The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

2. Later investigation would uncover nine reports from fishermen claiming to have found a castaway floating in the remains of a broken boat. Each report described a man dressed in the habit of a monk and impossibly old—a face like leaves gone to mulch, a body light as paper. Each man raved and raved about the Shank and a saint lost forever. In each instance, they died before reaching land, and their bodies were given over to the sea. If any of these men hid anything among their possessions, no record of it exists. What catastrophe they might have been fleeing is unknown, although German U-boat records do contain references to the sinking of at least two “ships” that do not correspond to any losses in the records of the Allies.

The Auble Gun

Documented by Will Hindmarch

Drs. Franz S. Auble and Lauritz E. Auble, Inventor/Designer

Auble Gun, 1884–1922

Purchased by Dr. Lambshead, January 1922

1922.11.1a&b

My goal is to create a new battlefield milieu in which a select few do battle for the sake of their ideals and their nations with science and engineering on their backs; a new generation of gallant combatants and miniaturized engines of war—knights not with horses and lances but with boilers and bullets.

—DR. FRANZ AUBLE

The Development and Reputation of a Singular Weapon

According to Aidan Birch’s book, Cranks and Steam: The Story of the Auble Gun (1921), Franz Auble came to America from Prague in 1855, at the age of eleven, with his mother. Though the Aubles were wealthy enough to buy Franz out of military service, due to a near-tragic misunderstanding he fought in the American Civil War as part of a Northern artillery battery and went deaf in his right ear as a result. Young Franz Auble’s time among the deafening muskets and cannons may have inspired his idea for a shoulder-mounted weapon. “Franz Auble must very much enjoy being deaf,” wrote Martin Speagel in the St. Louis Gazette, “for it means he hears only half of his bad ideas.”

Although not widely known by the public, the Auble gun ranks among firearms and artillery enthusiasts as one of history’s great curios. Not quite a personal firearm and not quite miniaturized artillery, the Auble is a man-portable, multibarreled mitrailleuse designed to be carried and fired on an operator’s shoulder for “ease and haste of transport and displacement in tenuous battlefield circumstances,” according to a lecture given by Franz Auble in 1882.

American humorist and essayist Edgar Douglas, while on a monologue tour in 1891, famously deemed it “the Awful gun.” American shootists, in periodicals of the era, joked that it was the “Unstauble gun or Wobble gun.”

The weapon’s infamous instability was a result of the Aubles’ innovative “human bipod” design. Franz Auble’s vision cast able-bodied soldiers in the role of “specially trained mobile gunnery platforms,” which would operate in three-man fire teams, triangulating on enemy positions. “Ideally,” Franz Auble wrote, “the gun’s very presence is enough to stymie or deter enemy soldiers, ending battles through superior military posture and displays of ingenious invention rather than outright bloodshed.”

Word of Franz Auble’s interest in “military posturing” over battlefield effectiveness led to his being labeled “a showman, not a shootist” by Gentleman Rifleman editor Errol MacCaskill in the periodical’s winter 1882 issue. The Auble gun was still only in active development at the time. Billed as “a more personal approach to gentlemanly annihilation,” perhaps tongue-in-cheek, an early hand-cranked prototype of the Auble gun debuted in 1883, just a year before the first demonstration of a proper machine gun: the Maxim gun, invented by Sir Hiram Maxim. Whereas the Maxim gun’s reloading mechanism was powered by the weapon’s own recoil action, the first Auble gun prototype was still powered by a hand crank. It looked somewhat like an oversized, shoulder-mounted film camera—and, indeed, some early design prototypes might have allowed shooters to shoot what they were shooting, so to speak.

When the Maxim gun first gained real attention, in the mid-1880s, Auble went back to the drawing board and the firing range. The era of the machine gun was coming, and in his journals, Franz would later bemoan his “fatally late understanding that the revolution would be in the field of ever-swifter reloading mechanisms, not the perfection of techniques to balance machinery on the human shoulder! Who knew?”