Unusual Firearms: Key Guns

In our last article about unusual firearms, we looked at the Greener police shotgun. In today's post, we will look at a very unusual class of firearms, a combination of a key and a gun, the so-called Key Gun.

Key guns were apparently used in the 17th and 18th century, but they are pretty rare. They were apparently intended to be used by jailers for self-defense purposes, when they were making their daily inspections of the prison cells. The idea being that the jailer could use the same object to open the cell door and also defend himself, in case the prisoner inside tried to escape.

Key guns were initially incredibly primitive devices. The example above is merely a tube sealed on one end, with a touch-hole on top. Note the lack of any firing mechanism. The jailer would have carried a lit cigarette or cigar in his mouth. To discharge this weapon, the jailer would touch his cigar on the touch-hole and light the powder within the key.

Some other examples had actual firing mechanisms. For instance, we have a model that uses a matchlock firing mechanism, one using a flintlock and another one using percussion cap technology.

Click on images to enlarge.

Whether these weapons were actually practical or not is a completely different matter. These are all small-caliber and short range firearms with low stopping-power and it isn't quite clear how usable one of these is once the jailer has started turning the key, because the gun can no longer point at the prisoner and the jailer can't put his finger on the trigger while turning the key. No wonder then that these weren't very popular.

The Greener Police Shotgun

The topic of today's study will be an unusual firearm, the Greener police shotgun.

The history of this unusual firearm dates back to shortly after World War I, when the British ruled over very large portions of the planet and the sun never set on the British empire. In several colonies around the globe, the British set up police forces employing locals to handle ordinary law and order issues, with British army garrisons to put down major rebellions and uprisings. There came a need to equip the local police forces of countries like Egypt, India, Hong Kong etc., with weapons to put down riots and jail escape attempts, without the need to involve the local army garrison. Therefore, the British government issued a specification for a new firearm for these police forces.

The requirements of this new firearm type were a bit unusual. First, many of these police forces were not well trained or educated, therefore the firearms had to be extremely simple, sturdy and reliable. They were expected to need minimal maintenance. Since there was a chance that the guns could be used against the British troops themselves, the guns had to be short-range weapons and single-shot only. Another request was that the cartridges used for these firearms should not be easily available. That way, if the police forces decided to rebel themselves, the British garrison could easily take them on.

Greener police shotgun. Click on image to enlarge.

With these requirements in mind, the firm of W.W. Greener, a well known manufacturer of firearms from Birmingham, UK, came up with the Greener police shotgun. The action chosen for this firearm was the Greener improved Martini action that we studied a couple of years ago. This reliable action was known for its simplicity and ruggedness. It was in the Martini-Henry rifle since 1871 and the Martini-Henry rifle was already used by many local militaries, which meant that many locals would be familiar with it. In addition, the barrel, springs and action were made of heavy-duty steel for extra strength and durability. The wood stock extended all the way to the end of the barrel, to prevent damage to the barrel. In addition, note the solid steel nose cap at the muzzle end of the barrel in the picture above. This cap served as extra protection for the end of the muzzle, so even if the gun was placed vertically with the muzzle-end on the floor, the steel cap kept the barrel about 1/4" off the floor. In addition, a bayonet could be attached to the steel cap. The butt-end of the stock also had a steel plate at the end, so it could be used as a club. The stock also had a compartment to store cleaning tools. The barrel of this shotgun had no rifling, so it could only be used as a short range weapon and since it used the Martini action, the user would have to manually unload and reload a new cartridge, each time he desired to fire it. The cartridge that this shotgun was designed to fire was a proprietary 14-gauge shell manufactured by Kynoch Ltd.

The original Mark-I model of this shotgun was released in 1921, mainly to colonial police forces in Egypt. However, it was soon discovered that unauthorized users could use a smaller commonly available 16-gauge cartridge in this gun and stuff the extra space with paper. In response to this, Greener released the Mark-III model shotgun, which had some improvements to prevent this:

New improved cartridge for the Greener Police Shotgun Mark III

In this newer model, the shotgun chamber was altered to take an unusual shaped cartridge. The base of the cartridge was the same diameter as a 12 gauge cartridge, but the front of it was narrowed down to 14 gauge. With an unusual bottle-necked cartridge shape like this, this cartridge could not be used with any other firearm.

In addition, the striker of the shotgun was also modified so that it could only be used with these unusual cartridges. Instead of a normal needle shaped striker, the new striker on this shotgun was shaped like a trident, with the outer two prongs longer than the middle prong. Note that the base of the new cartridge has a deep circular groove around the primer cap. The reason for this groove is so that the two outer prongs fit into the groove and the shorter middle prong can strike the primer of the cartridge. Therefore, the Mark-III shotgun could not use any other ammunition, except for this type of cartridge. If any other cartridge was used, the two longer outer prongs of the striker would strike the base of the cartridge first and prevent the shorter middle prong from striking the primer.

The end result of this was a cartridge that could not be used on any other firearm and a shotgun that could only fire a particular cartridge type. The British authorities were very careful to issue these cartridges in very limited numbers (about two or three per person). Therefore, if criminals stole these weapons or if the local government revolted, these guns would be useful only while the ammunition was available for them.

A lot of these shotguns were issued to colonial police forces in Egypt, Malaya, Hong Kong etc. Some of them were imported into the US in the 1930s, to be used in prisons. Greener continued to manufacture these shotguns even after British colonial rule ended in many parts of the world, until about 1975 or so. Used examples can be found on sale even today.

Unusual Firearms: The Gast Gun

During World War I, aerial combat between aircraft happened for the first time in history. It soon became apparent that machine guns were needed on aircraft, because pilots needed to get a large number of rounds on target to score a kill. However, the high rates of fire were also the cause of certain problems. For one, the frequency of jamming increased with the firing rate. Another problem was how to provide adequate cooling for the barrel after firing a large number of bullets. The gun we will study today attempted to solve these problems in an unusual way.

The Gast gun was invented by Karl Gast, a German, during January 1916. He was working for the Vorwerk Company at this time. Karl Gast's solution to the heating and jamming issues was, rather than using one gun, his idea was to combine two barrels and two actions into a single firearm. What was unique about this mechanism was that upon firing one barrel, the recoil was used to load and charge the second barrel. When the second barrel was fired, the recoil would be used to load and charge the first barrel and so on. Each barrel and action were fed by a separate drum magazine.

Side view of a Gast Machine Gun. Click on image to enlarge.

Gast gun seen from the top. Click on image to enlarge.

Each of these drums held 180 rounds of 7.92x57 mm. Mauser rifle cartridges (also known as 8 mm. Mauser -- it is still a popular hunting cartridge even in the 21st century). Because each barrel would fire alternately, this could easily achieve firing rates of 1600 rounds per minute without overheating or jamming issues. The firearm was also designed for ease of maintenance and could be field stripped in about one minute. Even if there were problems with one side of the weapon, it could still fire single shots from the other barrel. It was also easy to change the ammunition drums and an experienced operator could do this within a few seconds.

Karl Gast first demonstrated this weapon to the German military in August 1917 and they were highly impressed by its design and immediately ordered 3000 guns, with the first 100 guns to be delivered by 1st June 1918. They later changed their minds and ordered 6000 more guns by September 1918.

Plans were also made to manufacture a variant that fired 13x92 mm. TuF ammunition with curved box magazines.

Click on image to enlarge.

However, this variation of the Gast gun never reached the production stage. 

While the gun was very successful, it wasn't very widely used and therefore, the Allies had no idea that it even existed by the time World War I ended. They only found out about it in 1921. Incidentally, Karl Gast had also applied for a US patent in 1920 and finally received it in 1923. The US Army got interested in the design and evaluated one. They found it very reliable, but felt that it didn't offer enough of an advantage over their existing machine guns to justify purchasing it.

The Gast gun was not used by the Germans during World War II, but this didn't mean the end of that design. The Soviets borrowed the concept to design their twin-barreled 23 mm. GSh-23 and 30 mm. GSh-30-2 series of autocannons, used on many of their aircraft in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the MiG-21, MiG-23, Sukhoi Su-25, Tupolev Tu-22 and Tu-95, Mi-24 and Mi-35 helicopters etc. A GSh-23 variant is being used in India's new HAL Tejas fighter aircraft in the 21st century, so this innovative design lives on.

The Puckle Gun

In today's post, we will study an early machine gun: the Puckle Gun. We'd first mentioned this gun many months ago, when we studied the history of revolvers. We will now study this firearm in more detail.

The Puckle gun was invented by a London based lawyer named James Puckle, who had an interest in firearm design. He received a patent for his design in 1718.

Part of the patent application for the Puckle gun. Public domain image.

This was a flintlock firearm fitted with a multishot cylinder, much like a revolver. The cylinders were designed to hold 11 shots at a time. Unlike revolvers, there was a manual crank attached to the back to bring each chamber of the cylinder to the firing position. It was mounted on a tripod and the barrel was about 3 feet (0.91 meters) long. The caliber of this weapon was 1.25 inches (32 mm.). Typical of the era, the firearm came with bullet molds to cast bullets for it (part #21 in the above patent application).

This weapon was supposed to be used as a defensive weapon. If you look at the patent flier sheet above, the weapon is advertised as "A Defence" and the tagline below the title reads: "Defending KING GEORGE your COUNTRY and LAWES / Is Defending YOUR SELVES and PROTESTANT CAUSE". Below the drawing of the gun, it says that it is intended for use in "bridges, breaches, lines and passes, ships, boats, houses and other places."

A very interesting and unusual part of this design are the parts labelled 16 and 17 in the figure above (and also 18 and 19, which show a single chamber of 16 and 17 respectively). It shows the plan of two cylinders used by this rifle. Notice that the shapes of the holes in the two cylinders are different. This is because the gun was designed to fire two different shapes of bullets and the patent document elaborates how they were to be used. The cylinder that fires round bullets was designed to be used against Christian enemies and the cylinder firing square bullets was intended to be used against the Turks, who were Muslim. Apparently the square bullets were considered to be more damaging and the patent document explains that using square bullets against the Turks would 'convince them about the benefits of Christian civilization'! These days, such views would be considered quite inappropriate and racist, but views were a bit different back in the 1700s when this firearm was invented. Incidentally, the square bullets had to be discontinued soon afterwards, because they had a tendency to fly erratically through the air.

Another general point of interest about this patent was that it was written shortly after a change in British Patent law. The new patent law stated that the inventor must describe the invention and how it works in writing, in order to be considered for a patent. This gun's patent documentation was one of the first ones to do it as per the new patent law standards.

While the Puckle gun was an interesting design, it never was a huge success. Part of the problem was that the design had many complicated components and most British gunsmiths didn't have the necessary skill-sets to easily make these parts. Even though it was a commercial failure, the gun was way ahead of its time. It was the precursor to modern machine guns as well as revolvers.

Unusual Firearms: Cemetery Guns and Coffin Torpedoes

In our last post, we studied the topic of set guns and spring guns. In this post, we will look into a couple of kinds of set gun, the cemetery gun and the coffin torpedo.

First, we go to the development of modern anatomy and medicine. The early Egyptians, Greeks and Indians had done some anatomical studies more than 2000 years ago and had written books about them, but the knowledge was largely lost during the dark ages. During the 1600s and 1700s, the study of anatomy began to flourish again in Europe. Due to the lack of refrigeration at that time, bodies would decay very rapidly and so only fresh bodies could be studied. Certified anatomists were allowed to perform public dissections once a year, and the event would be performed in a public theater with medical students, art students, scientists and general public permitted to attend upon paying an entrance fee. In most European cities, the law specified that the body to be dissected had to be an executed criminal.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, by Rembrandt

Click on image to enlarge. Public domain image.

In the above image, we see a painting by Rembrandt, which is dated to 1632. It shows the chief anatomist of Amsterdam, Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, giving an anatomy lesson to interested bystanders. The body in question belonged to Adriaan Adriaanszoon, alias Aris Kindt, who was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to death by hanging and executed earlier in the day. This painting was done by a young Rembrandt, who was only 26 years old when he painted this. There were probably many more spectators viewing the lesson, but Rembrandt only painted the spectators who had paid him money in advance for the privilege of appearing in the painting. This was the standard custom of portrait painters of that period. Some of the spectators were doctors as well and colleagues of Dr. Tulp. Interestingly, Dr. Tulp went on to become mayor of Amsterdam and he was also responsible for examining and signing the fitness reports of the first Dutch settlers of a little island in the new world, called Manhattan island!

As medical schools began to flourish, there began a demand for human bodies among several universities. However, only the bodies of those who were condemned to death and dissection could be used by law and these sentences were only handed out by the courts for harsher crimes. As a result, there was a shortage of cadavers to be studied. To fill this need, a rather unscrupulous class of criminal, the body snatcher or resurrectionist, was born. Shocking as it may sound, these people would steal fresh graves and sell their bodies to universities.

As it turned out, UK common law treated body snatching as a misdemeanor rather than a felony. This meant the offenders could only be charged with a fine and/or imprisonment, rather than execution or transportation to Australia. So body snatchers were very careful to not steal jewelry or clothes, in case they were caught in the act, as stealing clothes and jewelry constituted a felony offence, whereas stealing the body alone was a misdemeanor. The practice became so prevalent that friends and relatives of the deceased would often guard the grave for a few days after burial to prevent this from happening. It was soon after this that a type of set gun, the cemetery gun, was developed.

Click on image to enlarge.

These were usually large smoothbore flintlock weapons attached to a large block of wood. The block of wood could be fixed to the ground with a couple of spikes. Trip wires would surround the grave to be guarded and they would be connected to the trigger of this weapon. This type of firearm could be either used as an alarm gun by filling it with a blank, or loaded with light shot such as rock salt or bird shot to scare the intruder, or even with heavier shot with an intention to maim. An example of such a cemetery gun built in 1707 is on display at the Museum of Mourning Art at the Arlington Cemetery in Pennsylvania.

After 1825, when set guns were banned in the UK, the practice of using cemetery guns died out and iron and cement coffins started to become popular. However, over in the USA, set guns were still legal. Moreover, right after the Civil war was over, the number of medical students increased tremendously. Between 1865 and 1890, the number of medical schools in the US doubled and with that came an increase in the number of body snatching cases, especially in Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York. There was even a public outcry in 1878, when the body of Ohio congressman John Scott Harrison, son of president William Henry Harrison, ended up on a medical table in Ohio Medical College at Cincinnati, and was recognized by his son, future US president, Benjamin Harrison.

To prevent such events from happening, people in the US developed a firearm known as the coffin torpedo, which was a booby trap designed to go off when a coffin was opened. We have records of an improved coffin torpedo invented by an enterprising gentleman named Philip K. Clover of Columbus, Ohio. The two images below are reproduced from his US patent claim (#208672) in 1878

Click on images to enlarge

This was a shotgun that was designed to go off when the coffin lid was opened. A full description of the working method of his model may be viewed in his patent claim here.

With the advent of new laws that allowed medical schools to use unclaimed bodies and with the advent of refrigeration, body snatching cases became much more infrequent.

Unusual Firearms: Russian Space Pistol

We have discussed many mainstream firearms over the months on this blog, but we haven't looked at too many unusual ones yet. We will start with the amazing Russian Space pistol, the TP-82!

Click on images to enlarge

This three barreled weapon was in service with the Russians since 1986 to 2006 and has been carried by their cosmonauts on several space missions. The two top barrels are side-by-side smoothbore barrels that can fire shotgun shells and signalling flares. The bottom barrel is rifled and fires more conventional 5.45x39 mm. ammunition (the same as that used by the AK-74 assault rifle)

So why carry a firearm into space? Are they expecting an invasion of little green men from Mars? Well,  the real reason is to protect their cosmonauts from earth-based predators. Here's why the need for a firearm came about.

In the 1960s when the US and the Soviets were both trying to win the space race, both countries were launching spacecraft that returned the astronauts to earth via parachutes. In America's case, the landings were often over water (specifically, oceans) and the US Navy had the job of recovering the astronauts after splashdown. In the Soviet case, they had vast underpopulated areas and would try to land their capsules in their own territory. However, they often had issues where the space capsules would land well away from the intended landing zone.

In 1965, on the Voshkod 2 mission, Alexei Leonov became the first man to walk into space. This feat made major headlines worldwide. What is not nearly well-known is the number of glitches that happened in this mission: Leonov's space suit inflated too much during his spacewalk, he had to bleed some air to get back in the hatch, got stuck, overheated and nearly died out there. On the way back to re-entry on earth, the automatic landing system malfunctioned and Leonov and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, had to take over with manual controls, which meant that they could not return to their seats immediately and disrupted the center of gravity of their capsule. All this meant that they landed over 350 km. (about 220 miles) away from their intended landing zone, in the middle of the Ural mountains. There were not too many people there, but plenty of wolves and bears! While the Soviets had a rough idea where they had landed, they could not dispatch helicopters immediately to their rescue. The two cosmonauts allegedly had to stay inside the capsule for several hours, while a hungry pack of wolves was prowling outside, trying to get into the capsule.

The solution to this issue was fairly simple. The next Soviet space mission added to the survival kit, a firearm that was known for its reliability and simplicity: the AKM assault rifle (this is per a former Soviet defector named Vladimir Rezun (who writes under the pen-name "Victor Suvorov") in one of his books.) and all Soviet space missions since 1965 have always carried some sort of firearm into space.

AKM and AK-74 rifles were reportedly carried along during Soviet space missions in the 60s and 70s, all the way to the mid 80s. The TP-82 was developed in 1982 and came into service around 1986. It combines the capabilities of a shotgun (to hunt birds and small animals), a flare pistol (to signal rescuers where they are) and a rifle (to shoot bigger predators and larger game) in one firearm. It has three barrels, two side-by-side smoothbore barrels and a rifled barrel underneath. The two smoothbore barrels can fire 12.5x70 mm. shells (approx 40. gauge) and the rifled barrel can fire a 5.45x39 mm. AK-74 round. The rifle barrel has been tested and found effective to kill elk, deer, wild boar, ibex, antelope and other large animals weighing upto 200 kg. (440 lbs.) for distances up to 200 meters and the shotgun barrel has been used effectively against rabbits, foxes, partridges, ducks, geese, pheasants etc. The stock is detachable and contains a machete inside it, to cut wood and build shelters. The stock can also double as a small spade or shovel to dig holes in the ground. The entire firearm with the stock weighs about 2.4 kg. (5.3 lbs.) and without the stock, it weighs 1.6 kg (3.5 lbs.). The three types of ammunition for this weapon come on a belt that is attached to the gun.

The TP-82 remained in service until 2006 or early 2007, when the ammunition that was made for it degraded and became unusable. Since then, the Russian missions have reportedly carried a semi-automatic pistol (reportedly, a Makarov PM) for self-defense.