a gun that used a limited form of recoil operation. He had three British patents related to firearms around the 1850s to the 1860s; however, all of them refer to a means of dampening recoil in firearms, which wasn't a new idea at the time, rather than true recoil operation. The next to mention recoil operation in the British patent literature is by Alexander Blakely in 1862, who clearly describes using the recoil of a fired cannon to open the breech.

In 1864 after the Second Schleswig War,