Talk:Puckle gun

Ridiculed in its time

A patent was issued for the Puckle Machine Gun during the time of the South Sea Bubble. One card maker published a pack of South Sea playing cards. Each card carried a caricature of a bubble company, together with a short verse. Here's the one about Puckle's Machine Company:

A rare invention to destroy the crowd

Of fools at home, instead of fools broad.

Fear not, my friends, this terrible machine,

They're only wounded who have shares therein.

Described on page 100 of Charles Mackay's "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions," 1841, still in print, and still relevant after 180 years.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.93.59.0 (talk) 10:43, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

New article

This article has been created with initial content copied from James Puckle. Roger (talk) 08:24, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Comparision to later guns

It would be interesting if somebody with knowledge of the subject could compare this gun to later guns such as the Gatling gun or other early machine guns. Wjousts (talk) 17:54, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Gatling's gun could fire 200 rpm, Puckle's only managed 8 or 9 rpm. 86.121.18.17 (talk) 14:46, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Someone should perhaps create an article for N.J. Lobnitz' 1834 air-powered machine gun which had "a firing rate of up to eighty shots per minute and enough muzzle velocity to punch through a one-inch pine board at a range of 250 feet. However, its undoing was the gigantic air pup with two six-foot-diameter flywheels to drive the gun." (quote from the same 2008 book by T.-W. Lee found in this article.) 86.121.18.17 (talk) 14:48, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Later, in 1850, Lobnitz (who was Denmark's war commissioner) also invented the "organ espingol". See http://www.milhist.dk/vaaben/lands/espingorgel/espingorgel_uk.htm 86.121.18.17 (talk) 15:02, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Contradiction:  Was it practical, or not?

  The introductory paragraph contains the following text:

…the design concept behind the Puckle gun turned out to be years ahead of what was technologically achievable with 18th century technology. The first practical guns using this design principle, now known as revolver cannons, only appeared in the mid-1940s.

  Later on, in the “Production and use” section, we get this:

Prototypes were shown in 1717 to the English Board of Ordnance, but they were "not impressed". However, “at a public trial held in 1722, the gun was able to fire 63 shots in seven minutes in the midst of a driving rain storm, an amazing feat for the period.”

  So it sounds like a working prototype was indeed produced and demonstrated, the performance of which was “an amazing feat for the period.”  This seems to rather directly contradict the earlier statement that ”…the design concept behind the Puckle gun turned out to be years ahead of what was technologically achievable with 18th century technology…“ as well as that that practical applications of the technology didn't appear until the 1940s.

  On reading the article as a whole, I get the impression that the entire reason for the Puckle gun's lack of success was a failure to impress the necessary investors and potential buyers, rather than anything inherently impractical or unfeasible about the technology itself. — Bob Blaylock (talk) 21:50, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

It was fairly amazing flintlock revolver, which is like being the most useful chocolate teapot. Herr Gruber (talk) 00:53, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Why? It doesn't have to be better than a cap lock, it only has to be better than a muzzle-loading flintlock. Note that it's also being made before Huntsman's crucible steel process, so even metallurgy is on shaky ground and it's hard to make something as simple as a reliable spring. Andy Dingley (talk) 01:34, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

I think you just answered your own question; the lockless swivel guns actually used on ships were far more reliable than this was, didn't require the fiddly operation of refilling a flash pan on a moving ship which would drop the rate of fire through the floor (it's impressive having it firing in the rain, I guess, but that's not what Puckle was asking for), weren't prone to corrosion of the lockwork due to spray in high seas, and since the Puckle Gun seems to have no integral parts for reloading cylinders, once you were out you'd have to sod off below decks and reload them with some kind of tool before the gun could be used again. Revolvers were basically useless curiousities until the invention of the percussion cap that gave them some semblance of practicality.

Also, replacing the cylinder is nothing like a detachable magazine; a magazine contains rounds, but the unitary firearm cartridge had not been invented yet and so there was no such thing as a round. Herr Gruber (talk) 20:45, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

As said above, something being "amazing" is not the same as "useful". If Puckle had been able to refine the design significantly, it might have been practical to manufacture and use, but the prototypes, while impressive, did not grant a significant ENOUGH advantage over the pre-existing technology. There were many innovative ideas during this time, but they all had the same flaws - expensive to make, and inefficient to use.Jmackaerospace (talk) 01:49, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Eh, I don't even think it was that amazing compared to marvels like the Cookson repeater and Kalthoff repeater, and gunsmiths had already knocked up working revolver mechanisms that didn't need Puckle's rather primitive hand-operated screw. Really it was just a swivel gun, and swivel guns with breech blocks which could be preloaded and rapidly swapped out already existed; a trained crew with a stack of preloaded breeches could probably beat a Puckle gun's fire rate since they wouldn't require the screwing and unscrewing, and the single-shot chambers would be lighter and easier to handle, and make it easier to switch between ball and shot rather than having to change out an entire cylinder (same as modern tactical shotguns don't tend to use box magazines because it's harder to deal with special rounds). Plus I don't want to imagine how the Puckle gun would cope with mass production, his handmade prototypes worked well enough, but you'd probably have seen crews throwing entire cylinders out because they didn't fit and the like if they'd tried to mass produce it. I mean nevermind what sea air would do to the screw thread over time, there's a reason naval guns tended to have few moving parts back then.

I'm also not sure about Puckle's claims for the role of the weapon; when would you be able to fire that many shots during a boarding action? I'm thinking he was just hoping to get some sales to people who wanted an intimidating-looking weapon to deter pirates, given that this was Blackbeard's day and all. Herr Gruber (talk) 07:36, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Magazine, or not?

It is precisely like a magazine, so far as the basic idea: performing "the reloading operation" for a number of rounds at once, rather than one by one. This is what both Puckle and the magazine do. Puckle is the first weapon to do so. It doesn't matter if their "reloading operation" is considerably different. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:56, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

It neither contains rounds nor does it perform the reloading operation (which is instead performed on the cylinder and lockwork by the operator). Also, given the chambers appear to be very solid pieces of brass and the whole crank assembly is part of the cylinder, I imagine swapping out a cylinder would be quite a project and not exactly easy to do under pressure. Apparently what really killed it was the flintlock mechanism, though; there's not much point in being able to theoretically fire three times faster than a musket if it's more expensive and difficult to make than three muskets and doesn't go off half the time you try to fire it. Herr Gruber (talk) 21:04, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

It's a 2 bore, not a musket calibre. It's firing a rather heavier ball, much further. So speed comparisons with muskets are somewhat irrelevant.

No-one knows how fast British flintlock muskets were at this period. The past era (Civil War and Glorious Revolution) of rapid-fire matchlock musketry was over (yes, in that period a matchlock was favoured for repeated volleys) and Britain was no longer fighting massed infantry battles. The flintlock had vast failings, true, but it was now the standard small arm lock. You'd have to look to Europe for rates of fire on flintlock muskets of this period.

The cylinder, like a revolver, acts as chamber and multiple magazine. Its chambers are pre-loaded at leisure with charge, ball, wadding and priming. Eleven of them are loaded into the gun with one operation. Multiple cylinders may be held in store, pre-loaded. I'm not a fan of calling 19th century US revolvers "speedloaders" (IMHE a speedloader is a stripper clip with brass cartridges) but this terminology is used widely in the US for cap-and-ball revolvers, so who am I to argue?

The Puckle always (AFAIK) had iron cylinders, not brass or bronze. Brass cylinder examples (of which there are plenty) are modern. It's a 2 bore, brass is inadvisable.

You also seem to think that the Puckle was a flintlock. Why? Puckle's design and his patent shows no lock. The early survivors show a manually-fired match-lit touchhole, like most other light artillery - as was also used for most volley guns. If you're firing a volley quickly, then like the Civil War matchlock it's reasonable to use match: it's simple, it works and it has a really good "reload" time between shots. No doubt some continental gunsmith, clockmaker and automaton maker could probably work out a cam-driven mechanism for cocking a flintlock, or simply attaching one to the barrel and doing it manually as later naval artillery did. But Puckle didn't (look at the papers and the surviving examples, not some Carolina gun show replica).

One thing Puckle did include was a pawl mechanism for rotating the chambers automatically. Winding the the clamp nut right out would rotate the cylinder by a notch, ready to wind back in. Single-handed and quick. As the chambers were also coned on the face, this gave both a taper-seated breech seal and also some alignment as the breech was closing. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:39, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

The thing is there's no need for it to be that size because it's a light gun for dealing with boarders; carrying three extra muskets would give you the same rate of fire and three mechanisms instead of one for a higher chance one of them will actually fire for a given volley, which is good when the flintlock mechanism isn't exactly noted for being robust.

A cylinder is not a magazine because it does not contain complete rounds and contains a part of the gun's action (the chamber, and in this case also the entire operating mechanism). A cylinder does not have a follower, which is generally held to be the key component of a magazine (wikipedia's magazine page incorrectly throws in gravity-feed hoppers, which are not magazines either). There is simply no comparison between this and a magazine-fed firearm; the closest would be weapons with cassette magazines like the Pancor Jackhammer, but these contain complete rounds, not just ball and powder with no primer.

Every source on the Puckle Gun says it was a flintlock revolver and all modern museum pieces based on Puckle's work have a flintlock mechanism with the lockwork mounted on top of the cylinder; the patent doesn't seem to have it drawn in detail, most likely because Puckle was a lawyer with no idea how to design lockwork and his gun was using someone else's mechanism for that. Notes on the rejection state that a key reason for it was the lack of reliability in the flintlock mechanism, and this is easily sourced. Herr Gruber (talk) 14:12, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

There are very few sources on the Puckle gun, and nearly all of those are wrong. Like most firearms stories, and all the infamous firearms stories, it's an absolute magnet for inaccuracy. So look at the good sources, and the early textbooks before coffee table books started recirculating the same myths.

The patent is visible on the web - no flintlock. http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ref/MG/I/img/MG-1-001-11.jpg The patent is incidentally quite detailed and shows main subtle features, but no flintlock.

The museum pieces - no flintlock. There are only a handful of these, I doubt there are any outside the UK, I've probably seen most of them myself. Here's the piece at Buckler's Hard http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Buckler's_Hard_Maritime_Museum_06_-_Puckle_Gun.jpg

Chinn's book only mentions Puckle in passing, but that's a book with phenomenal research behind it and he describes "slow match".

You can find this nice photo on the web of what's clearly a flintlock-equipped Puckle in well patinaed iron http://sadefensejournal.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/iwa07.jpg - yet even that is a replica. So maybe there were flintlock Puckles, maybe they were added later, maybe someone thought that a boat at sea really needed a wet flintlock as yet another headache – but it wasn't Puckle doing this, he was using match.

You claim that the cylinder is not a magazine because "it does not contain complete rounds" So what's missing? Also there are plenty of heavy artillery cannon autoloaders where the primer tubes are loaded separately, yet those are still "magazines". Why can't a magazine also act as a chamber? It's not usual, but it's not a reason for exclusion (and the cap-and-ball revolvers would later do it). "a follower, which is generally held to be the key component of a magazine" is only accurate for stacked magazines where a sprung follower is needed to position the rounds. Pan magazines don't use them, nor do loose box magazines for belt-fed LMGs, yet they're still magazines; nor did the Johnson rifle's rotary magazine, let alone the strip magazine of the Hotchkiss M1914. Closest example though is probably the multi-barrel Reffye mitrailleuse and its 25 round plate magazines. Loaded as one, fired sequentially and the magazine plate formed the chambers. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:01, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

That's nice, but the sources say it was rejected because of the flintlock mechanism being unreliable; it would therefore be reasonable to assume the match-lit versions were prototypes made before Puckle had made any kind of deal to supply him with lockwork for his final guns, given Puckle guns clearly do exist with flintlock mechanisms and accounts of them being fired with flintlock mechanisms also exist.

Belt boxes are not magazines (they are sometimes called drum magazines, but those are actually something else, and they're correctly just called drums if they contain belted ammunition), in a pan magazine the entire assembly acts as a follower, the Johnson's integral magazine does have a follower and works like the drive member of a helical magazine without the helix, the Hotchkiss uses a feed strip which is not a magazine at all but a precursor to modern belted ammunition, and the "plate magazine" of the Reffye mitrailleuse is not a magazine in the modern sense, it's a clip since it is a simple piece of metal with no operational mechanical parts that simply holds rounds together; since it is inserted into the weapon, it is an en-bloc clip like the one used by the M1 Garand.

I don't think anyone would argue an artillery autoloader is a magazine in the smallarm sense and I'm not sure where you get that idea from. Usually the term "carousel" is used for a system like the one used in the T-72, and in other cases they're using magazine in the warship sense of "the place ammunition is kept." Herr Gruber (talk) 15:23, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

The mitrailleuse magazine is referred to universally as a "plate magazine". It's also the only one I can think of offhand that, like the Puckle, forms the chambers too. It is definitely not just a clip!

Carousels are arranged in a ring around turret baskets, with the crew and gun placed inside them. However there are also autoloader designs where there's a magazine (usually a drum, sometimes a box) somewhere behind the breech. These are called magazines. Even when they're two-parting the rounds. A few designs have used fixed barrel guns (S tank etc) or oscillating turrets to simplify the breech - magazine alignment with autoloaders. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:14, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

That's weird, sources I'm familiar with tend to use "loading block" or "loading plate" because it is not a magazine in the modern sense of the term, it is a breech block with cartridges attached to it. I already did give you one example of misused terminology where it does apply (the cassette magazine of the Jackhammer) which also has no mechanical role in loading the weapon and no real follower, though realistically this is because it's a detachable cylinder that's misnamed. It's hardly a radical invention when revolvers which were not designed to be reloaded in this way ended up being reloaded in this way more practically than one which was, it's more like claims that Star Trek invented flip phones because they made a prop that happened to look a bit like one.

In those instances they are using "magazine" in the sense that it is used in a ship: a battleship turret also has a magazine, but it is not the same kind as the one used in a handheld firearm. 16:28, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

AFAIK, all of the revolvers that are possible to load in this way are designed to load in this way. They are cap-and-ball revolvers, which are obviously slower to load than cartridge revolvers. Although they have features like frame rammers, the cylinders are easily removed, mostly for cleaning, and they're designed to permit multiple, interchangeable cylinders to be used (that in itself was quite a new feature of these factory-made interchangeable parts weapons), loaded in advance.

I know of no cartridge revolvers (other than some pre-charged air pistols) that are designed to be capable of reloading by cylinder swapping. The closest is maybe a top-break Webley and even they won't do it (the necessary dismantling is excessive) - and they used speedloaders, even supplied with them from the factory.

I have no idea why you're comparing battleships to this, but so far you're giving no reason at all why the magazine of a Puckle gun is not a magazine. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:37, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

The fact that something can be detached for cleaning and replacement with spares does not mean it was designed to be replaced as a means of reloading the weapon. The designer decides what a device is being designed to do: the .50 BMG, for example, was not designed as a round for heavy sniper rifles, even though it is now used as one.

I don't have to prove a negative, it's your job to prove some compelling argument why (a) it is one, despite not fulfilling the modern definition of a magazine as a device for loading rounds (powder and shot is not a round) and (b) this was noteworthy, despite the Puckell arrangement of a hand-cranked revolver cylinder not making any kind of impression on future designs of repeating weapon. Herr Gruber (talk) 16:46, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

How else was it to be reloaded? The only way to load this was to load the magazine cylinder first. Puckle is specific that multiple cylinders may be used. He is thus clearly (in the absence of any other method) intending their use as magazines.

Your point about .50 BMG makes no sense. Are these not sniper rifles (they clearly are used as such) because Browning hadn't considered such a possibility? If anything, that suggests that something becomes such a device when it is used as one, even when not within the original intention.

Powder and shot makes a round, even if not permanently enclosed within a brass case. After all, the 17th century "cartridge" was a wooden bottle, hung from a belt. Or do you deny their existence too?

The future take-up of the Puckell design has no relevance for our description of parts. Despite the fact that 150 years later it did re-appear similarly (a hand-cranked mechanism with multiple chambers to a single barrel) as the US coffee mill gun. General Gorgas' gun was even more similar, one was even the same calibre, although it had the cylinders mounted radially, on a perpendicular pivot behind the breech. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:35, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

So now you're down to inventing doofy terms like "magazine cylinder" to justify your claims? Something is either a magazine or a cylinder, it can't be both.

When you use the phrase "designed as" you are talking about what the designer's original intent was. Puckle intended his gun to be reloaded by swapping out the cylinder, while there is little evidence the makers of early percussion revolvers thought likewise: they were not designed with this in mind, or it would have been made easier to do and features such as loading levers for reloading the cylinder while it was still in the gun would have been omitted. What something is used for is not necessarily the same as what it was designed for: if my computer breaks and I use it as a footstool, that does not mean it was designed to be a footstool.

At minimum, powder, shot and case make a round, preferably also with a primer. Just stuffing shot and powder into a chamber does not qualify: if it did, you could count a loaded flintlock as a round and therefore a pirate's brace of muskets as a magazine. As for trying to dredge up archaic definitions of "cartridge" to apply to the modern definition of "magazine," we are not in the 17th century: if we were, a magazine would be the place on a ship, fortress or military base where powder is stored, and you would be even more wrong than you currently are.

The coffee mill gun has nothing to do with Puckle's design since the revolving mechanism is a permanent part of the gun rather than a detachable assembly and reloading is performed by putting more cartridges in the hopper (it is far more similar to Gatling's work, only Gatling used what were effectively entire bolt-action rifles attached to the crank rather than just a loading mechanism). And seriously, you're trying to argue this was noteworthy because a single gun that was never used was based on a vaguely similar principle? Puckle's system cannot be held up as an early example of a detachable magazine because nobody holds it up as one, it is not one, and it was not influential on later designs that did qualify as magazines.

To be honest you do not strike me as being particularly knowledgeable about this topic, especially with the claim the Johnson Rifle did not have a follower. How do you think it indexed cartridges, magic? Herr Gruber (talk) 22:23, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm sorry if you consider the phrase "doofy" (whatever that means). I'm unaware of Puckle's own term for it. Perhaps you know it?

I did not use the phrase "designed as", you did.

You seem obsessed by the problem of flintlock ignition, despite a lack of evidence for it actually being used. You claim that individual priming was still needed (i.e. "the fiddly operation of refilling a flash pan" before each shot): yet Puckle's patent and the survivors still show the multiple priming pans, loaded in advance, and each covered by a small lid.

You have invented a qualifier for "magazine" such that it's not a magazine if it pre-dates cased rounds. That's sheer WP:OR: this magazine contains "all that is necessary for each round" (the term "round" incidentally goes back to at least the 17th century in England). You have consistently failed to address the key issue here: why a multiplicity of pre-prepared charges loaded into the weapon as one unit does not qualify as a "magazine".

I would still appreciate comment from other editors on this, but you seem to have nothing left to offer other than descending to insults. Andy Dingley (talk) 07:39, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

I did not invent anything, this is the modern definition of the term magazine. As you have noted, there is no evidence that Puckle himself ever used the term magazine, nor that anyone other than you regards it as an early magazine, nor that it is correct to do so without resorting to some homebrew definition of "magazine" that you stretch to include belt boxes which lack any mechanical components.

I am aware I am the one who used the phrase "designed as." You then tried to argue with me that phrase can mean "used as." You talk down to me for being insulting, but your arguments are clearly made by scanning my posts rather than reading them properly, so you can hardly fault me for being rude in kind.

You are the one who keeps arguing with the sources that this weapon was not a flintlock, based on some weapons which are presumably early prototypes and ignoring all later mock-ups (nevermind the one you claimed was an original because it looks like you want is actually a mockup itself). Do you think the creators of these mock-ups just decided to stick a flintlock mechanism on the gun for no reason? How come there are accounts that the flintlock mechanism made the Puckle Gun unreliable if it did not have one? How is a match-lit revolver an even remotely sane idea, when even percussion revolvers with better protected chambers were prone to row ignition? How the hell would it take just over six seconds to fire each shot in the demonstration if all they were doing was applying a match?

You are once again trying to use 17th century terminology as your get-out clause, I see. The modern definition of "magazine" uses the modern definition of "round" (SAAMI: "One complete small arms cartridge") If it didn't, you could describe one of the attempts to put superposed loads in a cannon as containing multiple rounds, even though this is clearly not the case. It's hard to find a modern definition of "magazine" which does not specifically mention cartridges rather than rounds, anyway; more technical descriptions (ie not dictionary definitions which generally exclude non-detachable magazines) define a magazine as having a follower. I have yet to find one that would conceivably describe a black powder revolver cylinder. This "magazine" does not contain all that is necessary for each round, just powder and a ball or ridiculous square bullet. And "a multiplicity of pre-prepared charges loaded into the weapon as one unit?" Congratulations, you've just decided moon clips and the M1 Garand's en-bloc clip are magazines. I mean nevermind that a magazine is an object which exists independently of the charges themselves; the integral magazine of a bolt-action rifle or the tube magazine of a shotgun, according to that definition, are not magazines.

The key issue is you have failed to provide either a reliable source for your claim or a coherent argument why it is the case, and have repeatedly proven yourself ignorant of how weapons operate in the arguments you have made. Your claims about the definition of "magazine" are straightforward proof by assertion; you have presented no evidence whatsoever that your definition is widely used or applies in the way you claim it does, while I can link to my definition on the NRA or SAAMI terminology glossary page or a similar (if technically less accurate) description in just about any dictionary. If I am descending to insults it is only because it is becoming increasingly clear that you are trying to argue with me using google searches rather than a coherent idea of weapons development; that much was clear when you talked about multiple Gorgas guns (Josiah Gorgas was the Chief of Ordinance for the Confederate Army, so a lot of "Gorgas guns" were made, but only one with his weird revolving mechanism, which was so dissimilar to Puckle's that the only real thing the two had in common was a crank and something round). Herr Gruber (talk) 10:13, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

I think you mean "Ordnance".

The rest of your spiel is of equal merit. Andy Dingley (talk) 18:33, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Good to see you're down to nitpicking minor spelling errors. Herr Gruber (talk) 22:48, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

I think you both make very interesting points - ultimately, the "charger" of the Puckle gun is similar in design to the interchangable cylinders of the early cap-and-ball revolvers, and both are conceptually similar to the box magazine of modern firearms in that they are a container for a discrete number of shots, a container that can be removed from the gun to be replaced with a fresh container. Jmackaerospace (talk) 01:49, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

The key word here being "conceptually", as these terms significantly post-date the design of the Puckle gun. Jmackaerospace (talk) 02:14, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, but the thing is we're writing the article today, so if we call it "an early example of X" we're using the modern definition of X. SAAMI's definition of magazine totally excludes a revolver cylinder, and while swapping cylinders has the same effect as using a speedloader, it's doing it instead of using an actual speedloader, because such a device could not exist until the invention of the unitary cartridge. I don't really think it's justified to claim it's an early example of something that doesn't work the same way it does; if it was, there are earlier examples of cannons with removable breech blocks (chambers) that could be preloaded (eg Pierrier à boîte and other breech-loading swivel guns which had been around for centuries by Puckle's time) that would qualify as existing before it anyway, since there is such a thing as a one-round magazine. Realistically it is a follow-on from that type of gun using an array of chambers rather than one, but it's fundamentally the same technology; calling the device a magazine would require the gun remove rounds from it using its own action to chamber them, not just fire prepared loads while they're still in it. The Kalthoff repeater can claim to be an early magazine rifle because while its 2-3 "magazines" do not contain complete cartridges, they are functionally the same as the magazines which would be used by later repeating rifles for unitary cartridges. If you allow things that are conceptually the same regardless of functional differences, then you can say things like "a bow and arrow was an early example of a musket" or "a river was an early example of a washing machine." The fact that Y is like X in a specific way does not necessarily mean Y is a type of X.

More obviously, the definition "container for a discrete number of shots, a container that can be removed from the gun to be replaced with a fresh container" could also describe the en-bloc clip of the M1 Garand, so we know from real weapons that the term "magazine" or "speedloader" is not necessarily applied to such a device. If you stretched the definition of "container" a little it could also apply to a belt. Also the dictionary definition says "cartridges," not "shots."

The Puckle gun does have some honest-to-goodness descendants, though they were just impractical attempts to get around Samuel Colt's revolver patent: the Treeby Chain Rifle had a similar requirement to manually seal the front of the chamber with a lever before firing, for example, and used a chain of chambers, making it one of the few belt-fed revolvers ever made. Herr Gruber (talk) 07:14, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Not a machine gun, gatling, or even particularly fast

I've added the section explaining the operation because all over the internet there are people that think this was some form of machine gun, presumably because it was natural to assume that the crank moved the barrel. 9 rounds a minute is not particularly impressive for a weapon that takes two men to operate and is too bulky to carry around the battlefield. One man could have used pre-loaded cylinders for as long as he had a suppy, in a fixed position. When you take that into account you can see it had no battlefield applications, which was why Puckle marketed it as an anti-boarder weapon for ships.Jmackaerospace (talk) 12:57, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Modern Terms are not applicable to historic firearms

Before making an edit to change terminology, please take the time to reasearch the term you are replacing, AND the term you replace it with. Most words, and technical terms in particular, have changed over time, or have multiple meanings depending on context. Sometimes there just is not a CORRECT term. If you think that is the case, rather than replace one incorrect term with another, put in an EXPLANATION instead. Jmackaerospace. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.104.141.51 (talk) 00:41, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

The specific one you are referencing is you misreading the article you are talking about: it says replacing the cylinder functioned as a speedloader. If you hitch a horse to a car it functions as an engine, that doesn't mean a horse actually is an engine. Herr Gruber (talk) 00:50, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

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a comment

"convince the Turks of the benefits of Christian civilization" what benefits? a bullet is not a "civilization" damn it

Modern survivals

I am quite certain that I saw a Puckle gun (and knew its name) on a visit to the Tower sometime 1968–1984. I have no idea whether it was a genuine antique or a replica, but it was there. It was black, like so many other old artillery pieces on exhibition.

As few as two guns produced?

The article twice mentions that Production was highly limited and may have been as few as two guns, but the Surviving examples section lists four guns: three in Britain and one in China. That would clearly invalidate that "as few as two" claim, would it not? 87.94.111.218 (talk) 14:08, 31 October 2022 (UTC)