Canadian Airgun Forum

We all know that the Internet contains errors but hopefully the airgun history is close to being accurate. I was curious about when our air powdered rifles started production so I did some surfing. It appears that the PCP rifle has been around for twice as many years as the spring-piston design. Research results below. Please chime in if you have further facts or corrections on the posted details.

-----------------------------------------------------------

It looks like the spring-piston air rifle is a relatively new design with a history dating back about 120 years. The steel coil spring wasn't invented until 1857 for use in chair seats. The spring-piston rifles came to being in the early 1900s with the Lincoln Jeffries design.

Apparently, the “oldest existing mechanical air gun is a bellows air gun dating back to about 1580”. It functioned like a blowgun but used a bellows instead of your lungs and was mainly used with large darts as projectiles. The bellows was located inside the wide buttstock and functioned with a v-spring that produced low pressure when compressing the bellows (coil spring not invented yet). I’m not sure if this would make the rifle a PCP or a springer or maybe a single stroke pneumatic. It looks like the Germans were likely the airgun leaders back then.

The next documentation I found was for the Girandoni air rifle from over 250 years ago. “The gun was developed in 1768 or 1769 by the Tyrolean watchmaker, mechanic and gunsmith Bartholomäus Girandoni and is sometimes referred to as the Girandoni air rifle”. Contrary to what most people think, the PCP design has a long history. The old Girardoni repeating air rifle was a 20 shot repeater PCP. It took about 1500 strokes on a hand pump to fill the buttstock reservoir. A soldier carrying one of these rifles would also have a couple of extra buttstock air reservoirs and several tubes of lead round ball ammo. “A skilled shooter could fire off one magazine in about thirty seconds. A shot from this air gun could penetrate a one-inch-thick (2.5 cm) wooden board at a hundred paces, an effect roughly equal to that of a modern 9mm or .45 ACP caliber pistol.”

Girardoni rifle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girardoni_air_rifle
and
https://lewis-clark.org/tools-and-techn ... s-air-gun/

Bellows rifle https://www.pyramydair.com/blog/2015/10 ... -the-past/
and
https://forum.vintageairgunsgallery.com ... h-loading/

Spring-piston rifle history https://www.pyramydair.com/blog/2022/02 ... is%20rifle.

A very insightful and interesting post, Todd.
It is great fun target shooting with airguns that are 100+ years old, and still quite capable of performing to specs.
An even greater treat is having the opportunity to shoot one of the 18th century pneumatic airguns.

Here is a copy/paste regarding CO2 airgun history:
The first airgun powered by carbon dioxide (which used to be called carbonic gas) was a pistol designed and built in the 1870s by a Frenchman called Paul Giffard. The pistol wasn’t a success, because the gas cylinder had to be sent back to the factory every time you needed a refill.
Development of CO2 guns was slow, but by the 1930s, manufacturers were using 8g soda-syphon bulbs, which were filled with liquid CO2. Two decades later, in 1954, Crosman produced the Powerlet, a 12g CO2 bulb, which is still the power source of CO2 guns today.

Here is a copy/paste regarding multi-pump airgun history (from Tom Gaylord):
My knowledge of multi pumps really starts with the St. Louis Air Rifle Company in 1899. They made a multi-pump single shot BB gun that had a wooden barrel! Actually there was a thin brass liner inside the wood. The valve was simple to the extreme. A rubber tube held back the compressed air. The trigger was a spring-loaded clamp that pinched the tube shut until it was pulled. The compressed air was then released. The faster the trigger was pulled the better the release.
Around 1923 the Crosman Seed Company brought a unique multi-pump air rifle to market. Like the Benjamins of the time it was a front pumper, meaning that the pump rod came out the front of the gun. Crosman recognized right away that wasn’t the way to go and in 1924 they came out with their underlever pumper that soon became the .22-caliber model 101 and the .177-caliber model 100. Benjamin followed suit many years later.

Lewis and Clarke had an air rifle with them on their expedition with an external reservoir.
Accounts differ on how it was used, with some claiming it was used to harvest deer.

I have the old Crosman 101 here, and it's still a shooter.
The peep that came with it is a lot more precise than it appears, and a bit of a bear to adjust...

-D.S.

_________________
"Ain't no half-way"
-S.R.V.

A peek at some of the 18th century airguns from the Beeman collection, which is coming up for auction at the Rock Island Auction House.
Sadly, these are expected to fetch prices way above my pay grade.

https://youtu.be/eb_4-YvECgo