1789 Girardoni Air Rifle: A Generation Ahead of Its Time

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at a particularly awesome piece of very old firearms technology. This is an original Giardone air rifle. So, actually, it's not a firearm at all, it's an air rifle dating to the 1780s. And what you get with this is 20 shots, not quite semi-automatically, but very rapid fire. And this was a revolutionary advance in military technology in the 1780s. When it was developed, it was actually put into production. It was adopted and used by the Austro-Hungarian army. Ah, I'm sorry guys. I recorded this entire video just with World War I on the brain, and kept saying Austria-Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, etc. It was just Austria. It's the Austrian army, the Austrian Empire, Austria-Hungary didn't exist for like a hundred years after this. So, you'll hear me say that through the rest of the video, and I apologise. And yet, it had no real lasting impact on military technology, which is really interesting. And we're going to talk about that story today, why it didn't have an impact, how it could have perhaps, and what the truth behind the Giardone is. There are two places, I think, there are two things that people know about these, if you're familiar with the Giardone. One is that Lewis and Clark took one of these on their expedition to the Pacific coast in the United States. And that's very true, they did. And for good reason. Like instead of, you can't run out of propellant for an air gun as long as you have your air tank pump with you. Unlike regular firearms, where if you run out of powder, well, the gun doesn't work anymore. So, Lewis and Clark's Giardone has actually been, not recovered, but it's been discovered, it's known, it's provenanced, and it's a really cool piece of firearms history. Well, or not firearms history. The other thing I think people will probably say is that, ah, Napoleon threatened to execute any soldier caught with one of these. And that is a totally apocryphal story that almost certainly never happened, because Napoleon never had any of his troops in front of one of these. All right, let's get into the actual design history here. This was invented by a guy named Bartolomeo Giardone. He was born in South Tyrol in 1744, and came into the profession of watchmaking, which really makes sense. If you're going to be making a super high-tech, essentially, gun, in the latter half of the 1700s, watchmaker is going to be a pretty good occupation to start with. And he came up with this concept of a repeating, breech-loaded system, and actually applied it to both air rifles and flintlocks. Developed both systems. The air rifle actually is the far more effective of the two, but both of them actually went into production. He presented these to the Austro-Hungarian military. Tyrol, of course, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. And the then-Emperor Joseph was very interested in these, actually took a personal interest in them, and decided to purchase ... initially 500 of the air guns and 1,000 of the flintlocks. There was some discussion back and forth, setting up terms and such. And in 1789 they went ahead and set up a workshop in Vienna. Giardone and a couple of his family members came in, they hired a couple of people, and started building guns. But it was going to take a little while. By the time between 1780 and 1784 they managed to produce a grand total of 274 air guns and 111 flintlocks, over the course of four or five years. This obviously is not really going to work for the military. If they're going to use this as the super-duper new high-tech weapon, they're at least going to need to have a bunch of them. And so in 1784 a decision is made to basically shelve the flintlock system. ... I don't have any pictures, I don't have any history on the flintlock design itself, but I believe it was probably pretty similar to this in terms of loading, but then required you to prime the pan and re-cock the action for each shot. And because black powder firearms leave a ton of residue and debris behind, it seems like the flintlock was not nearly as useful of a repeating weapon as the air gun was. So 1784, not a big surprise, they decided to curtail the flintlocks, we're going to focus just on the air guns. And between 1785 and 1787 they managed to produce about 700 more of them. So finally we're getting to, like, potentially usable real numbers of guns here for a full-on military unit. There's almost a thousand of them that have been produced by this point, and this is the point where the Austro-Hungarian Empire goes to war with the Ottoman Empire, and they decide to actually issue and use some of these guns. Specifically they decide to issue out 200 of the guns, but they want them issued with spare air ... reservoirs, air tanks. We'll get to the technical side of this in just a moment, but the problem is Giordani's been building these guns as fast as he can. The air tanks are a huge logistical choke point for manufacture, and each gun's only been made with one of those air reservoirs. So in order to deploy 200 of them to combat, they end up pulling almost all of the manufactured air tanks off of all the other guns, so that they can issue these out with three tanks for each gun, for each soldier. In fact, in total these are issued out to Austrian troops with three air tanks, four speed loaders, plus 20 ball already in the gun. This has a 20 round capacity to it, so a total of 100 projectiles, three magazines, I suppose you'd call them, three air reservoirs, a hand pump so that they can refill their air reservoirs, and all of this packed into a nice little, cool, compact, purpose-built pouch. And with that, troops go off to war. Now we'll talk about how they were used, and why they didn't become more of a military thing in a moment, but first let's take a closer look. Let me show you how this works, and why it really was such a revolutionary weapon at the time. All right, what we have here fundamentally is a 46 caliber air gun that is not semi-automatic, but is pretty darn close to it. So we have a magazine tube here on the side of the action. There's a little doorway that opens up here at the front. You load that hollow tube with 20 round ball projectiles. They do have to be round balls because you can't really ensure that a shaped bullet's going to set in the tube in the right orientation, and it has to fit into this sort of transfer block. In order to load it, you tilt the gun up so that the balls will roll down in this tube. You then push this bar all the way over. There is a hole in ... this bar right here. You can actually see the back end of it right there. That back end is small enough that the ball can't roll all the way through, but it's open so that air, compressed air, can go through to push the thing out the barrel. Once I let go of this, and it's pressurized by just this flat spring right here on the side, once I let go of it, the one ball is now held right here behind the barrel. These are rifled, by the way. A round ball, by the way, at .46 calibre is going to be approximately 154 grains in weight. Once we're in this position, we would then cock the hammer, pull the trigger, and that is going to release a ... measured out amount of pressurized air from the buttstock, which is the air tank. So I can unscrew the air tank here. As I said, it doubles as the buttstock of the gun, which is kind of clever. There we go. So there's our air tank. We have a leather valve on the inside there. Alright, so when I fire this, we're going to cock the hammer. There is no flint or anything. This hammer system is here so that it is recognizable and easily understood by troops who are, of course, used to flintlock firearms. But when I pull the trigger, instead of striking a flint, it pushes out this rod, which is going to push in the valve in the air tank and release air. And then this, once a certain amount of air has gone through, the sear mechanism releases this, so it gets pushed back in and cuts off the airflow out of the tank. Really intricate timing in this. This ... seems like a very simple sort of system, but it is the manufacturing tolerances on this whole series of components are really what make the Giordani such an exceptionally difficult and expensive and complicated weapon to make in the 1790s. Well, 1780s and 1790s. So the air tank here, let's take a look at this. This is manufactured out of two pieces of iron. There's no steel. This is the late 1700s, so everything is being done out of iron. There's one piece of sheet iron that is rolled over and then essentially forged welded together here at a seam. And then the back end is half, basically, half of an iron sphere. And this sheet iron is crimped over around the edge of it there. This was probably the most difficult element of the gun for Giordani to manufacture. And these were pressurised ... it's hard to say exactly. We know they were pressurised to at least 800 psi because the civilian versions of the Giordani that came immediately afterward are 800 psi. And ... they tend to be recognised as lower pressure guns than the actual Austrian military ones. So minimum 800 psi. The hand pump that came with this for you to be able to refill it is capable of generating up to about 1,300 psi. So somewhere between 800 and 1,300 psi in this 1700s iron flask. So at the later point of production, which we'll talk about in a minute, when Giordani was under pressure to make as many magazine flasks, tubes, air tanks as possible, as quickly as possible, he was able to scale up production to about 100 per week. But 30% of those failed on testing. And it was extremely important to do the testing on this because the worst outcome is for a soldier to go try and crank up his pump pressure back into his tank, have it explode, and kill him right there on the battlefield. Like if your weapon kills your own guys, it's not worth issuing it out, you know. So this is the pump that was used. It's two parts. We have basically a foot pad here. So you would actually stand on this. And this also, by the way, has a screwdriver tip on it. So it's also a utilitarian tool for any work you need to do on the gun. But this you stand on. This is your actual pressure pump. So it comes in, this whole thing comes out, and then pressurizes in. We have a valve up here at this end. And what you would do is just screw this into the end of the air tank. Then the ball end fits into this little depression down here, like so. You stand on this and you literally just pull the tank on its ... stock up, and then push it down with body weight. And if you weigh about 150 pounds, say that's probably about typical for an Austrian soldier in the 1780s, your body weight is enough to get you up to about 1,300 psi coming out of this hand pump. It takes you a well-documented 1,500 pumps to fill up the tank to its full working pressure. So that is a lot of time and a lot of work to pressurize this tank. Once you have that, it will allow you to fire a full 20 round magazine from the gun with an effective range for your first shots at something like 150 meters, decreasing to about 100 meters by the time ... your magazine tube is empty. So of course there is a decrease in velocity with each shot because the pressure in the tank drops with each shot, but there is enough in here that all 20 rounds are combat effective. And they specifically also found that the accuracy did not degrade over the course of 20 rounds fired from the same air tank. So your kit would include three of these air tanks and 100 projectiles, 20 of them starting in the gun and the remainder in four speed loader tubes, which obviously would be super easy to just drop into that front gate. Like this is a very fast gun to use in combat, especially for the 1780s when everybody else, you know, after the first shot all you have to do is flick this back and forth and re-cock the hammer while everyone else is busily trying to ram musket balls down the barrel of their flintlocks. So ultimately what do you get with this? You get 20 rounds of approximately 154 grain bullet at about a thousand feet per second, as best we can tell from a combination of period reports and modern testing and equivalents and calculating based on pressures and volumes. So that seems to be a pretty safe estimate here to work with. That's not a lot of muzzle energy by today's standards, but it is rifled, it is accurate, it is extremely rapid fire, and that's plenty to be lethal. You know, I don't want to get hit by 154 grain bullet going at a thousand feet per second. That's a middle-of-the-road pistol cartridge. All right, a couple other things we can take a look at here. We have the receiver, which is just this component right back here. It's made out of cast bronze and then machined internally, and it includes basically a transfer tube for air to come out of the reservoir here and go into the barrel through that hole in the loading block to propel your projectile down the barrel and out. These did have potential flaws to them. There is at least one known example that has crack in it, like misshapen crack from presumably an overpressure event, or just fatigue. When you're making things like this in the 1700s, your material quality is not quite as good as what we have today. And so there were a lot of issues of making sure that you didn't have voids in castings, making sure that your smelted iron was actually uniform high quality, which, like, spoiler, it wasn't. That was something that Giordani had to work through, had to make sure his raw materials coming in were properly vetted, and then build them out into guns. And those are some of the reasons why these things were so slow and time-consuming to produce. In addition, all of the air reservoirs have to have interchangeable threading. You needed to be able to attach any air reservoir to any gun, because if you can't, all of a sudden the logistical nightmare of this gun explodes. You know, if guys have to keep track of their own individual air cylinders and not switch them between guns, it makes resupply in the field, in combat, extremely difficult, if not flat out impossible. And so Giordani did that, and it's an incredible testament to the precision of his workshop in the 1780s that he was able to do that. Something we really don't appreciate today. There are also some interesting detail elements here. Things like the seals used in the air tanks. These are leather seals. It was recommended in the gun documentation at the time that you should periodically immerse the tanks in water to keep the seals wet, to improve their sealing capability. But a plain leather seal is not able to contain 1300 psi of pressure. They actually went through and did some very specific bespoke hardening of the leather that was used in the seals of these air reservoirs to ensure that they could actually hold the full military working pressure of air that the guns were built around. So, like, every element of this is not just off the shelf. It's only capable, it's only possible because Giordani spent a tremendous amount of time perfecting this specific system in a way that just nobody else was really able to duplicate at the time. He was decades ahead of his time. The gun does have a rod here. This is important for cleaning and also potentially for freeing a stuck ball. If you end up shooting with not enough air pressure, it would be very easy to accidentally get a projectile stuck midway down the barrel. And the way that you would get it out would be to use the rod to push it all the way back into this loading bar, and then you could presumably push it over, pop it forward back into the magazine tube. So that's why there's a ramrod on a breech-loading gun. We have some sling swivels here on on the bottom, and a sling swivel on the trigger guard itself. Pretty standard sort of sights. There's a probably bronze, I expect that's a bronze front sight, and then an iron rear notch sight. These are rifled accurate guns, and the sights are not trivial. Like the sights are realistic, usable, better than most contemporary muzzle loading sights that I've seen. Overall, the barrel length on this is 32.8 inches, and fully loaded with an air reservoir attached, it comes in at just 9 pounds. So really it's like, it's lighter, it's handier, it's shorter than a contemporary flintlock, as well as having far more firepower than any flintlock at this time. Unfortunately, we only have some records surviving discussing the use of the military forces, so some questions are going to forever probably remain unanswered. But what we do know does answer a lot of questions. So first off, interestingly, Emperor Joseph, despite having recognized the capacity and the potential of these guns, and took a direct personal hand in their adoption, also took a direct hand in their utilization, and had them issued not concentrated in a single unit of, say, assaulting troops, you know, sharpshooters, snipers, any, you know, if he'd focused these together, they could have been, they could have dominated one point of a battlefield, and been used to break through enemy lines, or to exploit a breakthrough in enemy lines. They could have had a transformative effect on the battlefield. Instead, Joseph had them issued out specifically, like, dispersed throughout all of his units, and so you ended up with so few of these guns at any individual place on a battlefield, that they couldn't do anything to change the overall nature of the battle. And that's why they didn't have any direct impact. Now, there are some real, real logistical questions about these things. So, you do have a lot of firepower initially, but once you have magazines that run out, you're at a huge disadvantage, because 1,500 pumps to refill a magazine to get 20 more shots is a problem. They didn't have enough magazines to have any sort of really, like, large-scale refilling program. They did eventually manufacture enough magazines to have a couple hundred on spare carts that could be moved with troops. But, like, even when you've got that, that becomes an issue if troops are highly mobile, if you're using these guys to exploit a breakthrough in the lines, well, how does their air supply keep up with them? One alternative could have been to use them with cavalry, where it's easier for the cavalry to bring themselves back to a centralized depot sort of maintenance area to refill tanks or replace tanks with new ones, but that wasn't done. What does seem to have happened after the initial battlefield use of these circa 1788 is that they were used for defensive fortifications. They were put in fortresses where the air supply was readily available, like, right there with them. And you could have guys behind cover, you know, inside a fortress, refilling air tanks, that kind of thing. And we don't know this, but it's highly suggested, because what we do know is that a lot, hundreds of these Giordanis were lost in the capture of three main fortresses. And I have to take notes on these, specifically fortresses at Landerssee, Maastricht, and Konigstein, where guns were lost. And they wouldn't have been lost there unless they were being used, well, unless they were in the fortress, which suggests they were being used for defensive work. So there is a potential for them to be valuable weapons in that capacity, but ... I think their really true potential was to offer attacking firepower in a high-volume, dense sort of group. Now there are ... some of the generals recognize this. Emperor Joseph dies in, I believe, 1790. He is replaced by a new younger emperor who ... is also very interested in these guns, and who does specifically order them used with a group of Tyrolean sharpshooters. We're going to have an entire unit using nothing but Giordanis. Unfortunately, by this point the guns are spread out, and in order to equip this new unit of specialist air gun troops the guns have to be brought back in. They have to be reworked, repaired, more magazines made for them. And this process takes several years. Ultimately those Tyrolean sharpshooters never really have an opportunity to do anything really substantial with the guns. And then in 1799 Giordani dies. And with his death essentially the gun comes to a complete end. Hundreds of these guns have been lost in combat, and lost through mechanical problems. Magazines will occasionally fail. The receivers, there's one known example that actually the receiver has a crack in it you're dealing with. High pressure air here, very close tolerances. You know the machining required to make one of these in the late 1700s is really phenomenal. This is not something that just any old machinist can tool up and do. It requires someone who really understands what they're doing, and has put a lot of time and effort into developing the machine tools to actually make something this precise and specialized. And Giordani had that. But once Giordani dies, it goes away. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire is simply not able to replace the guns that have already worn out. They're not left with enough guns to do anything really substantial with. And that's why by the time we get to Napoleon coming onto the scene, well these guns are never used in combat against Napoleon. Because by that point they're just, there aren't enough of them. There's not enough organization. And things revert back to regular flintlocks. Which by the way was the, by far, the standard weapon for the vast majority of Austro-Hungarian forces all the way through this period. There were never more than, I think at maximum, maybe 1,500 of these guns manufactured in grand total. And fewer than that actually available to the military at any given time. So in the years after Giordani there would be some manufacture of sporting versions of this sort of thing. Typically they have smaller magazine capacities because they're not able to get the high pressure in the reservoir and in the hand pumps that Giordani was able to get. And even if they could, the amount of effort and work required to fully pressurize one of these tanks is like, it's a heck of a lot. And if you are wealthy landed gentry who would like to hunt with the fancy air gun, you probably, I mean maybe you can have some servants pump up the tanks for you, but you know what, let's cut the number of, let's cut the effort of charging the tank in half, cut the magazine capacity in half. If you're using this as a sporting gun you don't need 20 rounds, 10 is probably fine. And so the later sporting versions tend to be lower pressure, smaller capacity. And it's unfortunate, like this had the potential to be a truly game-changing technology. It was let down initially by manufacturing capacity, then by organizational logistics, organizational doctrine in the Austrian military forces, and then by the time they got that figured out they were back to being restricted by manufacturing and technology of the time. And so really the equal of this on the battlefield didn't show up again until basically the Spencer repeating rifles during the American Civil War, a period of 60 years before anyone came up with something that could equal the Giordani. So I would like to give a big huge thanks to the fellow who loaned me this one to film. This is not an Austrian military gun, it is very similar to the military patterns, it has the same tanks, it has the same capacity, it was made slightly after the military patterns, and it has a couple of replacement parts on it. But extremely cool, and very, very rare to get a chance to take a look at one of these in person. So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, thanks for watching.