Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1882 — Stopping a Bullet With the Thumb. [ARTICLE]

Stopping a Bullet With the Thumb.

A curious and little-known experiment, showing the resistance of the air in guns, is described by Prof. Daniel Colladon, of Geneva. He was long in the habit of showing it to his classes. It resembes the feat that was sometimes performed by soldiers with the old Swiss carbines. M. Colladon fully charged with compressed air the hollow iron breech of an air-gun, serving as a reservoir. Having screwed up the gun, he introduced a round lead ball, running freely, but nearly filling the bore; then placing the gun vertically, he seized the upper end, and pressed his thumb vigorously on the mouth. The gun was then “fired”by an assistant; the thumb remained in position, and the ball was heard to fall back in the bore. Thereupon after recharging the breech and with the same ball, he shot the latter at a pine-board about one-fourth of an, inch thick, or a pane of glass, and it passed - through. The experiment, M. Cfoll’n&on says, ‘is without danger if the operator is sure of the strength of his thumb, if the gun is more than thirty-two inches long, and if the ball is spherical and nearly fills the gun (in which it must act like a piston). The least uncertainty in the very vigorous pressure of the thumb, and the hermetic close of the gun, may entail serious injury to the thumb. While M. Colladon has repeated the experiment twenty or thirty times without the least inconvenience either from shock or heat, a trial of it is perhaps hardly to be recommended.