Ad for the 1909 Maxim silencer. They cost $5. $5 was 1/4 of an ounce of gold at the time.
Posted on 10/27/2023 4:45:47 AM PDT by marktwain
A close friend told me of a high school field trip he went on in 1975. The trip was to a slaughterhouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There, he encountered a Maxim Silencer attached to a .22 single-shot pistol. The Maxim and pistol were displayed on the wall. The display said the silenced pistol had been used to slaughter over two million cattle before it was retired, presumably when a captive bolt system was substituted.
Research revealed Sioux Falls was close to where my friend went to school. It has a huge slaughterhouse industry, started in 1909. The number of animals processed there each year numbers in the millions. By 1949, 800 cattle were being processed there each day. According to a source online, it takes about two minutes to move an animal on the processing line. If we limit a day to eight hours, there would be 240 cattle processed in a day. If we limit the days used in a year to 200, there would be 48,000 cattle processed in a year, and it would take 42 years to process 2 million cattle. The plant was started in 1909, the same year the Maxim Silencer became available. There was enough time for the Maxim system to be used for 2 million heads of cattle.
As a practical matter, the plant operates 24/7 in shifts, 365 days a year, so there was enough time to process millions of heads on several different lines, including time used for regular maintenance.
Another friend, Don Cowling, was involved in research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which included retrieving cattle organs and blood from freshly killed animals. He reported the use of a .22 single shot in the slaughterhouse in the 1960’s. That .22 did not
(Excerpt) Read more at ammoland.com ...
Ad for the 1909 Maxim silencer. They cost $5. $5 was 1/4 of an ounce of gold at the time.
Make sure to get the “gun” silencer, not the “car” silencer. Heh.
1960s advertisement
Before you get too excited about those prices, realize that the $49 Walther PP in 1968 would be $433 today.
Still not bad, considering that a new Ft. Smith PPK or PPK/S will leave the factory with a price tag over $800...
Yes. I purchased a number of the Star Model B pistols, listed at $59 in the ad, for about $99 sometime around the year 2000. Decent pistols. A design improvement on the 1911. I might still have one or two of them.
Ya people don’t realize wages back then. I looked it up a while ago and top journeyman pay in the trades was like $6 an hour!!
I recall minimum wage was $1 an hour, maybe a $1.25. Inflation was starting to take off after 1964...
They are primarily a safety device.
England too. You can buy them in 3-packs in hardware stores.
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I agree. If the NFA were repealed tomorrow, I wouldn’t shed a tear.
At 74 now, I found that to be just “normal”.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 killed all that.
Anyone remember “normal”?
My third grade field trip was to a cattle slaughter house. In those days a guy swung a really big hammer onto the head of the cow
Some were very bisturbed by the orocesd
Huyshoppe Ave Hartford Ct. is the Original Colt Mfg. Building address, I spent a lot of time working in those old buildings. Lot of history there but I did not know that Maxim was located there too.
Hartford CT and Springfield MA were both historic manufacturing sites that should have been supported by the states, neither was.
Btt!
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