9 6 ifcfnas of tbe TCofc, IRffle, an& (Bun 



A propos of copper caps, the credit of inventing them 

 has been claimed for Joe Manton. How far that claim 

 can be sustained will appear from a passage I shall 

 quote from Colonel Hawker presently. But the dis- 

 covery of a fulminate by which the percussion principle 

 could be applied to firearms a discovery which created 

 a revolution in the whole craft of gunmaking was 

 made, not by a gunmaker, but by an eminent minister 

 of the Scottish Church, the Rev. Alexander John 

 Forsyth. He announced his discovery to the world 

 in 1803, and patented his invention in 1807. But it 

 was not till 1818 that the percussion cap began to 

 come into use among sportsmen ; and it was not till 

 two-and-twenty years later that our sleepy old War 

 Office awoke to the fact that the flint-lock had every- 

 where, except in the army, been long superseded by 

 the percussion. Colonel Hawker tells us that Joe 

 Manton, previously to 'his failure, had shown him " a 

 new patent self-priming detonator," which had cost 

 him 200. The Colonel, as a practical sportsman, 

 told Manton it would never answer, and he adds : 

 " As some proof that I was right I need only state 

 that this gun was bought at the sale for a mere nothing 

 (Lancaster told me 14), and then, I believe, was dis- 

 carded by the purchaser." Whether this failure was 

 Manton's first contribution to the solution of the problem 

 how best to utilise Dr. Forsyth's discovery in practical 

 gunmaking, I do not know. But in the ninth edition 

 of his " Instructions to Young Sportsmen," published 

 in 1844, Colonel Hawker gives the following interesting 

 particulars in further discussion of the subject: 



