Firearms have played a central role in American history, shaping everything from technological innovation and manufacturing to military development and constitutional law. In my recent conversation with Alex Robinson on the Outdoor Life Podcast, we explore some of the most fascinating, and often overlooked, firearms that helped define the nation’s history. Rather than focusing on familiar names like the M1911 or M1 Garand, the discussion highlights lesser-known inventions, inventors, and breakthroughs that reveal how innovation and entrepreneurship influenced America’s development.
From Revolutionary-era repeating firearms and the Pennsylvania long rifle to the Winchester lever action, early firearm safety innovations, and the origins of the AR-15, this conversation examines the people, patents, and technologies behind some of America’s most significant firearms. More importantly, it explores why firearms history is inseparable from American history and why preserving that history remains essential to understanding our nation’s past.
Listen to the full episode or read the transcript below.
Full Transcript
This week, as we celebrate the 4th of July and America’s 250th anniversary, there’s just a lot more interests and conversations about American history. I’m editor-in-chief Alex Robinson, and today on the podcast, I’m talking with firearms historian Ashley Hlebinsky. Because as she puts it, you can’t talk about American history without also talking about firearms.
Ashley is going to pick some of her favorite American firearm innovations and explain how they relate to what was going on in the country at the time. Now this isn’t going to be your basic internet list of like 1911s and M1 Garands. Ashley gets deep into the weeds on patents, designs and gun stories that you probably haven’t heard about before.
But if you’re a gun nerd and an American, you’re sure to appreciate what she has to share.
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Okay, here we go. Ashley, to get us started, would you just talk about like your background quickly, your background in firearms and what you do, what you do now?
Yeah. I like that you say quickly, which means you’ve worked with me a lot in the past, because I’m not capable of that. But for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ashley Hlebinsky.
I am a firearms historian. Most people know me from the 10 years I spent at Cody Firearms Museum. I ran the Cody Firearms Museum.
I was responsible for a $12 million renovation where we completely gutted the museum and redid it. We added an extra thousand guns on display, a lot more interpretation. But since then, I’ve been working on a lot of different history projects.
So I started a research center at the University of Wyoming with a colleague of mine. It’s called the Firearms Research Center, super original, I know. It’s a Second Amendment Law Center.
I’m working with some other colleagues on the new Firearms Research Center in the UK. Working with a lot of museums, Maud Museum, LA Police Museum. I’m building a Firearms Museum up in Canada right now, believe it or not.
Cool.
I do a lot of expert witness work and TV still, whenever people give me the opportunity. But I think that’s like the big hits. I don’t know what I do.
Perfect. Well, you know more about the intersections of firearm design and history, American history than anyone that I know. And we’re coming up toward the 4th of July.
And I think a lot of folks are feeling patriotic and there is more interest in history this week, probably than at any other point during this year. And Outdoor Life’s way into this is really through firearms, the firearms of American history. So basically yesterday, I texted you and I was like, hey Ashley, what are your favorite firearms of American history?
And do you want to talk about them? So that’s what we’re going to do today.
going to do today.
Yeah. Which is like such a loaded question, if you will. So I’m going to say a bunch of things I like, but they might not be my actual favorite, but we’ll have a good time.
Yeah. I put no guardrails around this. You know, we’re not, this list that you come up with here is not like the most important firearms of American history.
You know, folks have kind of seen all those lists of, you know, the M1 Grand in 1911. This is, I promise, this is not going to be that. I know, I know that you are going to go deeper and maybe odder, more unique than just kind of like the basic list that everyone’s already seen on the internet.
So I am sure that I’m going to learn a lot here.
Yeah. I tried to come up with some weird stuff. And some stuff that you probably know exists, but maybe didn’t know all of the history was kind of what I was going for.
Okay. Perfect. Well, let’s start.
I mean, let’s start around to fit the theme of this. Let’s start kind of around the revolutionary times. Like take us back to the beginning of, around America’s founding.
What from that era really stands out to you as a firearms historian?
Oh, that’s a good question. Because one of the ones I was thinking of is a little bit later, it falls into what we call the founding era of the US. And this is a really cool and very difficult question for me because when in all my Second Amendment expert witness work, this concept of the founding era is very important because of the 2022 Supreme Court decision, the Bruin decision, which basically said that history is the most or one of the most important determinants to the constitutionality of a modern gun law.
And they point to like a hierarchy of historical relevance and the most important is around what they call the founding era, which is around the ratification of the Second Amendment. So it’s a little bit later, obviously, than our founding. But what’s interesting is, and what we talk about a lot from this time frame is kind of, you’ve got your standard guns that everybody knows about, right?
You’ve got your musket, you’ve got your long rifle, although the long rifle wasn’t necessarily used as much on the battlefield as people think it was, was more of a specialized purpose. And part of the reason for that was because rifling, which has been around, had been around at that point for centuries, was kind of something that people used for target shooting, for defense, for hunting, because it was more accurate than a smoothbore musket. But the type of projectile you were using at this time frame was a round musket ball.
And in order for rifling to be affected with a round musket ball, you had to make sure that it fits snugly down the barrel. Because again, most of these guns are being loaded down the barrel with a few exceptions of early breech loaders. And so when you do that, you slow down the loading process.
And that makes things a little bit more difficult on the battlefield with the type of tactics we’re dealing with, especially as you come up to the revolution. But one of the things that I always point out-
Wait, hold on. We, I mean, the whole idea of like, the American frontiersman with the Pennsylvania long rifle, and like, our skill is riflemen, that kind of swung the war in our favor. Is that, is that not true?
It’s not wrong. No, no, no. It’s not wrong, per se.
It’s just, I think there’s this kind of imagery. There’s actually a lot of really interesting quotes and documents from around the time of the revolution, where they talk about the fact that we, that because Americans had so many firearms, and because they were provisioned in kind of riflemen, the riflemen tactics, that’s not the right word. Because they were using firearms in a multitude of different ways at that time, the riflemen component in and of itself and the accuracy of firing in and of itself does get reported on a lot.
David Ramsey wrote about the soldiers kind of picking, or the individuals picking up arms and being able to use guns. But muskets were the standard infantry arm, a smoothbore musket. So it’s not, it’s just sometimes it gets, the long rifle gets romanticized to the point of thinking that everyone had a rifle.
And that’s just not, well, they did, you know, in their, in their personal lives, maybe, but that’s just not necessarily the case for, there were riflemen units and there were kind of specific designated purposes for that type of firearm. But your standard inventory arm was still the musket during that time frame. And pretty much for a century, by the time you get to the Civil War, you get rifled muskets.
And then we can talk about that, but, but what’s interesting here is you, you do have the rifle, the long rifle. And there are some long rifles that have two barrels or multiple barrels, which is interesting where the barrel would rotate. Although most of them were single shots.
And what’s interesting about the long rifle, I wasn’t even going to talk about the long rifle, but here we are. I always call it like America’s first multipurpose tool. Because with the long rifle, you were able to do a little bit of everything.
So what a lot of people don’t realize is in the colonies, there were target shooting competitions that were really popular, and a lot of them were called rifle frolics. And target shooting dates back to the late 1400s. And so in the colonies, people were using their long rifles for sport.
So they were target shooting and competing against one another. Obviously, they were using them for hunting, and they would have them for defense. And so it really was one size fits all type of firearm.
And what’s another interesting little tidbit about the colonies is the fact that some of the colonies actually recorded the number of kind of rifles, muskets, cannons that individuals owned, and they broke it down by gender, which I thought was kind of interesting. Some of the colonies broke it down by gender. But one of the things that I always like to point out during this timeframe is that you’ve got the guns that you’ve heard about with the revolution.
But there are a lot of other technologies that people are experimenting with during this timeframe, and then also immediately after the founding of the United States. One of them that gets brought up a lot is the Belton repeating rifle. There’s a lot of sometimes early controversy around it because some of the surviving examples are considered forgeries.
But Joseph Belton did exist, and he worked on rifles prior to the revolution. One of the guns that he developed, and he actually developed a better one in the 1780s, but he was working on a repeating rifle. So it was called a superposed gun, which basically means you stack powder and ball in a barrel together, and you have many different options for mode of firing.
It can be a Roman candle. There were different types of superposed guns. Some had only one locking mechanism, and you would slide it along the barrel with different touch holes so that the gun could go off.
You have to find the pan, cock the mechanism back.
Is this a shoulder fired weapon?
It was a repeating rifle. Now, he initially didn’t have a lot of luck with people being interested in it, but he did actually have Congress order 100 of them in the 1770s. However, they ended up canceling that order.
There’s a lot of conversations around why that order got canceled, but that gun did exist and it wasn’t the only repeater in the colonies. In the early pre-founding and post-founding, there’s estate sales where they talk about these repeating firearms that are up for sale, that you can buy or gunsmiths, because there were 3,000 gun makers around the time of the revolution in the colonies. So there were lots of different things that people were buying for their own personal interest, and not just this idea of the military gun.
And usually, pretty much all the time, the guns that people were owning were way cooler than the military arms that they were using.
Do you know if any of those repeating designs were used in the revolution?
There are examples of some of these, the multi-barrel long rifles. There’s an example, I haven’t thought about it in a long time, so I can’t remember what officer was killed, what British officer was killed, but they believe that the person that did it used a double barrel, a long rifle where it actually like you rotate the barrel, and you can fire two shots. I know of that one.
I’m trying to think of specific, you do get, obviously, the British had the Ferguson breech loading rifle, which you see some use of that, and that’s not a repeater obviously, but it’s another idea of this faster loading or reloading of a gun. But it’s really like post-war, you start to see some really wild repeaters pop up kind of in the early US, where people are trying to standardize and modify and create a better market for these repeating firearms.
Gotcha. Fascinating. Yeah.
I was just, you know, just from like the British military perspective, you know, they’re coming into this land and getting ready for battle, and all of a sudden, these guys are shooting multiple times without reloading. They’re like, what the heck is going on?
No, not quite. I mean, like, the colonists are scrounging, right? Like, there were committees of safety, there were people making guns, obviously.
And prior to that, people were importing lock, stocks and barrels and assembling guns prior to the revolution. But a lot of the times, they were stealing the guns from the British. So yeah, they were totally refined on that.
Because if you think about it too, I mean, a lot of the repeating technology that existed early on in like the 1600s obviously is coming over is in Europe. So it’s kind of technology that was a blanket and it trickled into the colonies. A lot of people don’t realize that like, other than like the few stories we hear about people migrating to the US and all of that, like Jefferson lived in Paris for a while, like people did come and go.
I know in a lot of my court cases, people were always like, well, would people have been aware of some of these technologies? And it’s like, I mean, it’s not like communication like we think of today, but communication was definitely going back and forth. Jefferson was always kind of up on a lot of the latest technology.
He was in charge of the patent office when it first got going and yeah, and he actually one of my favorites, one of the ones I was going to talk to, we haven’t even talked about, we haven’t gotten to that, was one that Jefferson was actually aware of. And it was developed in the 1790s, which that’s around founding era because it’s the ratification of the Second Amendment. And that is called, it’s called the Chambers.
And he developed, it’s like the Belton in the sense that it’s a superposed gun, but the Chambers, kind of like the Belton on steroids, the original Belton on steroids, because he had different versions of it. So we had versions where they would fire seven rounds. And what he devised was a type of ammunition.
So that with some early superposed, you had to kind of fire and then move the lock, and then fire again, or use a different lock. Sometimes they’d be stacked or there’d be a bunch of lock plates. Whereas here, he developed, he basically hollowed out the ball, so the projectile.
And so basically, if you press the trigger, you were gripping it and ripping it, and it was going off until you were done. And he did test it out in front of a lot of the founding fathers, the politicians. Jefferson actually recommended it because initially, they were like, I don’t really necessarily see a military purpose for this, but I recommend you take a patent out for it, which is kind of interesting because there’s that idea of what a military gun is, and they’re like, oh, here’s this rapid-firing gun.
Nah, we’re good. Why don’t you take a patent out for it?
So you said he hollowed out the ball, and then was that where the powder went?
So no, so you would still stack it, so you’d still have powder and the projectile, but basically that way, it would burn through the projectile and let the other ones fire.
Gotcha.
Rather than having to manually do it every time, having to prime the pan and do it every time. So he ultimately develops, he doesn’t take out a patent, but he ultimately develops this swivel gun that fires 224 rounds with one trigger pull. That’s a bad day.
If your gun doesn’t fire exactly, one of the barrels doesn’t fire exactly the way that you want. He said multiple barrels. And that was around the turn of the 18th century, so towards the end of the 1700s, into the early 1800s, and some of his guns were actually ordered for the War of 1812.
So it’s a cool kind of thing because you get this type of firearm that is a repeater. It can fire hundreds of rounds with one trigger pull, and something a founding father actually knows about. Those are all, people might be like, why are you mentioning?
Those are all ingredients that go into these conversations that you see in the courtroom.
And just to draw that out a little bit, it’s like the argument is like, hey, the Second Amendment should only apply to the types of firearms that existed at the time the Second Amendment was written, right? That’s like a perspective. And what you’re saying is like, if you go back into the detailed history of it, there is like firearm technology that is pretty similar to the concepts that we have today.
Yeah.
So a real kind of basic breakdown of what they’re looking for in the Bruin Test when it comes to history is, what existed, what types of technology existed, because if you can make the argument the technology didn’t exist, then you can make the argument that why would they know to regulate it? Because that’s where it comes in. So did the technology exist?
Would people have known about it? Would founding fathers have known about it? Again, to know to regulate it.
And then are there any comparable laws that you could tie into a modern law? And when it comes to like the second founding era, or gosh, I keep wanting to talk about the 1860s. When it comes to the founding era, there were most of the laws that you see that appear around firearms, are not firearms about the firearms themselves, it’s about who can own firearms.
Oh yeah.
So there’s regulation on natives owning firearms, free black men and women owning firearms. So it’s more about who can own them rather than what they can own. And then there’s conversations about like militia laws.
So you’ll see conversations around like certain militias, there were requirement to carry a minimum number of rounds, you know, and ammo and powder at any given time, which you’ll see a lot on kind of the gun side. And then when you look at kind of the more like expansive restriction side of things, then they’ll say something like, well, there were, you know, powder restrictions in terms of sometimes colonies would limit the amount of powder. So like some of them would be like 16 pounds of powder.
You could still have a lot of powder. And then if you went over that, you know, you could still put it in a public powder magazine and it’s still yours. You can have how much you want, but they’ll reference that.
And well, that was really about where fire prevention was. The concern that having powder, you know, a certain amount of powder. There’s also, you know, regulations on some places firing within city limits because you were trying to prevent fire, not necessarily the ownership of the technology themselves.
So that’s kind of where you get, like, you know, so like if you look at like a magazine case, right, where magazine fed firearms around at the time of the founding. Yes. They date to, you know, the 1600s.
And Belton, who developed his repeater in the 1750s initially, you know, he goes over to England and works with a gunmaker there and manufactures a version of his gun that takes what in essence a detachable magazine. It’s still superposed, but you can carry freeloaded pieces that pop out of the breach and you can pop them back in so you don’t have to, you can just kind of quickly reload them. And then it had several different methods of firing where you could fire it single shot, you could fire traditional superposed where you have to prime the pan every time.
And then he added a fun little port fire feature where you basically only have to set the locking mechanism up once and there’s this little port and you put a piece of like basically like a match in it and it fires at, according to the curator of the Royal Armory, is at about the same rate as the modern semi-automatic.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
So it’s a fascinating like, I’ve lived in a fascinating world since the Bruin decision because like all of this research is going on about like what existed and what that means in terms of modern laws. So it’s kind of interesting.
Okay. So that’s founding, that’s founding era.
Yeah.
I think we touched on that. Now, where are we going?
Well, I think we should move into the 19th century, which actually if we go, this isn’t supposed to be a lesson on Bruin, but the second most important time frame according to Bruin is what’s called the second founding era, which apparently I’m super jazzed to talk about.
Yeah, you’ve been trying to get into this the whole time.
That’s around the ratification of the 14th Amendment since 1868. But I don’t know, there’s a lot of things. Obviously, like the 19th century is a time of great changes in terms of production capacity, manufacturing processes.
I obviously could talk about your standards, Sam Cole, the development of a commercially successful self-rotating revolver, a lot of different repeating technologies. The one that I wanted to point out is probably a low-hanging fruit for me coming from the Cody Firearms Museum, but I think it’s an interesting moment in history. And that’s Smith and Wesson’s 1854 patent that developed what becomes the lever action, or what becomes the Winchester lever action.
And I think that’s really interesting from so many different facets. So one facet is patent history, which sounds like the most boring thing on the planet. And I think it’s so juicy.
It’s such a spicy topic. Why? Because, okay.
So basically, right, I’m sure everyone knows what a patent is. You get a patent saying, hey, I made this thing, you can’t make it now. I own the legal right to make it.
And so in 1836, there was kind of a standardization of the patent process. And Sam Colt comes out in February with his revolver patent. And now he took out patents in France and England the year prior because he was given advice on how foreign patents work.
And I guess it was something like if he had gotten a patent in the US first, then he couldn’t take out the foreign patents. So he comes out of the gates swinging and patents his revolvers.
I’m getting all the countries.
Yeah, I got it. Yeah, he’s like, I’m collecting these and I’m going to make sure that no one makes my stuff. And if they do, I’m going to sue them.
And he does that a lot. But that’s why it’s juicy, because there are so many lawsuits that go on during this time frame. People suing each other, reputations being damaged.
But what’s interesting is you get after around 1836, because Colt patents the revolver, you see all these repeaters pop up that are kind of obscure. You get turret guns that are repeaters where the cylinder is facing the wrong direction. We’re just going to say the wrong direction.
But instead of it being the normal rotation with the chamber facing back, it’s facing all directions as it spins around. You get a chain revolver where it’s literally like a bunch of rounds in the chain that then move in advance. You get something that looks like a typewriter.
You get all kinds of stuff. And then Colt actually gets an extension on his patent to 1857, I think, 56 or 57. And that’s when you start to see kind of things shift for a lot of designers.
Because obviously that opens up the revolver market. But Smith and Wesson are really smart early on. And they’re kind of developing this idea of a repeater.
And they’re also developing this idea of a self-contained metallic cartridge. Because for the most part, prior to this period, you were loading the components of the round inside the gun, right? And that’s slow.
And so even though, like, say Colt’s Revolver was faster because of the type of repeater it was, you still had to load powder, projectile, all that stuff, kind of individually. And so they’re doing several things. And what they come up with, just prior to Colt’s patent expiring, is they come up with the volcanic, which is the lever, an early lever action.
And I think a lot of people also don’t realize that Smith and Wesson developed the lever action. I mean, they definitely, they came out with a lever action a handful of years ago, and they definitely pushed that kind of heritage. But they were the ones, and then Oliver Winchester was an early shareholder.
Yeah, it’s like Winchester repeating arms. You kind of just lump those two things in with the history of the lever actions, everyone kind of thinks Winchester.
And rightly so, because Oliver Winchester becomes a shareholder right away. They go through, it’s originally Smith and Wesson, then it’s volcanic, and then it’s New Haven, and then it’s Winchester. It goes through a lot of different names.
And Winchester gets involved immediately, and he’s a money guy. He does take out patents during his life, but he’s a money guy. And Smith and Wesson, really, they developed this thing, but they really were very much interested in this revolver market.
And so once Sam Colt’s patent is expiring, they get rid of their lever action, and they move on to developing their revolver with a metallic cartridge, which it has also, in addition to a metallic cartridge, it’s got the benefit of a board-through-cylinder, which is patented by Roland White, who was an employee of Colt, Colt the Company. And so there’s like a fun little interplay of all of that, that kind of builds up. And so to me, it’s kind of the birth of, obviously, the iconic classic Americana, which is their lever action, but it’s also this advancement in ammunition technology, which I don’t think, personally, I don’t think it’s enough credit and isn’t talked enough about in firearms history.
We talk about the Winchester Lever Action, but we rarely talk about all the calibers that Winchester came out with and the fact that ammo was the profitable part of their company for so long, you know? So it’s just a nice moment where you get a bunch of different well-known names in gun history kind of coming together to create something that develops in so many different ways. And that’s why I like it, because I just like when you look at all these different facets of history, and I love a little bit of drama.
And patent history always brings it. I mean, Roland White was like basically called an embarrassment to the Union.
Really?
Because of the way he made his deal with Smith & Wesson didn’t work out, worked out great for Smith & Wesson, didn’t work out great for Roland White, and he was obligated to defend his patent. Smith & Wesson didn’t have to defend his patent, he did. And if you know your American history, you know that not too long after they come out with this revolver, we go into an American Civil War, where mass production is very important.
And so patent infringement is pretty common. And he was not shy about lawsuits even during a time of war. So he ended up, you know, in terms of at least financial success, did not, he got the short end of the stick on that one.
So it was like, hey, we’re at war. We don’t care about, you know, the paperwork around this, like we have a war to win. And he’s like, hold on, I’m going to sue you.
Yeah. Is that basically the- I know he files for an extension.
I can’t remember if he gets it or not. But it doesn’t like ultimately end well for him because people felt that he like was bogging down production during a time of war. So it’s pretty, I don’t know, it’s a dramatic time for so many hearts of American history, not just technological history, but obviously with the war coming.
And the development of this idea of a change in military technology. If we’re looking at what we talked about with the smoothbore guns with the musket balls, you know, by the time of the Civil War, you now have a conically shaped projectile. Even though you’re not using the self-contained metallic cartridges that Smith & Wesson starting to pioneer, you’re starting to use a projectile that is conically shaped, which allows for rifling to be used more effectively on the battlefield for the first time in American history.
Yeah. So with Smith’s, you know, you referenced this quickly, you know, they came out with a modern lever action, and it’s the 1854 is what they called it.
I think so, yeah.
That’s their name. Is that a reference back to this?
Yeah, they very much marketed it as kind of a throwback to their origin story, I guess. Yeah. Which is neat.
And so I love to see a modern company embrace their historical roots. And when they came out with their version of a lever action, which is obviously not a volcanic, because a volcanic has lots of issues early on. When they went back to their roots, they actually did a lot of marketing where they used an original volcanic pistol, which I would love it if they would make a lever action pistol, that would be super cool.
But I highly doubt that there’s a great market for it, other than me and my 10 friends. Although maybe, I could be wrong. But they actually borrowed from somebody, a colleague of mine, they were using a historic one.
They did a lot of research into the early gun suits. I love when an older company looks back at their history and can find a really good way into a modern market. Lever actions are very popular, especially when they came out with it.
It was a hot market on that. And so, to be able to come out and be like, just kidding, we’re the first. We were the first.
Yeah.
It’s a pretty big flex, right?
Totally. Yeah. Good job.
Good job, Smith and Wesson.
Okay. Good job.
Where are we going now?
Okay. I mean, we can go in so many different directions. I don’t have to go with just what I wrote down, but one of the things I did write down, because I’ve talked about patent history, I’ve talked about legal history, technology.
I also find safety, the history of passive and active safety is to be really interesting. And so I wrote down the 1896 Andrew Freyberg patent for Ivor Johnson on Arms and Psycho Works, Bikes and Guns. And this was a patent for a transfer bar on a double action revolver.
And it’s a pretty revolutionary piece of technology, especially in the late 19th century.
Tell me more about it. What does it do and where do we see it?
Okay. I mean, we can go in so many different directions. I don’t have to go with just what I wrote down, but one of the things I did write down, because I’ve talked about patent history, I’ve talked about legal history, technology.
I also find safety, the history of passive and active safety is to be really interesting. And so I wrote down the 1896 Andrew Freyberg patent for Ivor Johnson on Arms and Psycho Works, Bikes and Guns. And this was a patent for a transfer bar on a double action revolver.
And it’s a pretty revolutionary piece of technology, especially in the late 19th century.
Tell me more about it. What does it do and where do we see it?
So, okay, so most people, well, I say most people, I don’t know. I don’t know who I hang out with. But a lot of people are aware that early cult single actions have the issue of loaded.
If you load all six rounds and you have the hammer and fold down position and you were to drop it, you are at risk of the firing pin pushing up against the primer and the gun going off[…]
Which is why the standard became and is still to this day, if you’ve got a model based on the original cult type single action, which people still make them based on that because it’s safe if you carry it the correct way. But it became the standard that you loaded five rounds and you put the hammer and fold down on an empty chamber.
And that was basically how cult single actions, cult type single actions operated until Bill Ruger patented a transfer bar in 1973. And then he discontinued their version of it and created the new model which had the transfer bar. But the transfer bar actually dates to 1896 with a double action.
So it’s different technology. So it’s apples and oranges. So it’s not like, oh, I could just take this transfer bar and make it apply to any type of revolver.
That’s not the case because what Freiburg patented, basically the transfer works off the trigger. So you need that long arc of a double action in order for the transfer bar to work for a long time. So Ruger comes out with their wave, they’re getting around it.
But a transfer bar is basically, it is what it sounds like. It’s this bar that when you press the trigger and it cocks the hammer back, a bar comes in between the hammer and the chamber so that you’re not directly impacting, the hammer is not directly impacting and potentially having some type of negligent or accidental discharge. So it transfers the energy of the hammer and the firing pin into firing the gun.
And there’s lots of different versions of transfer bars. There are some where the pin is actually in the bar, and there’s some where it pops up in different ways. But it was pretty revolutionary at that point in time because the revolvers in general had issues with dropping and safety with dropping if you had the gun fully loaded.
And so the fact that Iver Johnson came out with, at the turn of the 20th century, came out with a piece of technology that at least worked for double actions was a big leap forward. Although I will say, their marketing is so, so bad for it.
So, there you have it.
So, great piece of technology, real revolutionary. But then they market it as accidental discharge impossible, which in a modern litigious society would not pass. No general council is allowing that to go out into the universe.
And then it gets worse. So, accidental discharge impossible, which is great marketing, right? It’s like Hiram Maxim calling his invention the silencer.
It’s great marketing, doesn’t necessarily pass today’s idea.
Legal standards, but that’s okay.
But it gets worse because one of their earliest advertisements is a little kid in bed, and she’s pointing the gun at her face, and it says, Papa says it won’t hurt me.
Oh my gosh, wow.
So bad.
So bad.
Yeah. And then like by like, I want to say maybe 1912, they still have a Papa says it won’t hurt me ad, but the gun is no longer pointing at her. It’s I think it’s just in her lap or something.
Okay. They dialed it down a little bit.
They dialed it back.
Yeah.
But it is a really unique piece of technology that’s developing kind of as we move into the more modern era of firearms technology. So I told you I was picking up some really random things.
Well, it’s I mean, it’s interesting to think about that time too. Like, you know, I’m guessing that revolvers are incredibly popular or getting incredibly popular at this point. Right.
So it’s like they’re all over the place. And now there’s a new technology that, you know, just kind of makes the platform better.
Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because you’ll see, like, there are active safeties on early firearms. I mean, there’s some flintlock types are called a doglock, and they actually have a catch so that when you pull the cocking mechanism back, you can actually lock it in place.
And so there are like, there’s this idea of trying to make it kind of safe as possible from the earliest days. But it’s just kind of interesting to see how they evolve to, you know, fit the mold into more modern technology. So it’s just a neat little lesser known, probably, part of American history.
Although I say American history, but the guy was Scandinavian. But he was in America.
It counts. Yeah, we’re counting it. We’re counting it.
It’ll count.
Okay. So revolvers are getting safer.
But who cares? Because the semi-automatics.
Yeah.
Sorry. That was rude to all revolver companies.
I know. They had a long time. They had a good run.
They had a good run. They’re still very popular. They’re very, very popular.
And they have entire reprobarkets. But at this point in history too, it’s almost like the revolvers have to catch up to the game because semi-automatic and automatic technology developed in the 1880s and 1890s and really come into their own in the early 20th century. Obviously, John Moses Browning is a name that most people associate with that’s automatic and semi-automatic technology, understandably so because of his 1895 potato diggers, the machine guns and his early 1899, which is 1899 slash 1900 Browning and then the early 1900 Colts.
And all the iterations that lead up to the 1911. But it’s just this kind of moment and change. And he’s not the only person.
I mean, there’s a lot of experimentation with toggle-lock mechanisms. So early semi-automatics developed by people overseas. Hugo Borchardt develops the C93, which is it’s sold overseas, but he actually works for Winchester at one point.
Oh, interesting. And with another designer who’s an iconic designer, doesn’t get enough credit, William Mason, who developed. He and a guy named Charles Brinkerhoff Richards, who nobody heard about that poor man.
But Mason and him come up with the Cold Single Action Army. And then Mason goes over to work for Winchester to develop a revolver for Winchester in the 1880s, I think, when Winchester and Colt are starting to play in each other’s sandboxes. So Winchester pulls a dramatic, right?
Winchester pulls a dramatic moment and hires William Mason away from Colt. And then he works on lots of stuff like toggle locks, subby automatics. Winchester is actually way more advanced than I think a lot of people remember the company being.
I mean, they love our actions, love our actions, but they were a major military player by the time you get to World War I, which I accidentally segued into my next gun. And I did not do that on purpose. But Winchester is…
It also… Poor Winchester, like they are like they develop military technology. You know, they defined like early to mid 20th century military technology, but it also is what causes them to go bankrupt after after World War I.
They go into receivership in the 1930s because they can’t. The contracts, you know, and trying to keep up with production definitely causes them to start to circle the drain. They try to do lots of things
That’s where, again, the one the West expression comes from is actually a post-World War I marketing campaign to help revive the brand because they’re, you know, drowning to some extent. But they developed some really cool stuff during World War I. Well, people don’t realize, like, going into World War I, like, yeah, automatic technology existed, semi-automatic technology existed.
But we’re going to war with revolvers and rolling blocks, you know, and bold action. So, like, and you’ll see this a lot in the time period frames we’ve talked about, and also throughout American military history, is that there’s a lag in the development of technology and the adoption of technology. There’s always a lag.
Sometimes I joke that when people talk about, like, weapons of war, they use that expression, you know, what weapons of war are on our streets. You know, I sometimes joke, I’m like, well, for most of history, weapons of war meant crappier guns.
Yeah, like whatever was popular, like 10, 15 years ago.
Yeah, right? It’s been decades. And so there’s a lot of innovation that is going on towards the end of World War I, and Winchester develops an anti-tank rifle that is developed by a guy named Edwin Pugsley, who becomes a major, he actually coins the term gun, the one that when he becomes a major executive with Winchester.
But then the one that I always like to point out, there’s only one that exists. And Cody, they’re doing a lot of research on it right now, because there’s not a ton known about it. But it’s the only one that exists.
It’s at the Cody Fire Museum. It’s called the Burton Light Machine Rifle. It was developed in 1917 towards the end of World War I, and it is so advanced.
I know everyone hates this term, but it fits the Defense Intelligence Agency’s definition of an assault rifle. And that definition is, so you don’t have to like the term, you don’t have to use the term, but it is a historical term. And it’s not to be confused with the term assault weapon, which is a more modern legislative term to describe most of the time semi-automatics with certain features that make them look like selective fire guns.
That was the most simplified, I think, version of that definition I could give. But basically, when I use that term, I’m talking about a selective fire gun, so something that’s capable of going automatic, with an intermediate cartridge in a detachable magazine and something that’s a single user, portable, so you can move it around. So that’s the Defense Intelligence Agency’s definition from like the 1950s, so after the Sturmgewehr and everything.
But this gun has all of those things in 1917.
In 1917?
Yeah, in 1917. It’s developed by a guy named Frank Burton, or at least that’s what we understand from the records. And Frank Burton is actually the son of James Burton, who was a gun maker at Harpers Ferry, who was the one that modified the Minier ball.
So the French made Minier ball, the conically shaped projectile. He modified it into what we used during the Civil War. So family legacy, family legacy in the company.
And so he develops this gun and it is selective fire. It is in an intermediate cartridge that he created, that he invented.
What was the cartridge?
345 Winchester self-loading.
Never heard of that.
So basically, what he did was he took a 351 and he fit an 8.8 millimeter Spitzer bullet into it. And it wasn’t like it was adopted because that’s going to be the next part of the end part of the story. But he develops a selective, or sorry, an intermediate cartridge with it.
So it’s selective fire, intermediate cartridge, and it’s got dual twin top mounted magazines, 20 round magazines. It’s wild looking. Actually, I think I’m not a video game person.
I peaked at Nintendo 64 is like Mario Kart, but like Wave Racer. But Battlefield 1, I think uses it, which is wild. I believe it’s Battlefield 1.
Danny, who runs Cody now, who worked for me back when I was there, he’ll roll his eyes if I’m wrong. But yeah, I think it was Battlefield 1. But there’s an interesting misconception about it, was that people said that it was, and it’s used like this in the video game, that there were incendiary rounds developed for it to shoot down balloons, which there’s no evidence.
Like hot air balloons?
Yeah, like military to take down balloons. Not true. There was a, well, to our knowledge, based on the testing records for the burden that we have at Cody has, that there’s no evidence that shows that.
But there is an article from an old journal that actually Cody rebooted, it’s called RMAX, it’s nowadays, it’s a peer-reviewed academic journal. But, and it was back then as well. There’s an article mentioned, I can’t remember which, I think it was by one of the early curators where they referenced that and that’s kind of, it’s taken on a life of its own
But we like, I mean, they have, Cody has all the records of like the testing and that’s not necessarily true. But what’s neat about it in general is just this idea that like technology akin to the STG, you know, that we trace is kind of the first version of that gun, you know, is dating to World War I. Some people trace an earlier 1907 variant of Winchester to a similar type of technology as well.
But it’s just kind of neat to see that like, we’re so far advanced. And then, of course, a war ends and we’re like, we’ll never go to war again.
Yeah.
And the development just gets stymie. That’s why the military-
The war to end all wars, right?
We’re good. Yeah, we’re good. We fought one world war, we’re done.
Never again. We’ve learned our lesson. So it doesn’t get produced, but it’s an interesting moment in American history that really also shows a development and advancement of international arms history, which for so long, I think we give the bold action and a lot of things that we consider classic Americana came from overseas and then we modified them and made them into iconic models that we recognize.
But it’s a neat moment, I think.
Yeah. Okay. Let’s do one more and then I have some bigger general questions for you.
Okay. So that I’m going to do the lowest hanging fruit.
Yeah, have to.
Okay. Not the 1911. That’s right.
The lowest hanging fruit.
Well, you referenced it. Everyone loves the 1911. We’ll just say that on here.
It’s great. I worked with the Matthew S. Browning collection up in Montana, and I can talk about Matt Browning and Ed Browning and John all day long.
They’re fascinating. The family is fascinating. The story is fascinating, but I digress.
That’ll be a different podcast.
That’s a different podcast. I actually wrote an article for you guys. I don’t think you ever published it on the family.
we’ll have to dust it off.
Well, look at that. But anyways, so I’m obviously going to jump forward to the AR-15, the original design, the design that was Selectifier that went between the M16. And the reason I’m going to point this out is because if you’ve noticed, I have really weird nerdy reasons why I like things that are not necessarily the reasons that other people have.
But the AR-15 is a modified version of the AR-10, which was developed by Eugene Stoner. It was modified with Stoner and Jim Sullivan at Armalight. And fun little fact that made somebody really angry on the Internet years ago, is the original AR-15 were Selectifier, because that’s what becomes the M16.
And I was standing in front of a row of Selectifier AR-15s at Cody doing an interview for PBS, I mentioned something about the definitions, the terms assault rifle versus modern sporting rifle versus assault weapon. And someone was like, how dare you stand in front of a row of AR-15s? And I was like, well, these ones actually are Selectifier.
I was like, sorry. They did not want to hear that. But the reason that I find this piece of technology so interesting, well, there’s so many reasons, but with the fact that it’s the most semi-automatic version of the most popular sporting rifle in America.
But there’s a lot of things that have to go into the development and success of a firearms design. So Sam Colt patented a self-rotating revolver. He was not the first revolving firearm and he wasn’t even the first self-rotating revolving firearm.
But he had a recipe of people around him and designers and marketing that made it successful ultimately. And you see that with like Glock, when Glock comes together making a successful polymer pistol. And you see that with the AR.
And it’s just so many components that go into it. So at this point in post-World War II period, we’re getting experimentations with lighter weight material. Like everyone’s trying to do it, right?
Aluminums, different types of synthetics and composites and plastics. No, not a lot of people are successful, right? Like whenever you’ve got something new, you’re going to see a lot of experimentation and you’re going to see a lot of failure.
And that failure doesn’t necessarily mean that the gun wasn’t good, a lot of cases of those. But not always. I mean, there are still good designs that utilize these features.
But then it’s a marriage of other things. So when you’re trying to be kind of the first or an early version of something new, and it’s important to note that the AR follows a lot of historic technologies as well. But really what we’re talking about in some instances, we’re changing the face, right?
And when you are trying to be the first and the first successful, you don’t necessarily have a great support structure around you. So if you develop it and say there’s no government contract, right? Like what happens if it breaks down?
You don’t have an aftermarket populace like you do today, right? Like if your AR goes down and you have whatever you want, like right, or you can customize it however you want. When you are starting to be new or the first at something, you don’t have that level of support.
So going into something with a government contract is, although it can take a while for the money to really trickle in, and you also see examples of like Winchester struggling because of government contracts. But it is a built-in support structure. It’s a built-in guarantee that someone is going to at least take care of you for a little bit.
And so you get that with the AR that develops into M16 because there is a government trial. And then you also have a company that can afford it. You’re now dealing with an aeronautics company, you’re dealing with armolite.
And I mean, do I have to mention AR does not stand for a saw rifle, it does not, it stands for armolite, not armolite rifle, it stands for armolite. Because there are AR shotguns. AR-17 is a shotgun.
I mean, it is armolite.
I’m sure they would appreciate that, yeah.
Yeah. It’s not a huge deal if you got close enough with armolite rifle, but it is armolite. And armolite is a subsidiary of Fairchild, which is a massive, massive, massive company.
So you’ve got not just the backing of the government if you get the contract, but you also have a lot of money going into it that a lot of companies maybe that are like mom and pop shops, that are trying to like get up and try. And even older companies like Winchester that are trying to get into the race. So they’re supported by a juggernaut company.
And then you look at the trials from this timeframe, and there’s a really interesting back and forth because Winchester does submit the Winchester lightweight military rifle to go up against the AR design. And it does, it does okay. Like the government comes back and has some suggestions, but that is a total showdown between old guard because you’ve got your metal and you got your wood gun.
But it’s like funny because you’re dealing with the same, selective fire, you’re dealing with the same technology per se, but now you’re dealing with the different materials. And so you see a cool moment where new and old go up against each other and then a range of factors where Winchester pulls out of the trials and the AR gets adopted, becomes the M16 and it also breathes new life into Colt, the revolver company. I’ve been helping out with a museum in California that’s got a huge, huge, huge Colt collection.
And they have a lot of stuff, but we all always talk about Colt going west. But how about when the west came to Colt? Because we’re also dealing in California with the development of the AR designs.
And I just think that’s kind of a cool moment in a company history that’s also associated with the west and older stuff. And so it’s kind of a nice reboot in Colt’s brand, because if you know anything about Colt’s history, especially in the mid 20th century, we’re dealing with changeover in ownership, labor strikes. I mean, there’s a lot of kind of unrest going on in the[…]
So getting this contract is a really big deal for them. So yeah, so it’s not just the technology in and of itself and what it became. I mean, obviously, that’s significant.
And Colt starts selling a version, the civilian version of the AR, semi-automatic version of the AR. I think the first shipments go out in 64, but the orders are in 63 or something like that. So almost immediately after it’s adopted on the battlefield, you’re seeing it in the civilian market.
So all of those things are cool, but it’s the combo.
Yeah, I think that point is missed, because obviously that platform has gotten so popular, and like you said, it’s the most popular style of rifle in America and has been for quite some time, but it’s not new. Even within the last 20, 30 years, there were civilian versions going way back before that. And I think that is definitely-
I mean, and you can legally own early military versions.
Yeah.
Silly Hughes Amendment.
One point that stood out to me that was prominent was like a lot of your examples was, there were these little windows of time where lots of folks were kind of all trying to solve for a similar problem and just like going about it in different ways. And like you said, it’s like there’s kind of one winner that has the right idea, the right backing, the right marketing and the right timing and they win.
Yeah.
In this like theme of like American firearms, is there one that is maybe adjacent to all the examples that you had that was like, oh, this product, this gun design should have won. Like this should have been the revolver or is it just that the best product historically has always won out?
I don’t know if I can think of one where I specifically would say it should have won because a lot of those, especially when you’re talking about, and how do you define winning? Is a government contract winning or is winning on the civilian market more important? But I think that obviously technology is very important.
I mean, look at the 1911 going through, you don’t have any rounds of ammunition without failure, right? I mean, that is very, very important. But it also brought the cult name.
So it’s not just one thing. I mean, technology is very, very, very important, but there are other factors that go into the politics of it all, right? There’s a little bit of who you know to some extent in it.
And so that’s also a unique part of the American history of it is not just that it’s not just about a history of technology, it’s a history of people and iconic figures that really define American history. And as a larger, not to completely ignore your question, but as a larger part of that, I, you can’t tell the history of America without firearms. And that’s not just like, oh, because we like guns, right?
Or, oh, because we have the Second Amendment. I could probably take any topic and tie it back to guns within a few degrees of separation. And those pieces of history, it frustrates me, have been completely pushed out of kind of the popular narrative.
The fact that part of the reason Colt was successful was because he was smart enough to hire a guy named Alicia K. Root who developed machining systems that set the standard for mass production and standardization of parts. That Henry Ford was aware of him, but that Henry Ford visited Winchester in 1909, before he built his Highland Park factory.
So we hear the history of the assembly line, and it’s Henry Ford, Henry Ford, but I mean, Sam Colt was doing it before, and yes, he modified. It’s like Munger, he did all the tweaks and things. But like, why did we lose the fact that he visited Winchester?
Or the fact that Abercrombie and Fitch, was an outdoor sporting store that became a monster in New York. It was like nine floors. It was also the largest importer of Mahjong, I think.
I know Mahjong was very popular at that store. We don’t think about Abercrombie and Fitch as an outdoor brand, but it completely was. Louisville Slugger and all the different companies that came together to make gun parts, General Motors during the war, and the fact that Remington, people made gun companies, made bikes and sewing machines, and Winchester made all kinds of crazy stuff to try to save themselves from bankruptcy in the 1920s.
But guns, sometimes, if you’re not familiar or not a part of the quote unquote community, whatever that is, it feels like a subculture. Dead ownership sometimes feels like a subculture in a more mainstream sense, and it’s absolutely not. You know, it’s integral to understanding every facet of who we are as a country.
You know, in good ways, yes, there are bad ways, and there’s ways that just are. You know, that’s what I always try to like, you know, people try to polarize it of like, these are really good things or these are really bad things. But like, they just are, you know, it’s just neutral and neutral is fine.
And neutral happens more times than, you know, anything else. And so it’s a shame that when you talk about American history, like if you talk about guns, it has to be only politics because it should define everything. And it’s pretty, I don’t know, it bums me out when I see those pieces of history lost, the narratives lost because people’s political opinions about something in today’s standard clouds their ability to objectively look at it in the past.
Yeah, I mean, that’s amazing a point. And I think, hearing all those examples, I think maybe one thing that has changed a bit is like, what you just ran through, firearm manufacturing was not like its own thing. Like that was just like manufacturing.
And I think now it kind of has shifted where some of these big companies, like there’s liability for them to be in like the firearm space. And we’ve just seen kind of a divergence of, well, the industry now is like, you’re either in the firearm industry or you’re not, and there’s not just like this kind of general manufacturing. It’s like, oh, it’s like firearms manufacturing is kind of branched off.
And yeah, I think that is a sign of kind of the political climate more than the things that like actually make sense in industry standpoint. Yeah. Okay, what is, where can we follow you?
Where can we see your stuff? You know, folks who are like, wow, I need to learn more about firearm history. I didn’t know any of that.
Like, where can they learn more?
So I’m terrible about social media, but I’m trying to be better. So if you want to see kind of like what I’m up to, which is just, you know, shenanigans, I’m at History in Heels on Instagram. I’m at official Ashley Hlebinsky on Facebook.
I have an ex. I’m trying to be better about it.
But if you really want to see more about kind of firearms history and like kind of legal side of things, you’re welcome to go to firearmsresearchcenter.org. That’s the center that I’m the executive director of at the University of Wyoming. And if you’re interested in, I’m on the editorial board, so I guess I’m mildly biased.
But you can go to RMACS, A-R-M-A-X, Journal, and you can subscribe to that as well. And they come out with some really, really gun-technical, well-researched. It’s a double-blind peer review for gun articles.
I mean, it’s kind of the only that exists. Most peer-reviewed journals get guns wrong because they have no peers, and this one is all peers. So, you’re interested in kind of the nitty-gritty of the histories.
That journal is probably definitely something you should check out.
Nice. Well, thank you so much. This has been super interesting.
Thank you.
The Outdoor Life Podcast is hosted by our editor-in-chief, Alex Robinson, and it’s produced by me, executive editor, Natalie Krebs. It’s edited by Mike Pedersen of Eighty Five Audio. Music in this episode was composed and performed by Roy Edwin Williams, via Epidemic Sound.