Category Archives: Gunge

The Firearms Patents of Robert L. Hillberg – A Timeline

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It was the ahead-of-its-time Whitney Wolverine .22 pistol that first attracted my interest in the firearms designs of Robert L. Hillberg, and his US patent for a four-chamber shotgun with a revolving firing pin, an image from which is shown above, that cemented it. And in the course of researching Hillberg’s portfolio at the patent office, I got a chance to try out Google Spreadsheet’s nifty Visual Timeline Gadget. The one embedded below is derived from a Google Spreadsheet I compiled with twenty lines (one for each of Hillberg’s patents I could find) and six columns:

  1. “Title” – The proper title of the patent, as published in the patent.
  2. “Start” – The date upon which the patent application was received.
  3. “End” – The date upon which the patent was granted.
  4. “Description” – The US patent number of the patent in question.
  5. “Image” – URL of an image for each patent, which is supposed to display in a pop-up bubble. I haven’t filled these in yet.
  6. “URL” – A link to which anyone who clicks on the “Title” in the pop-up bubble will be directed. In this case, the links direct to the appropriate full Google Patent.

These six particular columns are specified by the gadget and cannot be changed. The resulting timeline isn’t quite perfect, as there are some other display parameters I would like to be able to control that don’t seem to be user-editable, yet. But overall I’m quite impressed. Very cool resource.

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Mystery Edison Giocattoli “LR” ray gun from Germany

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In April I was contacted via e-mail by a German woman who had seen this page on my old site and was interested in selling some EG ray guns in her possession.  This happens occasionally, and more often than not the sellers have mistaken me for a wealthy, eccentric collector, when in fact only the last two descriptors are accurate.  But this seller turned out to be fair-dealing, and best of all, she had something I had never seen before, specifically, this “rifle” style ray gun, clearly an EG, which is apparently a variation on their Thitan model Spacematic cap gun, a fine specimen of which I already own.

This, however, appears to be an “LR” variant of the Thitan, which term I adopt by analogy to the Super Thur LR.  I have never actually seen an EG ray gun with a stock before, yet alone been offered one for sale.  But this seller had two of this model, and I got the one pictured above shipped to my door for what was, to my mind, quite a reasonable price. Still trying to figure out the best way to display my growing collection.

Most exciting about this find was that I had no idea this model even existed before it was offered to me. The seller, intriguingly, claimed in one e-mail that “there are more space guns,” but her English was poor and I could never get her to elaborate.