses smokeless which is deflagration. Detonation is a unstable supersonic explosion driven by high speed pressure waves. Deflagration is a subsonic explosion under heat/pressure . Nitrocellulose(smokeless) powders contain higher energy & burn consistently for higher longer pressure curves. Think of these as solid rocket fuel in a powder form. The grains rapidly combust building pressure as a smooth impulse. While black powder is a multitude of individual detonations with pressure rapidly rising and dropping. Most of the acceleration is still near the chamber, but longer barrels are needed to harvest required energy. Also evens out the inconsistent burn time of the powder for more consistent velocity. Engraving the bullet into the rifling at lowest velocity/pressure reduces shock loading to both the barrel & the bullet. Gunsmiths didn't have access advanced science they did have to fire every gun they crafted with a proof load in Europe. Finding out what works/what does not while manually firing the firearm with a overpressure load.
And to strengthen your metaphor... Similar to dueling predating "duelling pistols", the Willys Jeep utility wagon was essentially an SUV decades before that term became popular.
Another way to get the rifling effect, without true rifling, would be to have the barrel with a hexagonal interior cross-section, then have the borders between sections spiral down the barrel.
Both parties could use the same pistols, and it would benefit the owner if he knew the aim point. Have you checked that the bores are drilled true centre, not offset? This would be a major advantage because if your opponent aimed straight down the barrel he'd miss, you knowing the aim point wouldn't.
If I was going to cheat, I would want pistols that shot well off the point of aim. I would know to aim, say, 4 feet left, my opponent would not.
All those beautiful EM2's in the background goddamn
One would expect that were the pistols unequal in their capabilities, that one would have something visibly different to the other, if only a minuscule difference.
You don't want your opponent to notice from a casual glance.
Robert wogdon is another maker whose dueling pistols used concealed rifling in his pistols which was proved durring the amnesty
when pistols were banned , when a pair of wogdon pistols were being destroyed the barrels were cut long ways revealing rifling in the barrels apparently
I expected an elliptical barrel that spirals. This should produce spin, be hard to see, but deforms the bullets a little.
Would be difficult to do effectively with the tools of the time. Very high degree of craftmanship, and few gunsmiths would stoop to (and risk their reputations) producing such pieces.
@@obsidianjane4413 I thought that rifling in general was a difficult process back then.
@@edi9892 It was, but the cutting of the grooves was fairly straight forward once they were started. You would not have that if you were basically honing a helical channel in the barrel with an oblong cutter. It would be easy to produce just a lumpy mess.
@@obsidianjane4413 Charles Lancaster started offering his oval-bore rifles in the early 1850s, would you say that it was in those 30 years that tooling changed radically to allow them to be made economically?
I have heard it said that some flint lock duelers had a very slight curve in the barrel that would induce a spin and thus improve accuracy.
You should run a inspection camera down the Barrel so we can see the rifling all the way down to see what your describing. Interesting video though.
the comment at 8:08 about rifling the end of the barrel is just not correct. Rifling is the most effective at the rear of the bore, since it is way easier to get a bullet to spin if it is engaging the rifling when it starts to accelerate, since the bullet is at its slowest in the bore when it is starting to move. If only the end of the barrel is rifled, the bullet is already moving quickly, and the rifling has a harder time to start the spin.
I had a pair of Nocks. Lovely things, was somewhat impecunious, had to sell.
They were rifled target pistols, looked like very modern target pistols.
In America a gentlemen and his son borrowed dueling pistols that killed them years apart that had set triggers. This was only discovered after the guns were in museums. Hamilton I think. Burr killed him.
That rifling really IS like garage-rifling, wow.
We should use the term “French-XXXXX” for many things.
“French compliments”
And “French tipping” and so on. :)
In 'Lovejoy' we were treated with an antique cheating dueling pistol pair where the other pistol fired backwards 😂
"The Judas Pair"
Any observer would spot the cheat. While their are other ways to cheat.
Hmmm, isn't the rifling relieved in front to make loading easier? I'd think that 'hidden' rifling would be a really stupid idea.
I don't think this would make loading easier, forcing the patched ball into the lands is hard even at the front of the barrel where you might use a large "ball starter" to overcome the initial resistance. In my experience I'd think moving that point further down into the barrel would make it harder to load, not easier.
@@ZazuYen I have experience too and in my experience, the 'starter' rods make this a non issue... these days. In those days, there wasn't a starter rod and I don't think they were even patching the balls. That relief, which IS present on many modern and antique muzzleloaders, makes all the difference.
Deeper into the bore the rifling may well be profound, and there's no way to detect it without doing some sort of wax-casting that shrinks enough to be withdrawn and inspected. These days we have surgical inspection devices. A wee hint there.
Mortimer is a name associated with accuracy for the connoisseur including fine rifles for the Creedmore match.
Hamilton taught me that one should never bring a Wogdon to a Wogdon fight.
"Vampire dolphins" needs to be a thing.
1880? Give me a Merwin Hulbert.
It's pretty easy to cheat with a pair of rifled pistols if both have their sight off by the same (known only to you) degree. In fact that probably makes you safer than a smooth bore, as your opponent more accurately sends a ball 2 feet to your left and high.
Fascinating stuff! I always love learning more about all these various old school firearms. Thanks Jonathan
A few people in the comments here are speculating about setting up pistols to shoot a specific distance to the right or left of the point of aim. I have read an apocryphal story about some collectors test firing pairs of pistols from that era and finding that the sights on a few were set to hit three feet to one side at twenty paces. Sneaky. But as I say, an apocryphal story.
But it makes more sense than even French rifling. Sights were dovetailed into the barrels and could be tapped a tiny fraction of an inch this way or that without anyone noticing.
I suppose you could use a laser bore sighting device to get an idea.
A properly patched ball in a smooth bore is essentially as accurate as a rifled barrel out to 75 yards in the shooting I have done.
At dueling ranges you would not notice the difference.
Smooth bores get a reputation for inacuracy due to the loose fitted balls in military muskets
I agree with you, only my experience comes from fullbore shotgun slugs, and those things are plenty accurate at 30 paces. I suspect the point of hidden rifling was that you felt more secure going into a potentially very deadly situation.
Don’t wish to quash your analogy but the main reason why people bought SUVs is because they provide several benefits over standard cars.
1: they tend to be larger so can carry more people and equipment.
2: they have a better visibility for drivers being higher than usual cars.
3: Are generally easier to access and exit for people with mobility problems than standard cars.
4: finally British people love to camp so towing is a great benefit of SUVs.
I may have accidentally recreated scratch rifling in a project, but for 9x19.
your description of French Rifling is right on the letter
The patch engaging the rifling instead of the bullet means if they pulled a bullet from the loser, there wouldn't be any evidence of the rifling, meaning the victor wouldn't immediately be found out
Use your own pistols because a gunmaker could offset the sights for a customer so that an opponent would aim dead centre but the bullet would fly high or wide. The owner of the pistols would then offset his aim to compensate and hit dead centre.
For some reason one of those joke greetings card with a cartoon on the front or a fake old photo sprang to mind: Two people dueling, the guy furthest away has a very obvious laser sight on his dueling pistol trained on the guy in the foreground, "Sir Basil suddenly realized his opponent may not be strictly adhering to the gentlemanly rules of pistol dueling."
You can’t just say “vampire dolphins” and then refuse to elaborate.
Isn’t the protocol that the person who does not provide the pistols chooses a pistol first, so sneaky attempts at accuracy are pointless? As others have noted a simple windage error in the sights that is the same for both pistols seems a much more life-protecting option for the pistol owner.
Thing I've always wondered is why especially back in the day they didn't just... rifle the bullets?
Love these videos! It’s great to learn about guns and not feel like you’re being sold them as well.
It makes sense that the scratch pistols are rare, that feature would be hard to preserve both mechanically, and socially
The rifling looks to be a pretty fast twist (can't really tell), my understanding is that round ball twist rate it quite slow. I wonder how much this would enhance accuracy.
What twist rate works effectively is also dependent on how fast the ball will be traveling. Out of the short pistol barrel it's not nearly as fast as it would be from a long rifle so to get the same stabilizing spin rate the twist must be quicker.
I'm concerned by his word choice that he may have seen a number of vampire dolphins NOT in the ocean, which is much more concerning.