James Paris Lee - a man ahead of his time
Here it is - the most important invention in the field weapons - Paris Lee shop. We do not know the name of the inventors of the gun barrel, the trigger and the hammer, but we do know that without his magazine, neither many rapid-fire rifles, nor automatic pistols, nor the famous Kalashnikov assault rifle would have appeared. In all these and many other samples of store weapons today, this store is present. The photo shows a magazine for a Remington-Lee rifle, model 1885. Photo forgottenweapons.com
“But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”
Matthew's Gospel, 19: 30
Matthew's Gospel, 19: 30
Weapon stories. It has always been and always will be that from a small seed a huge tree grows. So it is in people's lives: from another, at first glance, quite insignificant invention, many others grow over time, and it itself turns out to be the basis of an entire industry. AT stories There are also such examples of creating weapons, and the most significant of them is the example of a man named James Paris Lee, who at one time came up with a very simple, but absolutely wonderful thing!
This is what James Paris Lee looked like in 1889
He was born in Scotland, and in 1836 he came to Canada with his family at the age of 5. Apparently, he was destined to be a weapon designer, because he made his first gun at the age of 12. Trained as a watchmaker, he married in 1858 and moved to live in the United States. As soon as the Civil War began, he offered the army of the northerners a cartridge rifle chambered for his own design. For a number of reasons, its production did not work out, and Lee went to work at the Remington enterprise, where he continued to invent.
Lee's box store. Schematic from 1879 US Patent
In 1875, he patented the main invention of his life - a detachable box magazine for a rifle. And already in 1878 he developed a truly revolutionary rifle with this magazine and received a patent for it.
Lee offered this rifle chambered for black powder cartridges (and others didn’t exist then!) to the army and the fleet for testing. The army rejected it, but the Navy Council, which tested the rifle, made the following conclusion:
“The relative simplicity of the mechanism and the ease with which the magazine can be used make it a valuable and destructive weapon. Tests carried out with the rifle in the presence of the Council were the most satisfactory."
Carabiner D. W. Keane "Remington Keane" with a nine-shot tubular magazine. Limited production for the US Navy and Indian police armament on a number of reservations in the western United States. Photo littlegun.be
Native American brule "Crow Dog" with a carbine "Remington Keane" model "frontier" 1880 Nebraska, ca. 1898 Fort Niobrera
Despite his long association with Remington, Lee clearly wanted to have his own arms business. So he founded the Lee Arms Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1879. It has been suggested that Lee's departure from Remington was due, at least in part, to the company's decision to begin production of the bolt-action Keane rifle with an underbarrel magazine.
The longitudinally sliding bolt of the Keane rifle required manual cocking. Photo littlegun.be
The location of the loading window was also inconvenient. It was located at the bottom of the receiver. For hunting weapons, this arrangement is acceptable, but for military weapons it is not suitable. Photo littlegun.be
Lee probably felt that Remington would not be able to allocate the necessary resources to manufacture and sell two different types of bolt-action rifles, and so he set up his own business. Lee attracted investors to the new company, including the creator of the legendary German Luger pistol, but since the company did not have a material base, Lee's rifles were to be produced and sold by Sharps, but under the name Lee Arms Company. The ammunition for them was the cartridge .45-70 Government ("Governmental").
TTX cartridge .45-70 Government ("Governmental") .45 - nominal bullet diameter 0,458 inches (11,63 mm); 70 - the weight of the charge of black powder in grains (4,54 grams); 405 is the weight of a lead bullet in grains (26,2 grams). Initial speed 487 m/s. The allowable dispersion radius was 101,6 mm (4 in) at 91,44 meters (100 yd). At a distance of 457 m, such a jacketless bullet fired from a Springfield rifle pierced a 173 mm thick block of white pine wood.
The first working prototype of the new bolt-action Lee rifle was manufactured by Sharps in October 1879 and presented to the US Naval Ordnance Board for testing, which was to be carried out on April 17, 1880.
Five-shot magazine rifle "Remington-Lee" М1879. Photo forgottenweapons.com
Once again, the Lee rifle impressed the sailors quite strongly, so a contract was signed for the manufacture of 300 bolt-action rifles in .45-70 caliber with the expectation of receiving additional orders in the future. The original price for one rifle for the US Navy was $16,25. They named it "Lee's Naval Rifle Model 1879". The rifle weighed about 3,2 kg and had a total length of about 120 cm with a barrel length of 73,6 cm, fixed to the stock with two rings.
Magazine for the Remington-Lee M1879 rifle. Pay attention to the very short jaws to hold the cartridge and the tide on the left under the plate to hold the cartridges in the magazine. At the moment of attaching the store, the edge of the shaft pressed the protruding button, moved it down and thus the store opened. Photo Amoskeag Auction Company
With its device, the rifle looked more like samples of rifles that were supposed to appear about ten years later. So, she had a rotary bolt with two lugs, one of which was at the base of the bolt handle, and the other on the opposite side, locked in a recess in the receiver. On the left side of the shutter, a hole was prudently drilled for the gas to escape. The rifle did not have a fuse as such, but its drummer could be put on a half-cock, and then he worked as a fuse. The receivers produced by the Sharps rifles were marked: THE LEE ARMS CO. BRIDGEPORT. CONN./USA/.
The shaft of the Remington-Lee M1879 rifle store. On the left side, a groove under the ledge on the store is visible. Photo forgottenweapons.com
The most revolutionary part of this rifle and at the same time the simplest was the box-shaped middle magazine. It was a flat box with a leaf spring, a cartridge feeder plate, and two curved jaws that held the cartridges in the magazine. At the same time, the store was detachable. That is, the shooter could have several pre-loaded magazines and quickly change them as needed.
Plate for firing single shots with the magazine removed. Photo forgottenweapons.com
True, there was one “but”, which led to some complication of the design. For some reason, Lee made the jaws for holding the cartridges in the magazine very short, so that they actually did not hold the cartridges in it! Therefore, a spring-loaded retractable plate was installed on the left side of the store, which prevented them from falling out of a fully equipped store.
The edge of the magazine shaft shifted the plate when the magazine joined the rifle, and now nothing interfered with the supply of cartridges to the chamber. Another tribute to the time was another plate, which occupied a horizontal position in the receiver when the magazine was removed from it. This was done so that the shooter could fire from this rifle without attaching a magazine to it, that is, as from a “single charge”, thereby saving cartridges! Accordingly, the store inserted into the mine pushed it aside.
Schematic diagram of the Remington-Lee M1885 rifle.
Meanwhile, it turned out that the Remington company suffered a crushing defeat with its Keane rifle. It was necessary to do something urgently, and then, fortunately for her, the Sharps company went bankrupt and could not fulfill Lee's order. And in the end, it was Remington who had to take on the fulfillment of this order of the Navy, because, as you know, a bird in the hand is better than a crane in the sky. And so, due to a more than strange interweaving of cause and effect, the Remington-Lee repeating rifle appeared, which became the most modern rifle in the world until the advent of the 8-mm cartridge with smokeless powder and the Lebel M1886 rifle, in which, moreover, the archaic tubular magazine was still used.
The Model 1879 Remington rifle had limited use in the US Navy, while the Model 1882 was tested by the US Army and produced in very limited numbers. In the end, in 1892, for some reason, the army abandoned it in favor of the Krag-Jorgensen rifle.
Rifle "Remington-Lee" M1879 Navy (US Navy). Photo Rock Island Auction
About 1881 Model 1884 Lee rifles were produced by Remington & Son between 7500 and 1879. In 1884, China purchased 13 Remington-Lee rifles chambered in .000 Spanish (43×11,15mm R). Of these, 58 M4000s were converted to .1882, so Lee had every reason to once jokingly say that maybe they thought he was Chinese, which is why they bought so many of them. During the Sino-French War, they proved to be very effective against the French army, which used the single-shot Gras rifle.
The 1885 rifle had an improved magazine with longer jaws and moved the bolt handle to the rear. Photo forgottenweapons.com
New Zealand purchased 500 Remington-Lee rifles for its militia in 1887, also chambered in .43 Spanish. They were quickly replaced after complaints about the quality of the ammunition.
Rifle "Remington-Lee" M1885 with a bayonet. Photo Rock Island Auction
But Lee's invention was most appreciated in the UK, where his name was included as the basis (bolt and magazine) of such rifle designs as the "Lee-Metford" and "Lee-Enfield". To summarize, we can say that James P. Lee was a brilliant designer and throughout his career remained at the forefront of 250th century weapons development, and was even ahead of his time in many ways. He received little recognition during his lifetime, but received $000 from the UK for his patent rights and retired as a wealthy and successful man. Well, the Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield rifles from 1888 until the Korean War were in the hands of the British Tommy. The third design of Paris Lee was absolutely fantastic at the time of its creation, the 1895 Winchester-Lee rifle for the US Navy chambered in 6mm Lee cartridge. But we'll talk about it next time...
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