I've been thinking. We all know that XIX century was a time when progress in sporting weapons took numerous leaps across one generation. A chap migth start hunting about 1840 with a perrcussion muzzleloader, a 16 bore rifle for stalking, an 8-bore for dangerous game. Then, in just a decade or two, wham! in come the breechloader. It must have been a relevation, especially for dangerous game. You no longer had to trust to the gunbearer being there at the right moment and not screwing up with the load. A few more years, and there's the Express, which doubled or even tripled the shooting range. And, by 1890, our hunter was not too old to try the new-fangled smokeless-powder bolt-action magazine rifle, a .256 Mannlicher for example.
I've been thinking, for some reason, about a Brit colonial hunter. But his (or her, for that matter - there were enough shooting ladies at all times) American colleague went through similar revolutions, from Kentucky rifle to Winchester repeater.
A lot of progress in a lifetime. But was it high-tech or low-tech?
By common understanding, low-tech is something that you can do at home. Rust-blueing is a good example. High-tech, by contrast, is something that requires lots of investment and collective effort. A billion-dollar lab, a crowd of highbrow researchers with scary-sounding degrees, who work for years and years and then come up with a new plastic fantastic or cryogenic treatment technology. Then, it takes a huge corporation with big production unit, armies of managers, accountants, marketers, etc., etc., to produce the equipment with which one could take this research and make a gun using its results.
Now, if we follow this definition, then most of XIX century gunmaking, revolutionary as it was, was pretty low-tech stuff. Returning to our Brit hunter, his hammerless ejector Express was made using much the same technologies as his first percussion. In fact, they could quite possibly be made by the same person. Workers who did stock-inletting, engraving, lock-making, barrel-boring for the first Forsyth "detonating guns" in 1818, if someone gave them a ride in a time machine to 1918, could have walked right up to a Holland&Holland work bench and start building a .465 Nitro Express without years of retraining.
Of course, smokeless powders, jacketed bullets and fluid steel can't really be called low-tech. They required precision machinery, advances in science, big manufacturing plants, before they could provide the low-tech gunmakers with actions, barrel blanks, and ammunition. Yet nothing of that could be compared to modern research and production. Most chemical discoveries of the XIX century, for example, were made by individuals with the help of a handful of assistants, in laboratories which wouldn't impress a modern high school science teacher. Nothing compared to a modern research facility.
Finally, modern hunters go out deer hunting with ultramodern rifles, with plastic stocks, cryo-treated sub-MOA barrels, latest powders, bullets, scopes, etc. Of course these advances give them some edge over the 'old, low-tech stuff'. But how big is this edge? Does all this high tech give you the same level of advantages over a 1880s .256 Mannlicher rifle, than that Mannlicher gave to the old Brit as compared to a 16 bore percussion rifle?
