Thanks, Hal. Yes, those are very attractive hammers, on a Belgian gun made for a German clientele. I prefer the dolphin motifs myself, only because of their quirkiness to the modern eye. Dolphin designs were popular in Greek mythology and through the Middle Ages, when they were considered a form of fish. A hold-over from heraldic designs, the dolphin motif is also said to reflect Lord Nelson's maritime victories at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 and the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and thus popular in Victorian art, architecture, furniture-making, and guns.
On those Belgian hammers, and on several other British ones, are the vestiges of the cap guard on percussion hammers, to deflect flying bits of copper caps. This makes me ponder on the subject of hold-over, non-functional features.
In gunmaking the original design of a part might change in its function, such as the flint cock becoming a hammer, or a flint pan fence becoming a nipple fence, but all are functional. However, merging earlier functional designs into non-functional ones is a repeated theme in gunmaking. There is even a term for such a practice, skeuomorphism, and it is not limited to gunmaking. Skeuomorphism is a concept first identified by the archaeologist Henry March in 1890, and it generally refers to hanging on to aspects of an object's design that no longer have a function, or items pretending to be something they aren't. Examples of skeuomorphism on a pinfire game gun includes features such as decorative fences patterned after percussion fences, the afore-mentioned cap guards on pinfire hammers, and fore-end finials evolved from ramrod throats.
Another term used in design circles is path dependence. This is when design is limited by decisions made in the past, even if newer and better alternatives are available. Path dependency occurs because it is often easier or more cost effective to simply continue along an already set path than to create an entirely new one. A pertinent example is the iron butt plate. This is necessary on a percussion gun, whose butt must be placed on the ground for re-loading, but wholly unnecessary on a pinfire game gun -- yet it is present on almost every single one. In later pinfires you can see the eventual evolution towards heel-and-toe plates, skeleton plates, horn plates, or leaving the wood as-is, but until the mid-1860s, the iron butt plate is there...because.
How necessary is chequering? The French often dispensed with chequered hands on their pinfires, leaving the wood untouched to best show off its figure. How effective is English flat-topped chequering, beyond its attractiveness? Is any chequering really necessary on a splinter fore-end? Really? Again, the original Lefaucheux pattern fore-end is iron, and a French gun does not fly out of one's hands when fired!
Perhaps the best example of trying to retain as much of the previous design as possible is the bar-in-wood gun. Masterpieces of the breech-loading gunmaker's art, such guns try to emulate the form and sweep of the muzzle-loader and hide the hinge pin and action parts beneath as much wood as possible. Hardly a practical solution, leading to chipped wood and uncertain action strength, but remarkably beautiful when executed well, in a nostalgic kind of way.
I mentioned skeuomorphism not being limited to guns. It is commonplace all around us, and pervasive in the world of computing. To answer a call on your smartphone you press an icon in the shape of a phone that no longer exists; I saved this document by clicking on a floppy-disk icon, a technological feature no longer found on most computers today. We instinctively know its purpose, and it helps us deal with the new.
Last edited by Steve Nash; 02/04/21 06:16 PM.
