Because of this, John Browning went back to Winchester, and after a few rounds of “I told you so,” produced for them the Model 1893 pump shotgun, a solid-frame, black-powder-only affair that was then improved into the Model 1897 Winchester pump gun, a smokeless-proofed piece that set the standard for pump shotguns. This gun was a big commercial success, manufactured until 1957 and also, by the way, being the basis for modification by Winchester engineer T.C. Johnson, who accomplished something nearly impossible – improving on a Browning design. Johnson produced the Winchester Model 12, the Perfect Repeater, which is to this day the gold standard of pump shotguns.

Now, I told you all that so I could tell you this: Winchester’s pump shotguns were the first widely successful pump guns, but they weren’t the first commercially produced pump guns. To learn about that, we need to go back a few years and revisit the career of a man better known for a Civil War-era repeating rifle: Christopher Spencer.

See Related: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. X - the Spencer Repeating Rifle

In the piece about the Spencer Repeating Rifle, I wrote about Christopher Spencer:

Christopher Spencer was born in Manchester, Connecticut, in 1833, and for a time worked in Sam Colt’s New Hartford factory, where he learned the gun-making trade. Young Spencer was a prolific inventor, making not only guns but also a steam-powered “horseless carriage,” and the first fully automatic turret lathe. He also invented the first slide-action shotgun, although the shotgun never saw much commercial success, leaving it to the Maestro, John Browning, to invent the first really commercially successful pump shotgun.

This time let’s take a look at Spencer’s shotgun. An “Outdoor Life” piece on the gun describes its action:

The Spencer pump-action shotgun operates using a toggle breech that pivots up and down when the action is cycled. The extractor is spring mounted in front of the action on the right-side action bar and as the bar moves rearward it grasps the head of the fired shell and pulls it out onto the dished-out top of the toggling bolt. At the same time, a fresh shell is released from the magazine into a cutout in the bottom of the toggle. The last bit of rearward pumping action causes the breech to quickly flip up tossing the fired shell up and away from the top of the breech. The extractor then grasps the head of a fresh round and pushes it into the chamber with the forward stroke of the pump handle. It’s not exactly a simple process.

While the Spencer was clunky and awkwardly designed, unlike the Spencer lever-action carbine, the gun would nevertheless be roundly familiar to any modern shooter: A single barrel fixed to a solid frame, with a tubular magazine under the barrel, and the slide handle on the magazine tube. This design proved to be great for a repeating shotgun; the slide-action was easy to keep on target and allowed for fast follow-up shots. The magazine held seven or eight (reports vary) 2 9/16” 12 gauge black-powder shotshells, that being the standard length at the time. The Spencer broke from modern design in one way, that being a second trigger in the front of the trigger guard. In those long-ago days when ammo was not as reliable as now, in the event of a misfire, one could push the second trigger forward, re-cocking the gun’s internal hammer and allowing for a second attempt without having to cycle the action.

This shotgun, for the most part, set the pattern that’s still in use now.

See Related: Sunday Gun Day XL: The Legend of the Trench Gun

Sunday Gun Day XIV - Gold Standards, the Winchester Model 12

Spencer and a business partner, Sylvester Roper, sold the Spencer shotgun from 1882 to 1885, when Spencer’s debt prompted the sale of the patent to one Francis Bannerman, who made some minor modifications, printed the name “Bannerman” on the action, and resumed production. That went along reasonably well, until 1893, when Winchester brought out their Browning-designed Model 1893.

Remember the Model 1893? We talked about the Model 1893 above.

Francis Bannerman wasn’t about to take this lying down. He filed a lawsuit against Winchester, claiming patent infringement. But then as now, taking on a big company with big resources wasn’t easy, and sure enough, Winchester did a search and found several pre-existing patents for slide-action guns that had never seen production – and that predated the Spencer patent.

It turned out that the Spencer, while the first pump shotgun, wasn’t the first design for a pump shotgun; that belonged to a patent filed in 1866 by one William Krutzsch, and when Bannerman sued Winchester over their release of the Model 1897, claiming patent infringement, Winchester and engineer T.C. Johnson – he of the Model 12 fame – acted quickly to negate Bannerman’s claim:

This weapon is a rifle made by Winchester’s T.C. Johnson in 1895, based on English Patent 2205, filed in 1866 by one William Krutzsch. Krutzsch is probably the first person to invent the breech-loading pump-action firearm, but his design went un-manufactured and forgotten until, in the 1890s, Winchester came under assault from the Francis Bannerman & Son firm from New York. Bannerman had purchased the patent for Christopher Spencer‘s innovative 1882 pump-action shotgun design and began production in 1890. When Winchester began production of Browning’s Model 1893 shotgun, Bannerman took the New Haven company to court. Winchester claimed that Krutzsch’s patent – by then expired – was prior art for the pump-action concept therefore invalidating that portion of the Spencer patent, but Bannerman claimed that the Krutzsch shotgun was inoperable as designed. Therefore, to prove the validity of the Krutzsch patent, Winchester had their own example of the Krutzsch made which demonstrated that the design did, in fact, work. This allowed the production of the Winchester shotgun design – resurrected as the 1897 – to continue.

Thwarted, Bannerman ceased production of the Spencer shotgun in 1907.

So ends the tale of the Spencer pump shotgun. Not a commercial success, but still a remarkable piece, the first practical American slide-action shotgun, and the gun that set the basic layout of pump shotguns that are still in use today. It’s a neat little piece of American gun history.