Contemporary reproduction of a composite gun with a “plug bayonet”. Composite guns were manufactured by gunsmiths from pieces of...
Contemporary reproduction of a composite gun with a “plug bayonet”. Composite guns were manufactured by gunsmiths from pieces of different weapons. In an era before mass production, if a gun broke down you couldn’t just order in replacement part 2384B. It would either need to be fixed or replaced from another gun.
Plug bayonets were the earliest type of bayonets to be used. They get their name because of the design, which requires that the handle of the bayonet be fitted inside the barrel of the gun “plugging” it.
Of course this prevents the gun from being fired, and alternatives were quickly sought.
This particular example was made by gunsmith Ian Pratt.
Culture, be it material or idealistic, proceeds evolutionarily. Each development is first assessed in light of that which came before, in a way that can easily seem odd in later on retrospect.
To us, rifles with plug bayonets are odd - you can forfeit the entire purpose of a gun in order to stab someone with it. That’s weird. At the time, they were pikes where you could remove the blade and use it as a gun. That was amazing.
I remember in the early 2000s when blogs - warblogs, even - were becoming a thing, the next evolution of the newspaper column. One of the things that aghast heritage media denigrated about blogs was that they would just drop in pictures they found from anywhere. Which from a newspaper office perspective makes sense - hiring photographers, or licensing their work was a big part of their budget, and moreover of their self-narrative.
But from the web-native curatorial perspective that was just insane. Of course there were pictures. Here’s a thing I’m talking about, and there exists in the wild a picture of it, so you can better understand it, so of course the two go together as a matter of basic competency.
But things resolved. Newspapers don’t complain about them anymore. Maybe because there’s no one left with the idle time to complain. Once as a kid I thought I might make a career getting paid to write essays, but then the internet. C'est la vie, it’s unfortunate and they did warn us about this but seriously, fuck Metallica. Those dudes are dicks.
On the other hand, I don’t see blogs, at least the Wordpress-style things that I identify as the platonic figure of a blog, linking inline photos as much anymore. We kind of accepted that the association was the relic of the newspaper, and realized that now that we have the internet instead of a printing press and trucks and newstands, there’s no reason to expect to get photography and essays from the same source anymore.
On the third hand there’s whatever the hell I’m doing, hijacking an only tangentially related photoset for the purpose of an essay.
