Jon Excell

February 1896 - The gun bike

Archive

Sometimes pedestrians just get in the way of cyclists, and no amount of bell ringing, horn honking, or friendly shouting will induce them to move. In 1896 The Engineer presented a somewaht extreme solution to this problem that thankfully never saw the light of day — a bicycle with a machine gun mounted on the handlebars.

In a report from the New York Bicycle show, The Engineer describes ‘a Columbia bicycle with a 40lb Colt automatic gun attached to a turntable on the front handlebar’.

According to the article, the gun, which can be moved vertically or horizontally in any direction, is a single-barrel weapon with a ‘pistol’ handle attached to a breech casing, containing the mechanism for feeding, firing and ejecting the cartridges. These are contained in belts stored in a boxes containing 250 or 500 cartridges each.

‘Single shots may be fired, or the gun may automatically fire all the cartridges on the belt at one pull of the trigger, firing 100 shots in 16 seconds,’ enthused The Engineer. The article added that the recoil from the gun would not cause a problem. ‘The recoil is very light, and does not affect the frame of the machine.’

The report also mentions a weapon-enabled duplex bicycle — a two-person bike with one front wheel, two rear wheels and two saddles side by side — ‘[these] were fitted with guns, one having a small breech loader and the other a small maxim rapid-fire gun.’

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