Dr. Robert Beeman, founder of Beeman’s Precision Airguns, has produced a fascinating paper on the intriguing question of the identity of the repeating air gun, mentioned 39 times in the expedition’s journals, carried on the 1804-1806 Voyage of the Corps of Discovery by Captain Merriwether Lewis.

Colonel Thomas Rodney, en route to the Mississippi Territory where he had been appointed by Thomas Jefferson as federal judge, met Lewis at Wheeling (now in West Virginia) on September 8, 1803, and witnessed a demonstration of the air gun, which he recorded in his diary.

Visited Captain Lewess barge. He shewed us his air gun which fired 22 times at one charge. He shewed us the mode of charging her and then loaded with 12 balls which he intended to fire one at a time; but she by some means lost the whole charge of air at the first fire. He charged her again and then she fired twice. He then found the cause and in some measure prevented the airs escaping, and then she fired seven times; but when in perfect order she fires 22 times in a minute. All the balls are put at once into a short side barrel and are then droped into the chamber of the gun one at a time by moving a spring; and when the triger is pulled just so much air escapes out of the air bag which forms the britch of the gun as serves for one ball. It is a curious peice of workmanship not easily discribed and therefore I omit attempting it.

Beeman concludes that the Lewis’ air gun must have been one of the 1500 air guns produced for use by the Austrian Army upon the design of the Tyrolean clockmaker Bartolomeo Girandoni between 1787 and 1801, when the weapon was withdrawn from service.

A repeating rifle capable of firing 22 balls from a pre-loaded magazine was a revolutionary advance, but this complex technology undoubtedly required more maintenance and care in operation than the ordinary soldier operating in the field could typically supply. Perhaps, also, threats from the French adversary of denial of quarter to troops found using this unconventional weapon helped bring about its withdrawal from service.

The Beeman article.

A Curious Piece of Workmanship by Joseph Mussulman.

Lewis & Clark demonstrating the airgun to the Yankton Sioux. Warren Lee, 2005.

There is write-up on a tsuba (Japanese sword guard) for which we are temporary custodian on Rich Turner’s Tosogu.com. This one has a nautical motif. Tosogu means Japanese furniture in general.

Outdoor Life reports Wenger is offering the ultimate pocket knife: a nine inch, two pound, Swiss Army Knife including every single blade and tool, all 85 of them.

Who doesn’t need a cigar cutter next to a bicycle chain rivet setter next to a golf divot repair tool? Wenger is on to something with this everyman’s gadget. It wouldn’t be a knife, though, without a blade, so Wenger put seven in the line-up. And it wouldn’t be Swiss Army unless it came with tweezers and a toothpick. (They’re included, too.)

Aotsu Yasutoshi (1893-1984)

Mr Richard Turner, one of Australia’s leading Nihonto collectors and authorities, has started a blog (Tosogu.com) devoted to the discussion of Japanese sword furniture which will undoubtedly prove of great interest to collectors and connoisseurs.

The first posting announces the exhibition at the Sukagawa City Museum in Fukushima of the collection of the tosogu (Japanese sword furniture) of the late Aotsu Yasutoshi, who left an extraordinary collection, assembled over seventy years of collecting, including some 420 tsuba (swordguards) of extremely high quality and aesthetic interest.

The current exhibition is available on-line. There is no translation, but the viewer needs only to click on the left/right arrows to navigate the site.

Ko-Katchushi (Armor-maker made) tsuba, probably mid-Muromachi (c. 1392-1467 AD) – design motif: snowflakes

William F. Moran, circa 1982

William F. Moran, a legendary figure in the world of custom knives, died yesterday morning in the hospital at Frederick, Maryland of cancer at the age of 80.

Born in 1925, on a family farm near Lime Kiln, Maryland, Moran began making knives as a ten year old boy working in a smithy on his father’s farm, using discarded tools as his source of steel. By his teenage years, Moran had learned the skills of tempering and heat-treating blades, and his homemade knives had already developed a local reputation for holding an edge.

By WWII, he was dividing his time equally between knife-making and farming, working out of a small shop he built from material salvaged from a ruined silo. Over time, Moran decided that he enjoyed knife-making more than farming, and in 1958, with knife orders piling up, Moran decided to sell the farm, and devote his full time attention to the production of custom knives. Moran built a permanent shop, a one room concrete block building, near Middletown, Maryland. He built his own forge using stones taken from the stone fences on his family farm.

The first (of three) Moran catalogues appeared 1959-1960. 21 different models were offered, including a couple of historical replicas, two kitchen knives, and a carving set. By the mid 1960s, there was a four year waiting list for a Moran knife. By 1972, the waiting list was nine years long, and Moran had stopped accepting down payments. By the early 1980s, there was a twenty year backlog. With the growth of the collecting hobby, the demand for Moran knives grew and grew to the point where Moran recognized that existing orders exceeded the number of knives he could possibly produce in the remainder of his lifetime, and he stopped issuing catalogues or accepting knife orders not much later. Naturally, prices of Moran knives soared to stratospheric levels in the collecting marketplace.

Bill Moran was one of only a handful of custom knifemakers in business before the rise of the modern knife collecting hobby, and he played a key role in bringing about a vast increase in the number of custom knife makers, and the even greater growth of the audience of collectors and connoisseurs needed to support that industry’s expansion. Public awareness of the existence of custom knives really began with articles published in sporting and Gun magazines in the late 1960s. Moran cooperated with the pioneer journalists, granting interviews and supplying photographs. Moran co-founded the American Bladesmith Society in 1976, and served as its chairman for fifteen years. In later years, he devoted much of his time to teaching forging and knife-making to a younger generation of custom makers.

Moran was one of the most important innovators in knifemaking. He was the first modern knifemaker to revive the craft of making Damascus steel blades, circa 1972, and shared his knowledge widely. He emphasized quality, and moved very early to an emphasis on artistic work over utilitarian production. When most makers were resorting to stock removal and stainless steel, Moran stubbornly continued forging his blades of tool steel. It is generally thought the superior sharpness of Moran blades was attributable to his own style of “convex edge.”

In 1986, William F. Moran was inducted into the Knifemakers Hall of Fame.

KnifeForum — Moran page at American Bladesmith Society

Some of the knives offered in the first Moran catalogue

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