Casimir Lefaucheux, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetCasimir Lefaucheux
French gunsmith
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Bonnétable, Pays de la Loire, France
About Casimir Lefaucheux
- Casimir Lefaucheux (26 January 1802 – 9 August 1852) was a French gunsmith.
- He was born in Bonnétable and died in Paris. Casimir Lefaucheux obtained his first patent in 1827.
- In 1832, he completed a drop-barrel sporting gun with paper-cased cartridges.Casimir Lefaucheux is credited with the invention of one of the first efficient self-contained cartridge system in 1836, featuring a pin-fire mechanism.
- This followed the pioneering work of Jean Samuel Pauly in 1808-1812.
- The Lefaucheux cartridge had a conical bullet, a cardboard powder tube, and a copper base that incorporated a primer pellet.
- Lefaucheux thus proposed one of the first practical breech-loading weapons.In 1846, the Lefaucheux system was improved upon by Benjamin Houllier, who introduced an entirely metallic cartridge of copper brass.In 1858, the Lefaucheux pistolet-revolver became the first metallic-cartridge revolver to be adopted by a national government.It is thought likely that the revolver with which Vincent van Gogh fatally shot himself in a field in 1890 was a 7mm Lefaucheux à broche; the pistol was found, extremely corroded, in about 1960 and is on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.A 7mm Lefaucheux revolver used by Paul Verlaine to shoot and wound Arthur Rimbaud in 1873 sold with a price of €435,000 at a Paris auction.
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