Talk:James Puckle

That's the, Jack
First, it's not a machinegun, nor ancestral to 1, it's a revolver rifle, in the fashion of many (much later) types following the Colt (who also made 1); I won't even count the ADEN cannon. Second, "fired square bullets"? Huh? I presume this means "flat nosed". Can somebody who actually knows clarify? Trekphiler 13:13, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, square bullets
The Puckle gun, which IS the first machine gun (unless you also consider the Gatling gun to be "not a machinegun nor ancestral to one") absolutely fired square bullets. I've seen reproductions of the original advertisements and a period engraving of the weapon. It's fired with a crank from preloaded cases (just like the original Gatling prior to the introduction of metallic cased rounds and elimination of percussion caps) and is basically just a 150 year older design than the Gatling. It does not have multiple barrels because it doesn't fire fast enough to need them, but it still fires faster than the long arms of the time - something you cannot say about revolver rifles, which were no faster to fire than the pistols of the same period - and it's still a mechanically driven "machine" gun not recoil-driven, gas-driven, or trigger-pull driven like a revolver rifle.

I've never heard before that square bullets were "believed to be more damaging", rather I was told in military history classes 25 years ago that bullets square in cross-section were more accurate than round shot, especially when used with square barrels, and led to the development of twisted polygonal bores which in turn led to rifling. In the early 18th century rifling was still too difficult and expensive for mass-marketed human-portable weapons.

Note also that once upon a time Christians weren't supposed to use crossbows on each other - the weapon being too accurate and powerful - but Richard the Lionheart ignored the Pope's prohibition. One presumes any customer of Puckle's would not have been quizzing pirates about their ethnicity before firing about them, so Puckel's "square bullets for Turks" may just be advertising verbiage to prevent conflict with clergymen.

The "mistakenly" and "citation needed" edits (the page links the original patent, for chrissakes, which shows bullets and chambers as distinctly square) are incorrect. I have removed the "mistakenly" since the existing phrase "sometimes considered to be" is NPOV (and also correct, as 15 minutes in a good library will easily reveal - some authorities consider machine guns to be only those that are driven by exhaust gases, but many other consider the Gatling, Puckle and Milletreuse to be primitive machine guns). -- Charlie


 * In the strictest sense neither weapon is a machine gun in the modern sense of the term (per the definition provided by SAAMI, which is about as authoritative as it gets) because neither is fully automatic (and the Milletreuse is a volley gun, which is a completely different type of weapon). The Puckle gun is totally manually operated with no components that have anything to do with automating aspects of its fire cycle (the crank is used to manually rotate the cylinder and to form a seal with the breech, and isn't even connected to the lockwork, and unlike other early flintlock revolvers the Puckle can't prime itself through operation), while the Gatling is effectively a rack of straight-pull bolt-action rifles inside an assembly that operates them as they turn, with a crank to turn the array of rifles around. Gatling, though, did do experiments hooking up his guns to early electric motors, and so his guns were capable of being fully automatic. Puckle's was not.
 * It's entirely fair to say neither is an ancestor of true machine guns; Maxim's gun had nothing to do with Gatling's in terms of how it actually operated. I'm not sure where you get "powered by exhaust gases" from, since there are three self-powered fullauto operating principles and Maxim used recoil, not gas (the third is blowback).
 * As for firing fast, you do know there were lever-action rifles like the Kalthoff repeater kicking around a century earlier that fired six or so times faster then Puckle's gun could, right? Herr Gruber (talk) 07:29, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

james puckle
he made the gun —Preceding unsigned comment added by 156.110.35.125 (talk) 21:54, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Proposed move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: no move. Andrewa (talk) 07:53, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

James Puckle → Puckle gun — Per WP:COATRACK. The primary topic of this article is the gun, not the person. It contains only a bare minimum of biographical information. Roger (talk) 09:50, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Oppose. While I would agree that the main focus of the article is currently the Puckle Gun and not Puckle himself, I would not agree that this has anything to do with WP:COATRACK, an essay which talks about creating an article to hang POV and/or irrelevant material off it. The Puckle Gun is a subject worth writing an article about, as you acknowledge yourself, and the material is not POV (see WP:Coatrack). Puckle has a biography in the Dictionary of National Biography, less than half of which discusses the gun, so it seems reasonable for us to have an article about him. -- Necrothesp (talk) 17:03, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Split
From the RM above, it seems possible that this article will eventually be split to form a separate article focussed on the gun, while this article remains biographical. IMO the article needs to grow a bit before that would be appropriate, but it's the ideal long term solution. Andrewa (talk) 07:57, 9 March 2011 (UTC)


 * As it stands now this article contains less than two complete sentences about the person - the first sentence identifies James Puckle as the inventor of the gun and another (completely disconnected) sentence says he wrote a book. All the rest of the content is about the gun, so this article is in fact focussed on the gun, not the person. This article should be moved to Puckle gun and the introduction rearranged slightly to make the gun the subject of the first sentence. A new biographical article can be started independently. Roger (talk) 08:26, 9 March 2011 (UTC)


 * I'd suggest you give up on that one; It was proposed and received no support, and that should be it for a while at least. If you wish to create an article on the gun, there's nothing to stop you doing this. If you copy text from this article to do it, then put a note to that effect in the talk pages of both articles, in order to comply with the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. If you copy only information, there's no need. Put a main link to the new article in the section of this article on the gun. And a stub notice should go on this article until the biographical details are filled out; I'll put that on my todo list. Andrewa (talk) 20:19, 9 March 2011 (UTC)


 * I've flagged it as an English biography stub and a UK military stub... there doesn't seem to be any stub category for writers, or for lawyers, or even for inventors, let alone for firearms designers. Andrewa (talk) 23:06, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Notice: A new stub article, Puckle gun has been created with initial content copied from this article. Roger (talk) 08:10, 10 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Perhaps the gun section of this page can now be reduced as there is a main article about the gun itself. Roger (talk) 08:27, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

2 more Puckle guns on display in Montana, U.S.A.
The Miracle of America Museum, in Polson, Montana, U.S.A. was recently donated 2 historic reproductions of the Puckle gun. One is the original flintlock version, and the other was reworked to be a percussion gun. These are very authentic, quality, working, guns, and look exactly like existing drawings and the 3 known examples in England, with the slight modification of the percussion example. The maker and donor, whose permission to use his name, I don't as yet have, started making historic reproductions in the early 1960's and is now 86 yrs. young and still working his hobby shop.

The museum is currently trying to raise funds to build a period (early 1800's) gun shop w/ treadle and line shaft tools and a display of approximately 150 other firearms from the 1400's thru the Civil War. I should have a picture of one of the Puckle guns on our Facebook and website by the end of Jan. 2015.

I am not a computer whiz, so I hope this gets posted for further enlightenment and enjoyment.

Gil Mangels, Founder and chief executive of the Miracle of America Museum 66.135.79.121 (talk) 03:55, 13 January 2015 (UTC)