Auto news on Youtube Aug 30 2018

Hello and welcome to Collections Speed Dating at Fort Ticonderoga.

I am Matthew Keagle, the curator.

And I am down here in our Great Wars exhibit new for 2018.

And you may be thinking to yourselves, "Matt, what are you doing with these weapons?

They don't look like they're from the 18th century."

And while these are decidedly not, however, some of these are.

Our exhibit "Great Wars: Ticonderoga & WWI" seeks to explore the connections of the First

World War to Ticonderoga and create parallels between this great conflict of the 20th century,

and an earlier great global conflict: the Seven Year's War in the 18th century.

And so what I have right here is a grouping of weapons, some of which were brought back

by our museum's co-founder, Stephen Pell, and his first general manager of Fort Ticonderoga,

Milo King, during the First World War and some 18th-century weaponry to show some continuities

between these two time periods.

For one, both of these weapons, both this French Infantry Musket from the 1750s as well

as this Berthier Carbine from the end of the 19th century, were manufactured at the Manufacture

d'armes de Saint-Étienne, the heart of the French firearms industry going back hundreds

of years.

A center which made firearms for the French military in the 18th century, troops that

were shipped all around the globe, and continued to make weapons, now after a change of regimes

from monarchy to empire, to republic, to monarchy again, back to empire, and finally back to

a republic by the early 20th century, that made the weapons that armed French troops

in the early 20th century in the conflict that we know as the First World War.

And in fact, they still manufacture arms for the French military.

Furthermore, what is interesting about this particular weapon right here is that this

is a carbine developed in the 1890s with no provision to mount a bayonet, something that

was unnecessary for most mounted troops.

These weapons though, although they were designed for a somewhat out of date species of soldier--that

is the cavalry, found new life in World War I in the trench systems of the 20th century.

These carbines though had developed in many ways in the 18th century, when the use of

the flintlock ignition system allowed soldiers on horseback to carry a firearm like this.

Echoes of the past meeting us all the way into the modern world.