A Toy No More

Purdey’s new scaled-frame .410s: little, lithe, good-looking & lethal

For eons, creatures of prodigious size haunted the imaginations of pre-scientific man. From Cyclops of Ancient Greece, to Goliath of the Old Testament, to the fire, frost and mountain monsters of Norse mythology, giants were real and frightening things. This forever changed in 1638 with Galileo Galilei’s explanation of nature’s scaling laws. In Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, the Italian scientist, among other things, dissected the giants of yore using mathematics to show why they did not exist.

Galileo used an illustration of two bones—one from a smaller animal and the other from a larger one, the hypothetical latter being three times taller. The taller animal’s bones would need to be much more massive than the smaller animal’s, Galileo showed, because a bone’s strength is determined by the area of its cross-section. Area is two-dimensional—length x width—so if a bone were three times longer than the smaller and still of the same shape, the area of its cross-section would increase nine times (3x3). Weight, on the other hand, is three dimensional, so with the larger animal would increase a whopping 27 times (3x3x3)—effectively crushing said bones unless they miraculously were made of a much stronger material or were scaled up to grotesque proportions.

In an inverse way, Galileo’s bones provide one clue as to why properly scaled “best” .410s always have been as rare as the femurs of giants. Scaling mechanisms dramatically up—or down—in size is rarely simple or straightforward, and historically it’s been no easy task for gunmakers to downsize designs originally made as 12-bores to diminutive .410s.

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