Military History Photo Friday: A Viennese Death Organ from 1678

I was rummaging through some old photos yesterday and came across some from the Military History Museum in Vienna I took back in 2013. The museum has an incredible collection from the 16th century up to modern times, with an especially strong World War One section. More on that in a later post. Today I'm sharing something from a bit earlier, an attempt to make a quick firing gun from 1678. It was constructed by Daniel Kollman, a gun maker for the Holy Roman Empire.

By this time guns were in common use on the battlefield and armor was on its way out, but guns still suffered from the fact that they could only fire one shot and took a while to reload. Various attempts were made to solve this, such as making guns with two or more barrels. Another solution was to put rows of guns on a carriage. This device was called a ribauldequin and appeared as early as the 14th century. It also earned the name "organ gun" since its barrels looked like the barrels of a church organ, although the music wasn't as good.

Because I couldn't get behind the ribauldequin, I couldn't see its firing mechanism. I presume it was a series of flintlocks that set off the powder in the barrels. It would have made quite a nasty antipersonnel weapon against a closely packed group of pike men, one of the more common infantry formations at the time. Reloading it must have taken ages!

Military History Photo Friday: Pepperbox Pistol

I came across an interesting old gun in an antique shop here in Oxford. It was a so-called pepperbox gun much like the one pictured above. The pepperbox was an early form of revolver that, instead of having a cylinder that revolved, had four or more barrels that all revolved together. Early models had to be rotated by hand but later models had an action connected to the trigger so it would rotate with each shot.

The concept goes back to medieval times, and I wrote about a similar multibarreled handgonne on another blog. They were most popular from about 1800 up to around 1860, when they were replaced by proper revolvers. The pepperbox never saw any official military use that I know of and was strictly a personal weapon. While the multishot capability was a major benefit, it was front heavy and couldn't be aimed very well.

I've always liked antiques and was tempted to pick it up. But how could I justify spending 300 pounds ($460) on a gun that doesn't work anymore? Well, maybe it works. I'll let you try it while I stand at a safe distance.

Here's another percussion cap model, somewhat cruder, from the Museum of Weapons in Tula, Russia. While the gun shown above has six barrels, this only has four.

Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons.