salopain: The story of choke boring is well traveled. Fred Kimble did not invent choke boring (1) nor did Greener make a similiar claim (2). Choke boring evolved as a logical result of breech-loading.
(1) Fred Kimble was the last surviving old-time knight of the trigger and got to telling stories to credulous writers in his seniality; William Hazelton and Charles Askins and others made Kimble a folk hero starting in about 1920. But going back to the orgins of choke boring in the early 1870s, Kimble was a bystander. But the latter-day exaggerations of Kimble were promoted by Askins and Hazelton and "written over" by the next generation of gun writers until the ATA Museum created a Hall of Fame, to which ol' Fred was inducted as a charter member...and the story well-told just won't go away. Fred's bio. on the ATA-HOF site is pure hogwash.
I debunked the Kimble story in my Parker Guns: The "Old Reliable" (Safari Press 1997, 2004) in a chapter entitled "Choke Boring-Pure Accident." Another author took my research to the next level in his article "Doubting Fred Kimble." And John Davis has written two Trade Paperbacks debunking the choke boring story while telling of Fred's impressive other accomplishments in the pigeon ring and as a maker of the Peoria Blackbird" clay target.
(2) By simply reading Greneer's copious writings one can know what he really said about choke boring. He disclaimed "inventing" choike boring, giving credit to Americans, but he had a plausable claim to having prefected it in England, in the early years. After all, Greener was a shotgun maker on an industrial scale. Who better to improve on the basic concept that was in the public domain since at least 1827 in America, and written about by Hawker in England since 1814 in his Instructions to young Sportsmen. Hawker used the choke boring words "cylinder" and "relief," and Greener pictured barrel cross-sections in his tome, The Gun, starting in 1881.
(3) Choke boring as we understand it today, rather than manupilating the back-bore, became an accomplished fact in America with Roprer's ca.1868 screw-in choke, which wasn't effective according to contemporary tests. Meanwhile, once cartridges could be loaded at the breech rather than pushed in from the muzzle (like paper cartridges and Eley's wire cartridge), the barrel borers could constrict the muzzle, and experimentation with true choke boring began.
(4) Joseph Tonks of Boston supplied Joe Long of Boston with the first documented (meaning written about contemporaniously in the first person) choke bored "close shooter;" he wrote a letter to his duck-shooting buddy Fred Kimble in Peoria IL about it, and Fred asked for the gun--"Send it sure." This is covered in Joe Long's 1879 revised edition of his 1874 book, American Wild-Fowl Shooting. If Askins and Hazelton had read Long's book they would not have bought Kimble's "crazy-old-man" stories of grandure, and the true story of the advent of choke boring would have been written quite differently. But once a bogus story gains curency, it ain't gonna go away no matter how often debunked. EDM
