A Real Oddball
Repeating guns went through a lot of odd designs before what we would consider any of the modern forms came about. It’s understandable. In the days of single-shot front-stuffers, a repeating rifle of any kind would give a soldier or gunslinger a considerable advantage, even if the power level was lower, and even if the operation of the repeater took several steps. That was a problem with a lot of early repeaters, as was the challenge of reloading with loose powder, ball, and percussion caps. The time spent reloading a repeater may well have taken more time than reloading and firing a traditional rifle-musket.
That didn’t stop designers from trying to find a way to make a practical repeater, even in the days before metallic cartridges. This brings us to history’s first chain gun, or perhaps you’d call it a belt-fed repeater: The Treeby Chain Gun.
Which brings us to a British inventor, Thomas Wright Treeby. In the early 1850s, in Britain, he determined to make a repeating rifle. Now, this was in the very early infancy of repeating guns, and let’s just say that there were a lot of differing ideas on the best way to do this, back in the loose powder and ball era.
The Design
Almost anyone interested in guns is familiar with the concept of a belt-fed gun. If you haven’t shot one, in the service or at a machine-gun shoot, you’ve probably seen them in action in videos, in movies, or on television. Instead of a fixed or detachable magazine, these guns are fed by cartridges in a flexible belt. Some of the older designs used cloth belts that could be reloaded and reused. Some use metal links that eject with the spent cases, and those can be used again, too, although I’ve no experience with how easy it is to reassemble them with live rounds – although I’ve certainly helped to police up a lot of them on firing ranges.
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Thomas Treeby’s gun was a forerunner of these pieces. A .54 caliber black-powder gun, instead of being the traditional single-shot front-stuffer of the time, it was a front-loading repeater; Treeby called it a chain gun, because it used 14 (or more) individual steel chambers, which were attached to a mechanism in the gun that allowed the shooter to fire those 14 rounds quickly by advancing each loaded chamber in turn. Thomas Treeby obtained British Patent No. 1552 of 1855 for his chain gun, and off he want to the British Army to see if he could interest them in his novel repeater.
He didn’t have much luck.
The Guns
Treeby was an ambitious sort, so he took his repeater to the Army, no doubt hoping for a round of suitably polite British applause, some back-slapping in a jolly old way, and a contract. But that’s not what happened. The British Army took a look at the Treeby gun, subjecting it to testing at the School of Musketry in Hythe. Only two Treeby guns were made, or so reports go, and both were run through their paces.
The gun was rejected by the army due to its complexity and low power. In testing, the gun achieved a high rate of fire when discharging its 14 rounds (there are some reports that one was fitted with a 30-round chain) in a little over a minute. But then, each chamber had to be individually reloaded, as though one were reloading 14 individual muzzle-loading rifle muskets. Loose powder, ball, and don’t forget a percussion cap for each chamber.
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Firing the gun was also a complex process. The official website of The Most Honourable and Noble Lord and Lady Treeby of Berkshire, presumably descendants of the inventor of the Treeby Chain Gun, describes its operation as follows:
Firing the Treeby rifle requires following a specific process.
First, of course, each of the 14 chambers must be loaded with powder and ball, and a percussion cap placed on the firing nipple on each one.
Once the weapon is all loaded, the lever on the barrel must be rotated up. The barrel is connected to the frame by way of a very coarse thread, so lifting the barrel lever pulls the barrel forward, away from the chamber.
Next, the hammer is manually cocked, which rotates the chain of chambers and indexes one into position. Then the barrel lever is rotated back down, pulling the barrel in and sealing it against the chamber.
Only now can the trigger be pulled, which fires the round currently sealed up to the barrel.
That’s a lot to remember, especially if people are shooting back at you.
Why Didn’t It Work?The gun was never produced. It was too complex, too expensive, and it also came along at a time when the metallic cartridge was first introduced, which had the effect of rendering the Treeby, for all its innovative design, immediately obsolete. Repeaters like the Jennings and later, the Spencer, the Henry, and the 1866 Winchester, along with the first efforts by a couple of German brothers named Mauser, set the new standard for repeaters. The world would evermore belong to the fixed metallic cartridge and simple, fast-loading, fast-firing repeaters.
Today, one of the Treeby guns is in a museum in Hampshire, in the United Kingdom. The other is reportedly in a private collection. These may be some of the rarest guns in the world, with only the two known examples. It’s also a neat look at something rather odd by today’s standards, but in the early 1850s, in the infancy of repeating rifles, there were a lot of things that looked odd to today’s shooters. It worked – but other designs worked better. It’s a lesson for inventors, who may even now be tempted, to borrow a phrase from another famous Brit, to say “Now, for something completely different.”
