Repeating rifle

• 1. Introduction

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  A repeating rifle fires again and again before it ever needs reloading. In 1774, a Norwegian colonel named Fafting built one that could reportedly fire eighteen to twenty shots in a single minute. He was reportedly working on an improved version meant to fire up to thirty times in a minute.

  Two and a half centuries before self-loading firearms existed, gunsmiths were already chasing rapid, repeated fire from a single barrel. How does a single barrel manage shot after shot without being reloaded by hand each time? Why did so many of these early designs vanish almost as soon as they were built? And what finally let a rifle reload itself, with no lever, bolt, or pump at all?

• 2. Repeat Without Reload

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  Between each shot fired, a repeating rifle keeps several cartridges ready inside a magazine, built into or attached to the rifle itself. A reciprocating bolt draws each round from that magazine and feeds it into the chamber, cycled either by hand or automatically. Chambering a fresh round also recocks the hammer or striker, setting up the very next shot in the same motion.

  In everyday use, the term covers mainly the manually worked versions: lever-action, pump-action, and bolt-action designs, cycled by hand between every shot. Self-loading rifles work differently. They borrow the recoil, gas, or blowback of the shot just fired to cycle the action and chamber the next round on their own. Strictly speaking, every self-loading firearm counts as a repeating firearm too, but the everyday label is reserved for the manually cycled kind.

  That manual-versus-automatic split would matter most on the battlefield, where the right mechanism could decide how fast a soldier could fire.

• 3. A Civil War Divide

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  During the American Civil War, infantry units carried the Henry rifle while cavalry units carried the Spencer. Two branches of the same army went to war with two different repeating rifles. Both weapons stayed in service through the American Indian Wars that followed, extending their combat record well beyond the Civil War itself.

  Before repeaters like these arrived, soldiers reloaded single-shot breechloading rifles one round at a time, a slower process to manage under fire. Repeating actions let each soldier fire far more shots between reloads, a rate-of-fire advantage that changed how commanders thought about firepower in combat.

  Military repeating fire was not limited to gunpowder either. The Windbüchse was the first repeating air rifle to see military service.

  Long before Henry or Spencer built a single cartridge rifle, inventors abroad had already been chasing the same idea for more than two hundred years.

• 4. Centuries Of Near Misses

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  The earliest design on record, the Kalthoff repeater, dates to about 1630. Roughly a century later, in 1718, came the Puckle gun, followed in 1779 by the Girardoni air rifle.

  In 1813, two Americans, William Church and Chrostus Bartemy, patented a repeating rifle with three separate magazines holding up to forty-two charges of ammunition. It could fire twenty-five shots a minute and be fully reloaded in a single minute.

  Between 1834 and 1844, a French gunsmith named Devisme paraded an unusual string of repeating firearms through a series of French exhibitions. In 1835 he sold a seven-shot revolving rifle to, in his own account, 'an Arab chief.' By 1842 he demonstrated a double-action revolving rifle whose cylinder could reportedly be swapped out in three seconds. Two years later, at the French Industrial Exposition of 1844, he unveiled an eighteen-shot pistol described as a 'shapeless mass.' It had no visible hammer and fired solely by finger pressure.

  In 1847, Walter Hunt patented a repeating rifle in Britain, calling it the 'Volitional Repeater,' then patented it again in the US in 1849. Hunt's design fed cartridges from a tubular magazine beneath the barrel into the chamber using a lever. Unable to afford building the rifle himself, Hunt sold the rights to George Arrowsmith, whose employee Lewis Jennings then reworked the lever mechanism. A hardware dealer named Courtland Palmer placed the first order, for his firm Robbins and Lawrence, under the name the Jennings Magazine rifle. Sales were poor, partly because its ammunition, a hollow based bullet packed with its own gunpowder, proved unreliable. Most surviving rifles were later converted to fire only a single shot. Two Robbins and Lawrence employees, Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, then refined the design further and sold it as the Smith-Jennings Repeating Rifle. They first used a modified Flobert cartridge patented in 1853, before switching to an adapted Rocket Ball round built as a self-contained centerfire cartridge.

  In 1855, at the Exposition Universelle, a gunsmith named Leroux was still demonstrating a repeating carbine loaded with thirty-six Flobert cartridges. It was one more entry in a long list of inventions that had not yet settled on a single winning design.

• 5. The Hand-Worked Actions

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  Some of the earliest long guns simply borrowed the revolver mechanism already used in pistols, cylinder and all. Without special sealing, a revolving cylinder fired close to a shooter's face could vent gas dangerously close to the eyes. That was the usual risk when a revolver-action design was fired from the shoulder like an ordinary rifle. That flaw kept true revolver-action rifles from lasting long in general use.

  Most falling block actions fired only a single shot, but a handful became repeaters, including the Norwegian Krag-Petersson and the American Spencer rifle. The Krag-Petersson loaded from a Henry-style magazine fitted beneath the barrel, while the Spencer instead fed rounds from a tubular magazine hidden in the buttstock.

  In a classic Henry-Winchester lever action, individual rounds sit in a tubular magazine that runs parallel to, and just below, the barrel. A short bolt is held shut by an over center toggle, a linkage that will not open under simple recoil once the weapon is closed. A hand grip built into the trigger guard operates that toggle. Working the lever pushes a magazine spring forward, feeding a fresh round into position. Returning the lever chambers that round and locks the breech shut. An interlock then blocks the rifle from firing until the toggle closes fully. The Model 1873 Winchester became the best known rifle built on this toggle-link system. Later lever guns, including Marlin's and several John Browning designed for Winchester, replaced the toggle with one or two vertical locking blocks instead. Some lever-action rifles feed from a box magazine rather than a tube, which lets them use pointed bullets instead of round-nosed ones.

  One firearm applied lever action automatically rather than by hand: the M1895 Colt-Browning machine gun. A swinging lever beneath its barrel, driven by gas bled from the barrel itself, unlocked the breech every time the gun fired. Because that lever visibly swung with every shot, the gun earned the nickname 'potato digger.'

  Among pump-action rifles, the Remington Model 7600 series stands out, since the mechanism is usually linked to shotguns instead. The shooter pulls a movable fore-end backward and forward to eject the spent round and chamber a fresh one. Some local police departments still favor pump-action rifles, since officers already trained on pump shotguns adapt to them quickly.

  The Mauser rifle, dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became the most famous bolt-action design of all. Most similar rifles trace back to it, including the M1903 Springfield and the Karabiner 98 Kurz, usually shortened to Kar98k or K98. A bolt action itself is worked by hand. Pulling it back extracts the fired case, and pushing it forward chambers a fresh round while resetting the firing pin. A lever holds the bolt shut inside a notch. Moving it free lets the shooter draw the bolt back, and an extractor throws the spent case out through the lever's slot. A spring at the base of the magazine then pushes each reserve round upward, positioning the topmost cartridge between the bolt and the chamber. Pushing the lever forward chambers that round, and locking it back into the notch seals the bolt while enabling the trigger. The Russian Mosin-Nagant, the British Lee-Enfield, and the Norwegian Krag-Jørgensen round out the best known bolt-action rifles.

  The M1895 Colt-Browning's gas-driven lever pointed toward a different idea entirely: making the rifle cycle itself, with no hand on the lever at all.

• 6. When The Rifle Reloads Itself

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  A blowback action leaves the bolt completely unlocked at the instant the round fires, relying on mass and spring tension to hold the breech shut. Most blowback firearms delay that opening in some way to prevent a violent, dangerous recoil. In many small arms, the bullet leaves the barrel while the bolt is still moving forward, and the bolt only opens once that momentum is spent. Other designs delay opening by forcing a pair of rollers back into recesses cut into the receiver that carries the bolt. Simple blowback is cheap and easy to manufacture but limited in power, which is why it turns up mainly on small caliber machine pistols and submachine guns.

  Lever-delayed blowback, as used in the French FAMAS assault rifle, can handle stronger cartridges than simple blowback, though it costs more to manufacture.

  The Browning Auto-5 shotgun uses long-recoil operation. Its barrel and breechblock stay locked together for the entire recoil stroke before separating on the way back. Short-recoil actions, the type found in most semiautomatic handguns including the Colt M1911, let the barrel travel only a short distance before the breechblock decouples. In recoil operation more broadly, the breech stays locked while the barrel itself recoils backward as part of firing each round.

  A gas-operated rifle bleeds off part of the propellant gas already driving the bullet down the barrel and uses it to drive a piston. That piston's motion unlocks and cycles the bolt, which extracts the spent case and, with a spring's help, chambers the next round. Almost every modern military rifle today relies on some version of gas operation.

  The FAMAS itself sits at the boundary of these two eras. It is a lever-delayed blowback design, still cycling on the pressure of its own fired cartridge rather than a hand on a lever.