Clay Pigeons

With the London Olympics just around the corner, one of the events held there is the Olympic Trap Shooting competition. In this competition, shooters armed with shotguns attempt to shoot at clay plates that are thrown in the air. These plates are called "clay pigeons" or "birds", the machine that throws them is called a "trap", a hit is referred to as a "kill", a miss as a "bird away". So what are the origins of such terms.

A clay pigeon target made by Remington Inc. Note the name "Blue Rock".

Click on image to enlarge. Image released to public domain by user Jeff Weiss at Wikipedia.

To understand some of these terms, we must go back to the end of the 1700s, when shooting sports were popular among the rich people of England. At that time, the targets were often live pigeons and the first record of such events dates to the 1750s when flintlock firearms were still popular. By the 1830s, it was a well known sport and several shooting clubs were operational around London. Firearm manufacturers even began to manufacture specialized firearms called "pigeon guns" for this purpose and these were often double-barreled percussion shotguns.

One of the oldest shooting clubs from that period was called The Old Hats public house on Uxbridge road at Ealing, near London. The name "Old Hats" derived from the way that the pigeons were held before releasing: small holes were dug into the ground and the birds were put into these holes and old hats were put on these holes to keep the birds in the dark and prevent them from escaping. A system of ropes and pulleys were used to pull the hats away and release the birds when required. The "Red House" in Battersea was another famed London club known for wager shooting. By 1856, the hats were replaced by box traps which had sliding doors operated by ropes. This is why the sport is now called "trap shooting" and not "hat shooting". The Hornsey Wood House club was the first one to start using traps (incidentally, the Hornsey Wood House club was formed in 1810 and was the first dedicated pigeon shooting club).

Now we can go into the origin of some of the terms that are still with us. In the old shooting clubs, when the shooter was ready and wanted a bird to be released, he would yell "pull" to tell the assistant to pull the rope and release the trap door. Modern shooters still yell "pull" when they're prepared to shoot a target for this reason. As you've probably guessed, this is why the target is still called a "bird", a hit is a "kill" and a miss is a "bird away".

If you look at the picture of the clay target above, note that it is named as "Blue Rock". There is a history behind that name as well. The favorite type of bird used in England for pigeon shooting was the Blue Rock pigeon.

The Blue Rock Pigeon. Image taken from W.W. Greener's The Gun and its Development, which is now in the public domain.

According to W.W. Greener's book The Gun and its Development, the preferred variety was the Lincolnshire Blue Rock, which came from the Lincolnshire district of England. These birds were raised by farmers in Lincolnshire in cotes close to the coast, which made for a particularly hardy bird which was small in body size, but quick in flight and tough. Other Blue Rock pigeons were bred in Oxfordshire and Yorkshire, but were deemed inferior to Lincolnshire birds. Many birds were also imported from Antwerp, but they were not as game as the English birds, per the author. The second best preferred bird was the English Skimmer, which along with the Antwerp birds, were used in the second-rate shooting clubs.

The sport of trap shooting spread from England to Europe and America and became so popular that it became hard to obtain live birds. Therefore, enthusiasts started to make artificial traps to cover the shortage. The first artificial targets were glass balls and these were used from around 1865 to 1880 or so. Glass ball shooting originated in England and rapidly spread to the US. The platter shaped clay pigeons were first made around 1880 by Mr. George Ligowsky in Cleveland and began to replace glass balls almost immediately. These clay traps also gradually began to replace live traps as well and by the 1900 Olympic games held in Paris, trap shooting was an official Olympic sport. Incidentally, the 1900 Olympics had two additional shooting event as well, one using live pigeons as targets and another one that involved shooting running game. It was the only Olympics to have these two events. By 1921, it became illegal to use live targets in England and the clay traps were then used in all shooting contests since. A popular hand trap throwing device was invented in 1927 by Emile Laporte of France, which also gave a huge boost to the sport. This was a spring loaded device that gave a spinning trajectory to the clay pigeon and made the target stable in flight for at least the first 50 meters or so. Trap shooting is still a part of the Olympic games.

Interestingly enough, between 1900 and 1992, the Olympic sport of trap-shooting was one of the few sporting events where men and women competed against each other in the same event. It was the 1996 Olympic games that made separate events for men and women.

Shotguns: Actions and Designs

The early history of true shotguns begins in the 1800s, when people began to use them to hunt birds. During that time, the flintlock firing mechanism was the ignition system of choice and hence, it should be no surprise to know that early shotguns used them. The problem with such mechanisms is that there is a noticeable delay between pulling the trigger and the weapon actually discharging. The Rev. Alexander Forsythe, a Scottish clergyman and an avid hunter, noticed that the local birds would see the flame in the pan and immediately change direction and thereby escape. Hence, he set about inventing the percussion lock, which was the next big development in firearms technology and was also used by other firearms besides shotguns. The percussion lock was eventually replaced by modern cartridges, which we use to this day.

Shotguns come in both single barrel and double-barrel types. Double-barreled shotguns have two triggers, one to discharge each barrel. Of the double barreled shotguns, there are two types: "side by side" type and "over and under" type. What this means is how the two barrels are positioned. In "side by side" types, the barrels are placed beside one another, whereas "over and under" types have one barrel positioned on top of another.

"Side by Side" type shotgun

"Over and Under" type shotgun

Double barrel shotgun barrels are never attached parallel to each other, but instead set so that their shot will converge at some point (usually at 40 yards distance). In some shotguns, one of the two barrels may be made different from the other. For instance, one may have rifling and the other is smoothbore, or one barrel may be choked for closer shooting. In other cases, both barrels may be made as identical as possible.

Of all the actions, the break-open action, such as the two images above, is the most common type and has been around for a long time. This is a breech-loading mechanism. It was realized in 1875 that the movement of opening the action could also be used to cock the weapon at the same time. The first such cocking mechanism was pioneered by Anson and Deerley for their hammerless shotgun and it is still used almost unchanged to this day. Break-open actions are the most common type used for shotguns.

Another action that was invented in the mid 1800s and rare today, is the side-motion action. In this type of action, the barrels are mounted on the edge of a metal disc. A lever in the bottom of the stock rotates this disc, which causes the barrels to move in an eccentric motion, where they can be reloaded.

Another action that was invented in the 1800s, but is rare now, is the sliding barrel action shotgun. There are only a few manufacturers around that make this type currently and it was never as popular in the 1800s either.

Sliding Barrel Action Shotgun

Lever action shotguns were popular in the 1880s. The Winchester model M1887 was designed by John Browning and became a best-seller for the company. This was the first truly successful model of a repeating shotgun. This action allowed for users to load multiple cartridges into the weapon, not just one or two cartridges. Their popularity waned after the design that we're about to study in the next paragraph was introduced, and we don't see too many lever action shotguns these days.

Lever-action

The action that replaced the lever action design is the pump action shotgun design. The first popular ones of this type were the Winchester M1893 and M1897 models, which were designed by John Browning! It must be noted that when Winchester originally asked Browning to design a repeating shotgun in the 1880s, he had argued that a pump-action mechanism shotgun would be the most appropriate design, but Winchester was a lever-action manufacturing company, so they persuaded him to design a lever-action shotgun, which was the M1887 model described above. However, they did later manufacture his pump-action design as the Winchester model M1893, which was later improved to the model M1897. It must be noted that the M1897 shotgun gained so much popularity that it was used by US soldiers in World War I, where it was found very useful for trench fighting. Its quick shooting speed and massive stopping power made it a very effective weapon for US soldiers to have. In fact, the German troops feared this weapon greatly and the German High Command even attempted to have it outlawed in combat, by citing Geneva convention laws (this coming from the same people that allowed the use of poison gas!). The pump-action shotgun design is still popular to this day.

Pump Action shotgun

There are also semi-automatic shotguns, where some of the force generated by the firing cartridge is used to eject the old cartridge, cock the action and load a new cartridge. Semi-automatic shotguns use a variety of mechanisms: long recoil action, inertia operated action or gas-operated action. The first successful semi-automatic shotgun was the Auto-5 (or A-5) action first designed in 1898 by (surprise, surprise) John Browning! The Auto-5 model remained in production until 1998!

Semi-automatic Remington Model 11 shotgun using long-recoil action

Bolt-action shotguns also exist in the wild, though they are not common. One particular model was manufactured in .410 caliber by the Ishapore arsenal of India, based on the Lee-Enfield SMLE Mark III model.

Ishapore .410 caliber bolt action shotgun. Click on image to enlarge.

In the next post, we will look into more about shotguns.