At the risk of "boring" you all...

[Patrick Chadwick]

"70 cm, or as the makers would have said "28 Zoll" - not inch!

That was a really strong clue. If one takes the trouble to look up old weights and measures, one can discover that in 1817 the Hessian foot was officially defined as 30cm, and this lasted until (I think) 1871 and German unification. Since there were other "feet" at the time (Austrian, Prussian etc.) which were defined to 2 decimal places, the Hessian foot must have already been very, very close to 30cm indeed, making the Hessian inch 2.5mm, plus or minus a gnat's whisker. Once you picked up that, by using the word Zoll, I was hinting with a huge hammer that the inch in question was not an imperial inch of 25.4cm, you could have discovered that the 70cm could only be 28 Hessian inches. Nobody else's inch gives a round number!

Austrian inches were longer than 2.54cm. So the slightly odd 7-and-a-bit inch barrel length of my Gasser revolver is a straightforward 7 - in Austrian inches. Somewhere in a museum in Munich I once saw a roomful of "feet" from different states - even different towns!

[Eaglelord17]

Good job!! but don't be a bogart Eaglelord, pass that puppy...

I have to tell you, pinning down one of these old rifles/muskets isn't easy but it was a fun few days....

I guess I can share.

Definitely a neat piece of history, let us know if you manage to get that meeting, and what information you can glean from this. I have been looking into getting a black powder rifle at some point, and seeing stuff like this definitely encourages me.

[Vincent]

“Hessian” mercenaries, some armed with Jäger rifles, were used by the British in the American Revolutionary War. They were called “Hessians” because the majority came from the German state of Hesse.

These “Hessians” were professional soldiers employed by their German princes, who sometimes rented them out. That’s why “Hessians” is sometimes used here to describe a rented mercenary force.

[WarPig1976]

Yes, they stomped all round this area at onetime. Some even deserted and settled here in S.E Pennsylvania. This very rifle could have been rested against the giant oak tree in my backyard some 239yrs ago.