Units of Weight

It was with great interest that I read the Gallery piece by David Bertram concerning the 8-bore black powder breech-loading double rifle (January 2020). What especially caught my attention was his closing sentence mentioning the legend “Charge 10 drms”. I recalled reading in A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa by FC Selous, about black powder charges expressed in drams. I suspected, and this was confirmed when I read up about it, that the dram unit of weight is derived from the Greek drachma, which of course is also a coin denomination. As the term drachma is believed to originally mean the amount a person can hold in the hand, I laughingly compared it with the practice of olden-day pioneers who used the hand-eye method to measure a quantity of powder! When that happened (in double measure) during one of Selous’s hunts, it seemed to have left the hunter with a permanent flinch.

I have a little apothecary one draghm weight, which looks for all the world like our 20c coin, and weighs much the same: slightly over 27 grains. So the 10 drams charge of the 8-bore amounts to a whopping 273 grains! And there were charges of as much as 16 drams poured down the spout of the old 4-bores also used by Selous and others.

The ‘grain’ unit of weight which has superseded the dram, is based on the weight of a single seed (grain) of wheat. It has, I believe, on occasion confused some newcomers to the art of reloading, making them think one actually has to count out the individual granules (grains) of powder to make up a charge.

This letter is just my way of airing my appreciation of the January issue of Magnum, filled with snippets of information like this one by David Bertram, which together make one sit up and rethink what one might already know, but with heightened insight as a bonus. – Johan van Zyl, Western Cape