Genhart Horizontal Turret Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
•
10m
Heinrich Genhart was a Swiss designer working in Liege, Belgium in the 1850s making horizontal turret rifles. His design was actually pretty decent, and included recessed chamber mouths and a calming barrel which would lock more or less solidly into each chamber for firing, thus minimizing cylinder gap flash. This particular example is a roughly .38 caliber rifle with a 10-shot cylinder, in a pretty rough stock (I suspect a replacement). Genhart patented this design in Belgium in 1853 and in the United States in 1857, but turret rifles quickly fell out of popularity and his production ended by about 1860.
The Genhart guns were designed for a specialty cartridge, formed of lead or tin foil using tools sold with the gun. They used a type of tube primer set into the base of each cartridge during assembly, which was crushed by a hammer moving directly upwards. The whole system seems quite good, but doomed by the advent of much better cartridge technology.
Up Next in Forgotten Weapons
-
Forehand & Wadsworth Old Army Revolver
The Forehand & Wadsworth company was a better firearms manufacturer than most people tend to give them credit for. It evolved from Allen & Wheelock, with Sullivan Forehand and Henry Wadsworth both having married daughters of Ethan Allen. When Wheelock died in 1863, the two were made partners in t...
-
Erma/Glaser Luger .22 Rimfire Conversion
In 1927, a Berlin resident named Richard Kulisch patented a .22 rimfire conversion kit for the Luger pistol. Kulisch’s conversion used a magazine and fired semiautomatically, which made it a much more practical conversion for military and police training than the 4mm single shot conversions than ...
-
Engraved Glock 19 Pistols - Yes, That...
Would you believe it? Factory engraved Glocks are actually a thing! They have not made all that many, but they do turn up from time to time, recognizable by their ELP serial prefixes. These three were displayed by Glock at the 2002 SHOT Show, and are now on the civilian market. They were made as ...