Original Item: Official records tell us that the British East India Company procured or made no Flintlock Muskets after the late 1820s and it appears they were very swift to take advantage of the newest in firearms technology- the percussion ignition system. In 1840 the HEIC began producing the world’s very first massed produced percussion muskets one of which later became known as the EIC Model “F”.
A brief history of how this model came to being- The shortened 39″ barrel Brown Bess musket was first developed and adopted by the EIC in 1771. This was a full 25 years before the Board of Ordnance in London followed suit with a 39″ Brown Bess Musket dubbed the “India Pattern” in 1796. This is a testament that private enterprise has seemingly always got things done long before government bureaucrats. In 1839 the British Government officially adopted a converted to percussion Brown Bess musket (P-1796/39) but in the Great Fire of the Tower of London of 1841 over 400,000 of these converted Muskets were destroyed leaving the British Government very short handed. The result, once again, was to copy the current EIC Percussion Musket, the Model “F” and designate it the “Lovell’s Pattern of 1842”. By that time, the EIC had already developed and refined the .75 bore Percussion musket through six models- A to F.
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