Someone named Greener thought side-locks to be an anachronism once the cocks went inside in the 1870s...and the most recent reincarnation of the "Elsie" Smith is not a side-lock. I wonder why?
The on-going debate of side-lock versus box-lock is a recent invention. Greener's comment favored his new hammerless box-lock in the context a modernization of the action that was less costly to make.
...and Greener was a lone voice in the wilderness. To suggest that the debate is a recent invention is hilarious. You have a lot of reading to do.
What is hilarious is how the Internet works. People with absolutely nothing to say get to say it anyway, with no peer review or editors interfering. I made the statement about box-locks versus side-locks not being a topic of serious debate when the guns were in current production: This was peer reviewed by Mike Carrick, editor of
The Gun Report; Vic Venters, Senior editor of
SSM; Dave "Researcher" Noreen; Charlie Price, co-author of
The Parker Story; and a number of other experienced gun writers who are actually published in magazines and books. No one questioned my well-researched statement.
Right now I am in the process of inventorying and listing for sale most of my research materials, which include 45 volumes of
Shooting & Fishing from 1885 to 1906, read cover to cover as they relate to shotguns and bird shooting (250 pounds of books, 1,092 16- to 24-page weekly issues, over 100,000,000 words). I have also bought, read, and sold the full run of bound annual editions of
Forest and Stream--Rod & Gun from Vol. I in August 1877 through about 1890 the first 4 volumes brought $1,200 two years ago);
S&F-R&G over-lapped my bound complete run of
Shooting & Fishing. I have also bought, read, and sold a great many(over 2000 individual issues of
The Chicago Field, and
The American Field that dove-tail with my interest in absorbing what there is to know on the subject pre-WWI.
Meanwhile, I have a complete library of American-published shotgunning and shooting flying books from the first in 1783 until WWI, all read, by the way. And I supplement my reading in the rare book room at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg VA when I'm east visiting my kids. This research has resulted in 4 books in 14 years, and over 50 published articles. I am perhaps the only free-lance gun writer who is actually paid $$$ up front plus royalties to write a book.
Parker Guns: The "Old Reliable" has sold over 8,000 copies and is running out the second printing; my new book,
Parker Guns: Shooting Flying and the American Experience has over 30 dealers on Amazon cutting each other's throats selling it.
And then along comes somebody puesdo-named "400 Nitro Express," and with zero information to contribute, he says my well-researched, well-documented, and throughly vetted statement about the dearth of 19th century box-lock versus side-lock debate is "hilarious." And that I, of all people, "...have a lot of reading to do."
So the lesson here is how low the bar is when it comes to posting cryptic comments on the Internet. And the sad part is that these people get to vote.
Please be advised that I have no vested interest in whether there was much or little or no debate; if I had found any I would have reported it as a story line in the subject chapter on the topic. The lack of quotable quotes left me with Greener's pronouncement, which reflected his vested interest in his new box lock. End of story...
...except that my wealth of research materials, including original and reprint catalogs, advertising, post-WWI books, pulp-weekly newspapers, bound editions of pulp-weeklies, and shotgun- and ammo-related collectibles (used in my photography) will be sold over the Internet by e-Mailed lists for those who e-mail me to inquire and request info after my ad in the Summer
Parker Pages is published. Thus "400 Nitro Express" has given me an excuse to toot my own horn and show that his sour lemon is my lemonade. EDM
