doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com XIX century - high-tech or low-tech?

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?

No, and calibers seem to be going backwards. What's better than 7 X 57 used by the Boers against the British ?

Add the 6,5 x 55 mm!

Humpty, this is a great topic - it applies not only to gunmaking but to everything technological and to scientific instruments as well. I think there might be some question about your assumption:

"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."

If we look back in time even as far back as late Medieval or Renaissance times, going into the 16th and 17th centuries, a lot of superb mechanical devices were being made. These were all "leading-edge" for the period and what we would today call "high-tech." Making an astrolabe, for example, required highly specialized mathematical and astronomical knowledge, highly competent artisans and sources of quality metal. In the 17th and 18th c, the air pump was about as high-tech as any instrument or mechanical device in existence. It required large capital input, skilled artisans in many fields and they were expensive and limited to a few natural philosophers. All these devices stretched the limits of then-current technology, financing and trade skills.

In all historical contexts technology draws upon what is available at the time and despite the notion that these devices were crude or "home-made" they were certainly not - they required great skill to make and also a lot of money. They also required the efforts of more than one person, in general. There were no large factories, PhDs, subspecialty engineers, marketing departments and such. This in no way diminishes the "high-tech" quality of that product. Gun-making falls into the same category.

Home-made and Hand-made are very misunderstood descriptors. Any physical artifact is a material execution of a concept - how that execution occurs depends upon the time period and whenever a design change implementing new concepts is implemented it usually involves the best technology of the period. What was "high-tech" in the 17th, 18th or 19th century might have been supplanted by newer technologies and is now "low-tech" but not necessarily something that anyone could do at home.

The gun is simply another mechanical instrument and its manufacture and development parallels that of other devices. The modern gun draws upon many outside developments (as noted) including powder, optics, steel. It can still be made "by hand" and there are probably a few makers who can do that but in general a lot of automated machinery is used. Neither the machinery nor the hand labor makes the product low-tech or high-tech.

HD--

This is a great topic and I thank you for starting it.

Having said that, now I'm on the attack--

There is a fundamental problem with the way you've set up the issue. Your definition of high/low tech is ahistorical and fails to take into account technical/manufacturing progress (what is high tech in one generation may be low tech in the next), evolving social/economic conditions (the development of corporate organizational forms, the decline of guild forms of organization, and the rise of state/government sponsored research development and manufacturing (in this context, national defense initiatives, whether NASA in the 20th century or various government owned arsenals in the 19th).

Once upon a time Damascus steel (or a Toledo blade, for that matter), was the best out there. Over the last half century various snarky comments (sadly grounded on experience) have been made damning the metallurgical deficiencies of Spanish and Turkish guns. Half a century ago, it's possible that Spanish industrial practices, immediately after WW2, were sufficiently deficient that one could offer that caution legitimately. Today, the diffusion of steelmaking expertise around the world has gotten to the point that if there is a problem with the steel in a Turkish gun, blame the specifications to which it was manufactured at the behest of the foreign distributor, not the lack of state of metallurgical expertise in a country that is, after all, the home to any number of parts manufacturers in the supply chain of the global auto industry.

I mean, who would ever have thought that an Indian company (Tata) would end up owning British Steel, the consolidated entity that is heir to the traditions of Birmingham and Sheffield?

I hope I'm not just piling on and reinforcing Gnomon's point. To come at your issue from a different angle, my gut feeling is that, in terms of the pace of technological development of small arms, the century from 1815 to 1914 (end of the Napoleonic Wars to be beginning of WWI) saw more progress than the century from 1914 to 2013. But that's because during that period improvements in small arms technology had more real-world military consequences than they have had for that last century. You can make a pretty good argument that the Soviet development of the AK-47 sixty years ago was the last 'sea change' event in small arms technology and the various Vietnam-era doctrinal shifts in American military thinking about the role of small arms in combat marked an end to efforts in that direction for other reasons.

Just my two cents, FWIW, and, again, thanks for starting the topic.

Might be a difference between being high tech and looking high tech. Maybe the ultra modern plastic rifle looks trendy, but in many instances is no more effective than the hundred year old sporting rifle.

The process to manufacture might be high tech, but plastic shaped like a rifle stock could be a similar tech as was used to make a fast food drinking cup. Those historic western adventurers that hunted in Africa and similar places could have sailed their local lake in a small dingy, but they probably felt like they were on the cutting edge when they could buy a commercial ticket to sail half way around the world.

"his hammerless ejector Express was made using much the same technologies as his first percussion"

Yes and that is precisely it, and that is how certain thins have been writ in stone, with all the positvie and negative results.

The British makers rejected things they could not make, like coil springs, sticking to using construction methods they controlled, ie hand work.

They gave us superbly ergonomic hunting implements, but somewhere along the way we confused the end result with the process used to achieve it, that is our fault not theirs.

"his hammerless ejector Express was made using much the same technologies as his first percussion"

Yes and that is precisely it, and that is how certain thins have been writ in stone, with all the positvie and negative results.

The British makers rejected things they could not make, like coil springs, sticking to using construction methods they controlled, ie hand work.

They gave us superbly ergonomic hunting implements, but somewhere along the way we confused the end result with the process used to achieve it, that is our fault not theirs.

Good point. I suppose most was just inventive progress and development. The only real technological advance was the development of smokeless powders over black allowing for smaller bores and higher velocity. Looking at a Manton double flintlock alongside a Purdey double and there isn't all that much difference in technology just an improvement on design. Lagopus.....

There is an interesting book on the Kindle entitled: On the Wing by John Bumstead. The book was written in 1875 and is a discussion for sportsmen about the merits of the muzzle loader vs the new technology of the breech loader. I've enjoyed reading it. I don't think there is too much literature from this period extant.