Girardoni air rifle

The Girardoni air rifle is an early repeating rifle engineered around 1779 by the gunsmith Bartolomeo Girardoni for the Austrian army, using a tubular magazine holding twenty to twenty two lead balls and a reservoir of compressed air that could fire roughly thirty shots on a single charge. It served with the Austrian military into the early nineteenth century, but it is best remembered for the example Meriwether Lewis carried on the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803 to 1806, which he used to demonstrate to Native American tribes along the way that it could, in his own words, shoot so often and without powder.