Very cool. I find it interesting that we're not the first to ponder such unlikely events. In most of my gun owning years, whenever my mind wandered to these events I basically considered them damn near impossible. Bullets into barrels, or revolver chambers, or striking one another...
FW Mann appears to have been both a mythbuster and a "box o' truth" experimentalist.
While an initial google search didn't reveal a decent bio of Mann, his book is available on CD-Rom for anyone interested. It would be cool if they would bring this back as a downloadable e-book for a tablet.
http://www.amazon.com/Bullets-Flight-F-W-Mann/dp/1879356732
Yes, he was very much a mythbuster. In fact, here's an excerpt verbatim from his introduction to the book, penned in 1909:
Recorded experiments in the field of rifle work, particularly the unsuccessful ones, have been very meager, and no doubt many of the same mistakes here described have been and are being made by thousands of enthusiastic riflemen far and wide.
A detailed and descriptive record of such personally performed, made with one of the most fascinating mechanisms, the rifle, it is hoped will add to the rifleman's comprehension, and prevent repetition after repetition of the same errors.
...
Keeping in mind the conjecturing and theorizing so prevalent in rifle literature, speculations have been omitted in the following pages, except where they may add to the interest of the reader, and only such conjectures have been allowed as are afterwards either proved false by actually recorded tests, or fully substantiated by recorded experiments.
(I own the original first edition print of his book.)
I will caution you, if you buy it and read it, that the information is VERY outdated and (if you are knowledgeable about modern ballistics) you will cringe at some of the experiments. (We take many things for granted that he was trying to prove, sometimes with quite spectacular failures).
It's interesting in that his book covers the transition from black powder to smokeless powder; during the process they discover that concentrated ammonia can neutralize the primer "salts", etc. (They were ruining MANY barrels prior to that, due to corrosion.)
Once they get to testing smokeless powder, it's actually fascinating because - as they're able to hit higher velocities, he discovers that alloy composition to shoot harder bullets is required. Eventually he has to transition to jacketed bullets only, as velocities exceed the construction of lead rounds. (They hadn't discovered "gas checking" to shoot lead out of rifles, and other concepts yet).
Issues such as runout, seating depth affecting velocity, bullets of BORE diameter being more accurate than GROVE diameter (which was standard at the time), paper patching being unnecessary, etc all were proven by him and went against the grain of current accepted philosophy.
Anyway I'm rambling. It's an interesting book, but surely not for everyone. It's really only really interesting for a deeper understanding and perspective of how modern interior and exterior ballistics developed through the development and transition of blackpowder and smokeless arms.