Whether this temporary melancholy was caused by the events of the war or by possession of the Shank is unknown, but in later years, Lambshead was known to remark, “I must say I was very happy to give the thing away.”
Due to issues of medical ethics, the Shank displayed in this exhibit has yet to be tested on human patients. Nor have other specimens of this particular type of Turrilepus Gigantis ever been found.
ENDNOTES
1. There is unsubstantiated conjecture by Menard and Trimble that somehow the abbott conveyed his own seeming good health upon the Viking, as a way of saving the island, and that the monks then sought some way to avoid a similar catastrophe in future by creating an artifact that could, without a similar later sacrifice, perform the same function.
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?”
In the middle of 1884, however, Franz Auble was diagnosed with Brandywine syndrome, a rare and misunderstood disease in that day and age. Knowing he had limited time left to continue his work, he retreated to a cottage outside Boston, intent on designing a mechanism that would put the Auble gun into serious competition with the Maxim.
Journal entries from the time are chaotic—Franz combined his engineering notes with a dream journal analyzing months of fevered and torrid dreams of war and his dead wife—but on November 12, 1884, Franz wrote, “If I cannot escape my dreams, I must learn from them. I see smokestacks and gun barrels. I hear gurgling boilers and empty shells raining on cobblestones. It seems clear what the gun is asking me for!”
What he had arrived at was bold and, some said, insane: the creation of a steam engine to load rounds into the weapon automatically at the same time that it discarded spent cartridges. He produced detailed drawings. He had patent forms drawn up. He ordered smiths to forge new boilers and frames. He gave his famous interview to Cranks and Steam author Aidan Birch. Then he died.
The Auble Gun, probably being modeled by Dr. Lauritz E. Auble (from a badly damaged photograph, ca. 1912).
A Son Continues His Father’s Uncertain Legacy
It was edging toward the spring of 1885. Snow was melting into the mud on the day of Dr. Franz Auble’s funeral in Massachusetts, and it seemed at first that his work might never be completed. Lauritz was a dutiful son and devoted business partner, but as he would later tell Aidan Birch, “I lacked my father’s creative impulse. What came easily to him came to me with great difficulty. I did not have his head for numbers or his vision.” Birch is reputed to have replied that this might be more boon than curse, and when Lauritz asked him to elaborate, said that “vision is not the same as sight.” Thus bolstered, Lauritz set out to forge a future for the Auble gun.
Lauritz’s first goal was to improve the weapon’s stability, especially after early tests with the portable boiler revealed the weapon to be dangerously inaccurate. Between the bubbling boiler and the rattling barrels, the gun proved good at providing a harrowing base of fire . . . but little else. The boiler chugged. The gun trembled. The shooter shook. In one well-photographed demonstration in 1885, the gun walked itself upward in such a flash that it hurled the test-shooter onto his back, cracking the boiler and belching steam onto the shooter and his handlers.