英國皇家軍械博物館 英國皇家軍械博物館 柯爾特轉輪手槍的競爭對手？哈蒙德手槍（藏品展示）

Hello everyone, Jonathan here. Once more, another relatively scarce weapon to show you. I say relatively scarce because if you have a hunt around on the internet, you will come across these things. Ian's got a video on these. I was intrigued enough by them to have another look and hopefully there are a few details that we can add. Even if I can't add much to your understanding of the Hammond Patent Pistol, if you stop rambling and tell you what it is, we have a really lovely one to show you here on my left. We have two of this pattern. The one on my right I'm going to show you the mechanism with. I think it's a little bit, well, probably a bit worn out. So it's easier to operate one-handed, which is a feature of this. So, Henry B. Hammond is the patent holder here. There are actually two patents that apply. We'll throw those up for you in the course of the video. The first is actually 1864, October if I remember rightly. And is for the Pivoting Breach. So without further ado, let me demonstrate what we mean by that. Well, I should firstly show you, let me show you the nice one first. Really, really lovely little pistols. The plain one on my right is, well, not decorated. Would have once had this beautiful colour case hardened frame, like this one. But this one has a lot of decoration. So foliate engraving, sort of Belgian style really on the action and on the barrel. Nice little double line engraving around the Pivoting Breach that I keep talking about and haven't shown you yet. Just really nice thing. All the grips are gutter percher, which is a type of rubber, hard rubber. Looks like a polymer, isn't. We first have to bring the hammer to half cock. Can bring it to full. But I guess for safety reasons, you would want it on half. The advantage to pulling it to full is the one-handed operation that I spoke about. But nonetheless, you can then press the catch on the top, which is also your rear sight. And the breach block swivels to the left. Really slick. It is a term I learned from a recent CN Arsenal video, biased. Well, I know the word. But in this context, a mechanical component that has a spring set up in a bias to either be in this position or to be in this position. Which functionally means that it wants to be opened and closed, if that makes sense. It's very, very slick. I'll just show you that. Let me show you that on this one. I'm loath to operate this one too much. This one's a little bit more worn. So, with the hammer, let's pretend unsafe and no cartridge is involved. And take it to full cock, because that means you can get your thumb right across the top of the gun. And make sure I'm not cheating here. Flick the breach block to the left with your thumb. Take your cartridge in your left hand. This is, of course, a single-shot breach loader. Shove in the cartridge and then, with the same firing hand thumb, swing the breach block shut. And as you put it on full, you can immediately... I'll just gently let that down. You can immediately fire that off. So it's cock, flick, load, flick, fire. Really very slick. I'm really impressed with the Hammond, as you can tell, probably. I mentioned the rear sight. We'll just close this up on the nice one. And try to show you what I mean by that. So there's a blade, probably a German silver, form of copper alloy on the front here. Quite thin, so potentially quite precise for a small handgun. And then a groove in the breach block locking catch for the rear sight. Which, as you've probably spotted, is heavily checkered. Or actually knurled, I think, for that purchase with the thumb over the top of the gun. Now, obviously, if you wanted to load it the other way, you could do. There's no fixed manual of arms for this. So you can just use your support hand to flick it open. And maybe have a cartridge in your palm or something. But it's just far, far easier to do it in the one-handed method that I've just shown you. Now, I mentioned two patents earlier. The second one only appears in 1867. And it pertains to the extractor. Now, the sharp-eyed amongst you when I was operating these would have seen an extractor dookie popping out to pull out your cartridge, of course, from the breach. So this, I'll just pop this one gently open because the extractor on the other one doesn't work. And hopefully you can see how it pops. Or a bit like a shotgun extractor. Just enough for you to reach in and pull out the case. So I guess that would slow down your reload time. But with a lot of manually operated extractors of this period, give it enough welly, as we say over here, and it might just propel the case out of the breach. But it very much depends how much the case has expanded, how much black powder fouling you have. We're still using black powder cartridge at this time. So it isn't an ejector. It is an extractor. And we can see from the lack of damage to this lovely finish here that this has barely even been loaded and unloaded. Much less shot very much. There are patches of blue that have gone. But it's really in wonderful condition. So the significance of that. It's a camming mechanism, essentially. Have a look at the patent. We'll show you that. 1867. So the important features of the design only come together in 1867. So I don't think these can have been made until 1867. That's my assessment. I could be wrong. A number of sources say 1864, 1865 was when these start production. And I've seen a figure of 7,800 or 8,000 guns produced in total. I haven't really been able to verify that. But even if they were only in production from 67 to 68, which is when most people say that the Connecticut Arms Manufacturing Company, which is what was set up in 1865 to make these, is when most people say that it was shuttered due to debt, bankruptcy. Now I've said 1868 there for this bankruptcy. I did a bit of desktop digging on the Internet. And I did find a strong suggestion that the company did not go bankrupt until 1869. Of course, we don't know when the trouble kicks in. Some companies were able to keep producing whatever it is they produced. Until the very moment of bankruptcy, some are going to struggle and stop producing before they are actually declared bankrupt. So these may have ceased production in 68 or 69. So a short-lived company. So this was in a Now book. Please forgive my pronunciation if that's incorrect. I suspect that's an indigenous American term. This is in near Hartford, Connecticut. Famous Hartford, Connecticut. Where Colt was based, of course. A bit of a rival for this kind of product. So the company was set up in 1865. I believe shuts up shop in 1868, as far as I can tell. That's not many years of manufacturing. I believe in 65, they were setting up and hoping to sell muskets, rifle muskets, to the Union forces. So Connecticut, Rhode Island, that part of the country, very much on the Union side of things, of course. So they were hoping to get this big government contract. That didn't pan out. I believe there was hope that this pivoting breach block mechanism would have been applicable. Well, it was applicable, but would have been taken up by the armed forces for something more lucrative contract-wise than backup guns, essentially. So in terms of effectiveness, I hope I've demonstrated that for the period, this is a very effective little handgun. You're looking at, caliber-wise, 44 rimfire. Either the full-size 44 Henry, which would have been potentially quite a handful, I think, with this. Or a shortened case version of that that was proprietary, sort of, to the Connecticut Arms Manufacturing Company. And they are in other calibers as well. I think 32. I believe I've seen a .50 caliber. Now, of course, .50 caliber does not mean anything on the order of even the modern Desert Eagle. It means the bullet is .5 of an inch in diameter. The powder charge would have been way less. But ballistically, for a pocket pistol, this thing is a bit of a powerhouse, I think. It's only designed for close range, card table distances, as it were. So even the short cartridge is going to have enough oomph to do some serious damage. With handguns, pistols, it's all about the diameter of the bullet. I suspect people might comment otherwise, but that's the forensic science of it. Now, that's my assessment of the effectiveness of something like this, of this thing in particular. Now, Hammond, or his sales department, maybe it was his brother that was running that, I really don't know, wrote an extremely enthusiastic sales pitch for this thing. If you have a look online, you'll see one of these lovely Victorian advertisement bill-type documents that has a drawing of the gun and a really wordy explanation of why you should buy this because it's the best thing ever. Let me read you that. I think you'll find that entertaining. This pistol possesses more strength, fires a larger ball, and is calculated to do more execution within ordinary pistol range than any pocket pistol in the world. That's not it. Many cases have occurred where men have been killed who depended on the protection of the small charges that are fired from revolvers and the many other kinds of pocket pistols which are being constantly sold. But one shot from this pistol is sufficient to paralyse and destroy the most dangerous man or beast. It's still not finished. Many pistols are so constructed that the barrel is confined to the frame by only a small screw or pin. You can guess to which form of pistol he is referring there. Which in firing supports the whole force of the charge and such pistols are scarcely safe to use even with the small charges they employ. But in this pistol, the barrel and frame are securely united and the solid recoil block is so applied that this pistol has in these important parts sufficient strength for a musket. They finish with many competent judges have pronounced this to be the simplest, safest and best pocket pistol ever offered to the public. I think that has to be the most over-the-top sales pitch I have ever read for any firearm. Ever. Now, some very pointed jabs there at Colt in particular. Small caliber. I think he's alluding to the any of the Colt pocket pistols are going to be relatively small caliber compared to .44. So that's sort of fair enough. And then he's talking about the open-top wedge wedged-in-place barrel assembly on the Colt, which is OK from a 21st century perspective. Not as good as a solid frame or perhaps a hinge frame, even. Revolver. But for the black powder charges of the day, small as they are, Mr. Hammond, more than good enough. And of course, the Colt design, widely, widely made and sold, and indeed copied. So not to say that the Hammond isn't great, but he probably should have dialed that back a bit there. It didn't seem to quite land the gun the reputation that we hoped for. Now, often we know very little about designers, inventors and the people involved with these historic objects, which, of course, we as a museum are very interested in, and I suspect you are too. Partly that's because we may not have time to go down the rabbit hole and go to actual physical archives, especially in America, to go and check this stuff out. Sometimes it's because they're just lost to history, and we don't know very much about them. We do know that Henry Hammond was based in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1864, when he first patented this design, and that by 1867, for the second patent, he had moved to Nabuck, Connecticut, where his new company and facility had been constructed. He moved into an existing factory, from what I understand. I did also spot a Henry B. Hammond, who enlisted in the 1st Rhode Island Cavalry in December 1861. So I can be reasonably sure, I think, that that's the same guy. Like most men of fighting age, he ends up involved in the American Civil War. Now, by April 1863, he is a second lieutenant, and the comment in this document is not mustered. So my assumption then, it is an assumption, is that perhaps he's injured, and perhaps he has other circumstances that mean he's not been mustered back into his unit.We must have seen some action, I think, in 1861, 1862. But by 1863, he's not on the front line, as it were. And by 1864, he's got a patent for this thing. So maybe he had special leave to go away and work on a firearm that might prove to be of benefit to the Union forces. Getting a bit speculative there, but it's nice to try to pull together some threads on the people behind this thing. Now, as well as different calibers, different cartridge types, there were versions apparently with 12-inch target barrels on them, which is kind of weird, but, you know, okay. And a version with a shoulder stock, which, given Hammond's military service, sort of makes a bit of sense. But a lot of these products, they're throwing everything on the wall to see what sticks and what customers might buy. And a longer barrel and an option of shoulder stock are not bank-breaking activities, potentially, to diversify your product range, essentially. You will often come across this called the Hammond Bulldog. I am a huge fan of etymology and naming of things, as some of you probably know by now. And so I had a bit of a dive into this. Bulldog, we need to remember or realize, was a generic term for essentially a derringer. And among other things you could call this, it's also a derringer. So I think a generic synonym for this term derringer. So this was a type of small single-shot pistol popularized by Henry Derringer. Spelling varies between one and two R's. His name was One-R. Usually the gun, in my experience, gets the double R. So partly the reason I bring that up isn't just that they fit into that generic category. It's that President Garfield was assassinated by a muzzle-loading percussion equivalent of something like this. And that was referred to as a bulldog at that time. So it isn't just the famous Webley bulldog, which is a pocket revolver. Very popular in the Old West, incidentally. And it isn't just the Hammond bulldog. Bulldog was a generic term. Apparently some of these were marked bulldozer. I think it's hyphened. So I think the company were aware that these were going to be called bulldog or were being called bulldogs already when the early sales were made, I'm not sure which. And so some of them were marked bulldozer. But none of them are marked bulldog. But I think that's because this is just a generic term for a pocket pistol. OK, that's the guns out of the way. Thank you very much for watching, as always. We have our usual social media channels to check out our three museum sites. Hopefully you know all that by now. What's in front of me here is a little bit of a moonlight for me, I suppose. But I have in my time been an edge weapons person as well. Edge weapons people amongst you will recognize this as probably an oak shot type 14. It's a 13th century design, very broad but quite thin blade. I've always liked them. And this is actually from our new range of reproduction swords from our own collection, which is really exciting. So we've worked with Windlass the sword company and with Matt Easton over at Scholar Gladiatoria, hi Matt, to produce a range of, I believe, half a dozen really nice replicas or reproductions, if you will, from our collection. So this is a reproduction of class 9 2141 found in a peat bog and it's really very good, I think. And I hope you think too. So quite a broad range over a sort of medieval period in this range of swords. Go and check them out on our shop website. One little detail on this you might like to see. So on the blade is a sort of motto or inscription TOTO. It's on both sides twice. And on the original, that's a little bit indistinct. We're not quite sure if it's IOTO or TOTO. I'm not enough of an expert on swords to tell you what that might mean. Answers in the comments or from my colleagues when they see this and roll their eyes at me. So check out that range. I'm quite excited about it and I'll have to try very hard to resist to not get one for myself.