Jean Samuel Pauly

Jean Samuel Pauly (1766 – c. 1821), born Samuel Johannes Pauli, was a Swiss inventor and gunsmith of the early 19th century. Parish records show that he was baptised in Vechigen near Bern, Switzerland on 13 April 1766, the son of Johann Pauli and Veronika Christine (née Pulfer).

Pauly started working as a carriage builder and mechanic in his father's workshop; he was constantly looking for technical improvements (such as a self-lubricating axle) and also ways to increase the comfort of passengers. He later moved away to settle in nearby Bern in order to sell his inventions to the rich patricians there; a written testimony advertising his own carriages and promoting his technical successes may be seen in the city's trade handbook of 1796.

However, all this ended when, in March 1798, more than 30,000 French soldiers marched on the Zähringerstadt in the medieval area of the city to secure free access to the Alpine passes for Napoleon Bonaparte, and also to rob the legendary Bernese treasury to finance the campaign in Egypt. Pauly was an artillery sergeant in the Swiss Army, and, seeing the superiority of the light and easily mobile guns of the French over the heavy Bernese ones (which required a team of oxen), he went on to design artillery for the new Helvetian army that required just a horse or a few strong men. Whilst fighting in Massena's campaign against the Russians in 1799, he wrote a manual about the usage of firearms.

Many bridges in the new Helvetic Republic had been destroyed during the invasion, and in 1801 Pauly submitted plans to the central government for an elegant arched bridge with great carrying capacity. Those plans were checked and approved, and he even received two hundred francs from the Helvetian State Treasury, but, as the new state was constantly on the brink of bankruptcy, further money never materialised, and, with little demand for new carriages either, Pauly had to look around for a new way of earning his living.

For many years, he had set himself the ambitious goal of creating the world's first human-powered aircraft. The plan of an airship which Pauli drew in the spring of 1802 was in the form of a fish, with an elongated black hull, a vertical red tail fin, and two lateral fins to the left and right of the head to control it; two round, golden-rimmed eyes and a golden mouth gave the vehicle a dream-like and friendly look.

Although the dignitaries of Bern became very enthusiastic about this project, there was still no money to be had from them, so after learning that General Michael Ney in France had donated fifty thousand francs from the French treasury for a similar experiment there, Pauly packed his things and moved to Paris in 1802, never to return.

Under the devout sponsorship and patronage of General Ney, he moved into a beautiful apartment in Paris; under the gallicised name of Jean Pauly, he commissioned Aime Bolle, the city's most famous balloon designer, to build an airship for him in accordance with his plans drawn up in Bern. Its maiden voyage on 22 August 1804 in the castle park of Sceaux was, from a technical point of view at least, quite successful, and a year later, on 4 November 1805, at half past three in the afternoon, the Flying Fish rose again. As Pauly told the readers of the Journal de Paris the next day, it sailed from the Tivoli Park in a moderate easterly wind at the speed of a galloping horse to the Champs-Élysées and the Place de la Concorde, where the aeronaut operated his aerial rudder and managed, according to his own words, five or six minutes against the wind to stay in place and to enjoy the thunderous applause of the onlookers. (For the planned return to Tivoli Park, he wrote that, regrettably, he had needed the muscular strength of an additional man, so the Flying Fish drifted west for another eighty kilometers, landing four and a half hours later at dusk, near the Cathedral of Chartres.)

Whilst in Paris, Pauly had maintained contact with the weapon manufacturer of Saint-Étienne; using the title "Colonel Jean Samuel Pauly", he established a gunsmith workshop where he designed an automatic bridge and developed mercury fulminate platina. In 1808, in association with French gunsmith François Prélat, Pauly created the first fully self-contained cartridges; these incorporated a copper base with integrated potassium chlorate primer powder (the major innovation of Pauly), a round bullet and either brass or paper casing. Unlike later cartridges, the case walls didn't provide obturation though there was one at the base, similar to the 1855 Pottet cartridge, as the cartridge was loaded through the breech and fired with a needle or a pin; this needle-activated central-fire breech-loading gun would become a major feature of firearms thereafter, and in 1809 Pauly employed the German Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse who would later become the inventor of the famous Dreyse rifle.