The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

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.

In response to the accident, Lauritz Auble experimented with orangutan shooters with Auble guns upon their backs, but no orangutan would come near the steaming device. “Only humans,” Lauritz wrote in his journal, “are bold enough to master the Auble gun and its formidable report.”

Abandoning his flirtation with trained animals, Lauritz devised new “human quadrapod” braces for would-be shooters. Each brace was bound to the shooter’s shoulder and upper arm, affixed to a long, crutch-like leg extending down to a rubber foot. This gave the shooter two additional points of contact with the ground—one spar from each elbow—thereby stabilizing the shooter and the gun. This refined design is what Lauritz Auble took to the U.S. Army and Navy for demonstrations in the winter of 1885.

It did not fare well.

According to one military observer, the demonstration shooter “moved about like a newborn calf with a Gatling gun on its back; unsteady and uncertain. . . .” The Navy passed on the gun altogether. The Army ordered one revised Auble gun, but canceled their order within the week. Demonstrations for the British Army, the Canadian Army, and a small band of fanatical freemasons fared no better.

Seemingly, Lauritz was out of options. The unwanted gun had become a mechanical albatross, one that could counterintuitively kill with the slightest mis-shrug, yet could scarcely hit a target.

“My father wouldn’t quit if he were here,” Lauritz wrote in his diary. “In all the hours I spent watching him in his workshops, no lessons were more clear than these: That my father loved me and that he would not abandon his work for anything short of death.

“Neither shall I.”

The Repurposing of the Gun for Entertainment

However, unnoticed by Lauritz, something positive was happening at his demonstrations—something that caught the attention of entrepreneur Luther Fafnerd: crowds of civilians were coming out to see the Auble gun in action.

By 1885, Luther Fafnerd was known for two things: his famed, contest-winning mustache, and the traveling circus shows he produced with his cousin, Thaddeus. Luther Fafnerd visited Lauritz Auble in January of 1886 at the Auble townhouse in Boston, and, over brandy and cigars, devised a new function for the Auble gun (and for Lauritz Auble).

As reported by the local paper, Fafnerd famously said after the meeting, “I know spectacle, and what Lauritz Auble has there is spectacular. Bring your eyeballs, ladies and gentlemen, and your earplugs—we have a new attraction!”

Lauritz tapped into his experiences pitching the Auble gun to military men to transform himself from businessman to showman. He traveled Europe and America with the next-generation Auble gun on his shoulder, demonstrating the weapon’s incredible power and phenomenal noise for audiences from San Francisco to Prague. He wore a top hat and tuxedo and touted the Auble as a gentleman’s engine of war.

Lauritz eroded dummy armies with a withering barrage of lead. Children marveled. Lauritz blasted plaster bunkers to bits. Crowds applauded.

While visitors were cheering, Lauritz was going deaf, like his father. So he incorporated that into the act. Cries of “Wot wot wot Lauritz?!” greeted him every time he ascended the stage.

Encouraged beyond his wildest dreams, and desperate to keep his audience—which he saw as “vindication of my father’s work”—Lauritz devised increasingly theatrical shows, casting himself as a dramatic star and his Auble gun as a variety of famous weapons. He drew the gun from a papier-mâché stone and became King Arthur. Then he shot the stone to pieces and slew a dozen mannequin Mordreds. He strode across a rocky field, perched atop an elephant with an Auble on his shoulder, and became Hannibal blasting cardboard centurions apart with a steam hiss and a rattling thrum.

“People demand not just a performance,” Luther Fafnerd once said, “but heroics!” Lauritz imagined that he was delivering just that.

His plans grew out of control. He devised a fifty-man stunt show called The Battle of the Nile that would pit Auble-armed stuntmen in boats maneuvering and firing blanks at each other off the Chicago lakeshore, but the Fafnerds refused to pay for it. They had something else in mind.

American “automotive inventor” James Tasker had come to the Fafnerds with a new contraption—the Tasker Battle Carriage—and a simple sketch for a show: pit the rumbling Battle Carriage against lifelike animals preserved with rudimentary taxidermy.

Best of all, for outlandish sums, private citizens brought in by one of the Fafnerds’ circus trains could ride the Battle Carriage and hunt animals loosed from pens into Tasker’s private ranch for the occasion. Tasker had effectively found a way to monetize the testing process for his new weapon-wagon. As Tasker wrote the Fafnerds in 1908: “Auble provides a weapon you want to see—I provide a weapon that spectators actually wish they could fire first-hand. For a few, we make that wish come true!”

Thaddeus Fafnerd signed the deal with Tasker in the summer of 1908 without telling Lauritz. Soon after, Lauritz was out of a job.

The Auble gun had failed as a weapon of war and had gone out in a hail of glory as a novelty. What could the future possibly hold? “Perhaps a joke, perhaps a curious footnote,” Lauritz is said to have muttered on more than one occasion.

The Aftermath and Dying Fall of the Auble Gun

In the years that followed, Lauritz gradually faded from the spotlight, even for weapons enthusiasts. Young weapons designers tended to associate the Auble gun with sideshows, and thus any of his attempts to serve as a consultant failed.

Immediately following his circus departure, Lauritz started to woo Daisy Fafnerd, the forty-year-old widowed daughter of Thaddeus the ringmaster. Thaddeus, an ordained minister and never one to let business come before love, married them the same summer that the Auble shows were finally canceled: 1908. The new couple traveled with the Fafnerd Cousins Circus for years afterward, managing performances and arranging venues.

Just shy of fifty specimens of the Auble gun, in various makes and models, were put into storage in a Fafnerd Cousins warehouse in Nebraska—only to be destroyed in a tornado in 1912. One local headline read, “Circus Warehouse Destroyed, Nothing Valuable Lost, Show Must Go On.” The field around the warehouse was littered with top hats, clown shoes, and bent Auble barrels. Clown makeup smeared the grass for years. Only one working Auble gun, a model used during the early circus days and kept in Lauritz Auble’s Boston townhouse, now remained intact.

As the Fafnerd cousins grew older, they sold off their circus piece by piece and retired. Lauritz and Daisy lived for a few years off their savings, but the Auble family fortune was gone—spent on Auble guns—and their circus money was rapidly dwindling. They sold the Boston townhouse and moved into an apartment, with, according to Birch, “a third of the space given over to half-finished inventions.”

The Tasker Battle Carriage in action, re-created by Sam Van Olffen from period newspaper descriptions for use in one of his interminable performance art productions.

After the Great War exploded in Europe, Lauritz donated his time to the stateside war effort, assembling and testing weapons for the U.S. Army until peace came in 1918. That same year, Laurtiz was diagnosed with Brandywine syndrome, inherited from his father. Daisy passed away from a bout of pneumonia the following year.

In 1921, Cranks and Steam was published to widespread acclaim, much to Lauritz’s dismay. Inside, the Auble was touted as a turn-of-the-century marvel of steam engineering and a bizarre breakthrough in firearms design. Yet the work was not quite a celebration of Auble ingenuity. The Auble gun was the steam, but the Auble men were the cranks. And there, on page 201, was an interview with James Tasker about his “profound vision” for the next-generation Battle Carriage, along with a smug quote about the Auble gun.

Humiliated by the book, Lauritz withdrew from society.

It was in the earliest weeks of 1922, when Lauritz Auble was dwelling alone in his tiny flat, quietly withering away, that a young Thackery T. Lambshead came calling. He wanted to buy the last remaining Auble gun—the gun he had marveled at so many years before from the stands of the Fafnerd Cousins Circus—and install it in his burgeoning collection of antiquities and curios. Lambshead was offering the Aubles some measure of recognition for the marvelous thing they’d created, ridiculous and grand.

“It’s a grand and curious thing, that gun,” Lambshead supposedly told Lauritz. “It’s the gun that war didn’t want.” Lambshead reportedly spent the day with Lauritz, hearing tales of Franz Auble and Daisy and of Lauritz’s time with the circus. They drank port and smoked cigars. “Your gun might not have shot anyone, but its report echoed in imaginations from the California coast to the uttermost edge of Europe,” Lambshead recalls telling Lauritz. “That’s quite a difficult shot to make.”

Of Lauritz’s reply, there is no record.