Off The Grid: For All Your Meat-Cutting, People-Shooting, Saint-Revering Needs
Beat this, Swiss Army knife. Bonus watch content at the end.
The urge to combine several tools into a single object is apparently an irresistible one. A multitool should not be mistaken for a multitasker, of course – a modern blender is a good example of a single tool which can be adapted to multiple uses (although our Ninja, despite its potential versatility, gets used almost exclusively for occasional batches of gazpacho and attempts to virtue signal to ourselves by making “healthy” smoothies once every other month).
There have however been, throughout history, many attempts to put different tools together in one item although this generally produces less satisfactory results than you would get from simply improving one or the other tool and letting it be its own best self. Bruce Lee is supposed to have said, “I do not fear the man who knows 1000 kicks. I fear the man who has practiced one kick 1000 times.” You would not, for instance, think that anyone would consider it worthwhile to combine a tank and an airplane but lo and behold, it’s been tried more than once, perhaps most notably by Oleg Antonov, who in 1942 attempted to turn the T-60 light tank into a glider, which is, in terms of plausibility, right up there with the proverbial screen doors on submarines. To be fair, this was a time and place where there really was an incentive to try pretty much anything as you would have very little to lose, although you have to wonder why the notion wasn’t just instantly written off as prima facie absurd.
One of the most common combination tools were tools intended to deal out death as their main function. Almost as soon as firearms began to become common, there were numerous attempts to combine them with daggers, swords, polearms, and other weapons. One of the most famous is in the Tower of London, and is supposed to have been carried by King Henry VIII when he went for walks at night in London in disguise. The so-called “King Henry’s Walking Stick” is an object of blunt, ugly functionality: a mace, with its head studded with nasty looking spikes and which conceals three gun barrels, which would have been fired using a burning slow match. It says something about how sketchy London could get at night in the early 16th century that such a thing was considered a necessary form of insurance as well as a more practical solution to self-defense than just carrying a sword, but according to the Tower Of London’s notes, the King was a big fan of such combination arms.
The object in the headline image was made in the 1520s and is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum Of Art – it is exotic even by combination gun standards, consisting of a flintlock pistol mechanism grafted onto a heavy blade with a cleaver-like profile; the blade is engraved with a calendar showing the Saint’s Days. It is identical to one on exhibition in Prague Castle which dates to about the same period and which had a little bit of a moment on social media – Pàdraig Belton, on Twitter, wrote, “Tired of carrying your meat cleaver, pistol, and calendar of saints around separately? This 16th c. Czech startup has the product for you.” I thought it was impossible that anyone would have made more than one of these things but the Met acquired its example in 1904.
The single worst example of the genre I’ve ever seen is the so-called Apache Pistol, which is supposed to have been designed for and carried by Parisian street gangs in the early 1900s. (These gangs were nicknamed Les Apaches, for the supposed resemblance of their violence to that of the Native American tribe of the same name – part of a long history of negative stereotyping).
The weapon consisted of a pinfire revolver, to whose frame was attached a folding set of brass knuckles, a folding dagger with a flame shaped profile, and the trigger for firing the pistol. To keep you from blowing your own fingers off in brass knuckle or stabbing mode, the hammer usually rested on an empty chamber. It looks to be as fine an example of something as likely to injure the assailant as the assailed ever to come down the pike, but at least at very close range it was apparently fairly effective. You never know if you’re going to prefer stabbing, shooting or bludgeoning but the discriminating thug likes to keep their options open.
Now, since we’re here for the watches, let’s look at adding watches to things that aren’t watches. I have what I am absolutely sure is a Mandela effect memory of a flintlock or wheel lock firearm with a clock set into the stock but I think even the most optimistic craftsman would avoid making such a thing. Without any sort of anti-shock system, firing the gun would almost certainly break the balance pivots and other things too. You might be able to do it with a modern anti-shock system but the game doesn’t seem to be worth the candle, big time.
Watches and small clocks have however been enthusiastically added to a very great number of objects that lead less exciting, but also less violent lives. One of the best roundups of the different types is via A Collected Man, in “Our Favorite Horological Objects From The Past.” No firearms, cutlasses or brass knuckles, but there are lighters, money clips, keys, belt buckles and much, much more. Most of the objects in the story have back-winding movements by Le Coultre and are more or less novelty items (albeit quite luxurious ones) from the Art Deco period. However, if you would like your wrist to be a slightly less safe but more exciting place than it would be with, say, a Patek 5970, there is always the Findtime Cigarette Lighters Cool Unique Cigar Lighter Watch for Men Novelty Refillable Butane watch, yours for fifteen of your favorite dollars on Amazon.
Caveat Emptor.