INVENTORS

There are several types of inventors of firearms, including those who invent real improvements, and those who delay invention by making all sorts of things which are not only useless but are even dangerous.

Inventors, to do any good work, must be conversant with their subject, and, if possible, skilled mechanics as well.

This is the difficulty when shooting experts, who are not gunmakers, try to invent anything.

The shooter knows what is necessary, often far better than the gunmaker.

The shooter has to use the firearm, and often finds details in them, which are very beautiful perhaps, from a mechanical point of view, but which are very awkward or even impossible from the practical shooting point of view. A noisy bolt action for example.

The shooter knows what he wants but cannot put it into practical shape; the gunmaker, if he is not a shooting man as well, does not know of this want.The best way out of the difficulty is for the shooter to collaborate with the skilled mechanic and then between them they can evolve something really useful. This is the way most improvements are evolved, the shooter constantly testing the invention and pointing out its faults to the gunmaker who alters till the thing works well.

If an expert mechanic (even if he is a gunmaker), who is not a shooting man tries to invent a firearm improvement by himself, and he finds it works in the workshop, he thinks that is all that is necessary, and the invention is a failure as no shooting man will use it.

The expert shot who is unmechanical, cannot put his ideas into practical shape, and if he does not go to a gunmaker and ask his help, the invention never takes shape; in this way some invaluable inventions never see the light, for want of a little mechanical knowledge.

But there is a third type of inventor, who is absolutely hopeless and the despair of any shooting man he shows his invention to.

This is the man who knows nothing about shooting but he has his own ideas as to how shooting is done, and is too conceited ever to try to learn anything.

He is the type of man who says “Oh, we will muddle through.”

Such a man has a vague idea that, as he himself cannot shoot, therefore his own individual difficulties if he tried to handle a firearm are the difficulties which all shooting experts labour under.

He does not know that an expert laughs at the difficulties of a beginner, which never trouble a man when he has become expert.

As well might a man the first time he is put on a horse imagine that, because he has to fly up and down off the saddle at each movement of a cantering horse, that the expert also has to take care not to fall off.

The expert can sit on a cantering horse without the least lifting from the saddle, whereas the beginner flops up and down.

In the same way the expert shot has passed the stage which the inexpert inventor tries to invent against.

A horseman would not buy a saddle with straps to tie down the rider, invented by a man who did not ride.

The non-rider thinks such things absolutely necessary to keep from falling off, the expert horseman not only knows such things are unnecessary, but would be a danger in case the horse fell, as the rider could not fall clear.

In the same way inventors of firearms, if they are not shooting men, invent dangerous things for overcoming dangers which do not exist except in their own imaginations.

This would not matter so much if they would listen to experts but they refuse to learn, and actually try to instruct experts.I had a man come in recently to show me a terribly dangerous pistol he had invented.

He was pointing it about in all sorts of dangerous directions and finally put the muzzle against his own body whilst he tried to cock it.

I suggested to him he had better first see if it was loaded.

He smiled at me in a pitying superior way, but opened the breech and took out a loaded cartridge.

“Why it is loaded,” he casually remarked, re-inserting the cartridge and beginning again to fumble with the lock, whilst he held the muzzle against his body.

I said, “Don’t you know you can kill yourself if it goes off,”—“that is the great beauty of my invention,” he informed me radiant with delight, “I have made this thing,” pushing the trigger with his left thumb, “so that it only moves at a pressure of fourteen pounds so it is quite safe.”

These know-alls work up through all the steps man has gone through in perfecting firearms, instead of taking up the work from the highest it has come to.

Most likely the first inventor of firearms found he shot people accidentally when “pulling at this thing” (as my friend the inventor called the trigger), then discovered by experience that, however heavy the trigger-pull is made, it is sure to kill somebody accidentally if pulled hard enough, and finally came to the conclusion that it is safer to have a light trigger-pull if the muzzle is not pointed in a dangerous direction, than to have a half-ton trigger-pull and keep the muzzle pointed against one’s body.

PLATE 19. WINANS’ REVOLVER FRONT SIGHTS

In the matter of sights an optician, even if ignorant of firearms, may be able to give a valuable hint to an inventor, but this usually applies to sights for accurate aiming at distant stationary objects; for a pistol it is more often expert shooting knowledge which is useful in designing sights.

It was my combination of sculptor and shooter which gave me the idea of my front sight, any one not a sculptor would not be apt to stumble on the idea of undercutting the sight so as to give a deep shadow below and so make the top stand out light against a dark lower portion. (See Plate 19.)

In the same way some entirely distinct branch of learning may be of use to the inventor of firearms; but in all cases, this must be subservient to practical shooting knowledge; the man who tries to force his ideas onto a shooter, against the shooter’s expert knowledge, makes a mistake.

The highest authority can always learn something new from an expert; but the man ignorant of a subject who tries to teach an expert merely exposes his ignorance, like a politician who tells a general how to conduct a campaign.