“A fanatic is one who sticks to his guns whether they’re loaded or not.”
—Franklin P. Jones
Claude Étienne Minié
Just as Colt’s patent on the revolver was ending in 1857, two Massachusetts gunmakers, Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, were busy prepping the release of their own new gun, one that would complement many of Colt’s advances but add one revolutionary change. The Model 1, as it would become known, was the first revolver to use self-contained metallic cartridges—or what people typically (but, as we’ll see, incorrectly) refer to as “bullets” today. The cartridge, one advance that had first escaped Colt’s grasp, was a technology that helped alleviate many of the complications that had plagued gun owners since the inception of firearms. It allowed the shooter not only to repeatedly fire, but to reload rapidly. Its creation hybridized an array of innovations from some of the most renowned names in gunmaking history.
For hundreds of years, shooters had been loading round lead balls of various sizes into their muskets and rifles. The round shape made loading marginally quicker, and the lead, which was both common and had a low melting point for malleability, made weight standardization of ammunition possible. Yet, as we’ve seen, guns were often problematic to load, with shooters having to jam a ball of equal diameter into the barrel of the rifle by force. Sometimes this task was so challenging that shooters had to use mallets to pound the ammunition down the barrel. And because the spiral grooves of the new rifles would quickly foul from powder residue, it was necessary for the shooter to constantly clean out his firearm; otherwise it might be rendered useless.
There is evidence that paper cylinders containing ball and black powder were already being used in the mid-1500s.1 By 1777 the British had patented paper cartridges. At first these containers merely held the components together, allowing the soldier to rip open the paper package with his teeth and pour the contents down the barrel before ramming it all in the bore. Later those paper cartridges were coated in wax or tallow to protect the powder and ball from the elements and pushed down the barrel whole—and, as an added bonus, the wax melted from the heat and helped soldiers clean out the resulting fouling.
Before a proper cartridge could be conceived, there had to be something more advanced than the flintlock ignition system to propel the ball. As we’ve noted, shooting a gun was contingent on the sparks generated by the flint igniting a pan of priming powder, so any kind of wet weather or dampening could mean misfiring, which happened quite often. Inventors had experimented with alternative explosives as a way to overcome the moisture problem, but most of the combustible materials turned out to be even more unstable than black powder, though only slightly easier to keep dry. That is, until Joshua Shaw, an English painter who would later migrate to the United States, claimed to have fortuitously run across an idea in 1814 when accidentally detonating powder in a sealed steel can.
Shaw’s concept resulted in the construction of a small metal cylinder that held inside highly sensitive explosives, like mercury fulminate. This explosive concoction, known to chemists for some time, was made of ethanol and mercury in nitric acid. What made it useful for the gunmaker was its shock sensitivity. By the 1820s these “percussion caps” would be placed over a hollow metal “nipple” at the back of the barrel of a revolver or other gun. When the trigger was pulled the hammer hit the cap and ignited the primer inside, and the flame from the powder traveled through the hollow nipple and ignited the main charge. Percussion caps could be made in an array of sizes for an array of guns. Early caps could sometimes be hazardous, because they exploded and sent copper shards at the shooter. When properly designed, the cap expanded so that it fell off the nipple when the hammer was re-cocked, allowing faster reloading. Soon, most rifle and revolver makers adopted the system and old flintlock guns were rapidly being converted.
At around the same time percussion systems were being implemented, inventors were figuring out ways to enhance the trajectory of the bullet that was being propelled. A British captain named John Norton had invented the first known cylindrical bullet in 1832. The design was based on the blowpipe darts he had witnessed locals using when he was stationed in South India. The conical shape, far more aerodynamic as it pierced the air, had a hollow base. William Greener, the renowned London gunmaker, took Norton’s idea even further, designing a cylindrical bullet with a wooden plug in that hollow base to increase muzzle velocity. But it was a French ordnance officer named Claude-Étienne Minié who would be credited with making one of the bullet’s most deadly advances in 1849, when he created a cylindrical lead bullet that featured a conical point and a hollow base with an iron plug.
What made the Minié bullet so advantageous was that it was smaller than the diameter of a rifle barrel, so even if the barrel had been fouled—which it often was—one could load the bullet into the muzzle around seven times faster than a typical musket ball. One of the keys to firing a rifle properly was figuring out how to tightly seal the bullet within the barrel so that gases wouldn’t escape. Typically this was performed by placing the lead ball in a greased cloth. The Minié bullet alleviated all of this inconvenience. Rather than escaping, gases from the combustion of the gunpowder expanded the lead as it filled the hollow base of the Minié bullet, triggering the soft metal to flare and grip the barrel’s grooves, spinning it to fly farther and more accurately. In effect, the bullet went in one size and came out another.
In early trials, the Minié bullet performed exceptionally well. Testers hit more than 50 percent of their targets from 400 yards using the new bullet—as opposed to 4.5 percent when using a traditional ball.2 Suddenly an average soldier with only rudimentary training could fire a gun with passable accuracy from many hundreds of yards away. This feat would have sounded fantastical only a few decades earlier. James H. Burton, a disciple of John H. Hall’s who worked at the armory at Harpers Ferry, soon eliminated the need for the iron plug, making it even easier and cheaper to manufacture the bullet. Jefferson Davis, United States secretary of war, adopted the Minié ball—an ounce in weight and half an inch across—for the United States Army in 1855. The Union would end up making nearly 3,000 of them every hour at the height of the Civil War, producing tens of millions of Minié balls by the end of the conflict.3
It is believed that the Minié bullet accounted for more than 90 percent of the casualties during the Civil War.4 The new bullet was devastating to the soldiers who encountered it. Rather than pass through the body, as a round ball might, the Minié flattened on impact, shattering and splintering bones, bouncing around inside the body, and doing massive damage. When the bullet did drive through the body, the soft lead left the victim with an exit wound that was far larger than the entrance wound. As we’ll see, Civil War surgeons were initially unable to deal with these horrific wounds and shattered bones.
Exploding caps and conical bullets were not enough. While it was certainly true that a revolver could transform one man into five or six, once the handgun was emptied of bullets, there would still be the cumbersome process of loading each separate chamber with powder and ball and percussion cap on the nipple of each chamber. There had to be a better way. And that better way was to integrate the cap, powder, and projectile into a single metal package.
In 1848 an inventor named Walter Hunt, best remembered for his tendency to sell off his ideas and not his prolifically creative mind—he invented the safety pin, lockstitch sewing machines, and the ice plow, among many other useful and enduring items5—created the “Rocket Ball.” Similar to the Minié ball, the Rocket Ball could be shot even farther by packing the cavity of the bullet with powder. For ignition, Hunt soon added a cap with a small hole and then combined lead, powder, and ignition into one container. There was no casing, as the entire cartridge was fired out the muzzle. It was an invention that allowed the lever-action rifle and other quick-firing guns to exist.
The next year Hunt patented a rifle that could shoot this new cartridge, called the “Volitional Repeater” rifle. This rifle featured a tubular magazine with a lever mechanism located in front of the trigger, which, when pulled, would push one Rocket Ball from the cylinder to the next position and cock the hidden hammer. Although the design was mechanically unreliable, the contours of the lever-action rifle, soon to dominate the market, were set.6 But Hunt, as was his wont, sold the design, this time to shirtmaker George Arrowsmith, for a mere $400. And by 1854 his ideas had slowly worked their way to the desks of two engineers named Smith and Wesson at the Robbins & Lawrence plant in Vermont.
• • •
By the age of sixteen, Horace Smith, born to a Massachusetts carpenter and his wife in 1808, was working in the Springfield Armory as an apprentice. He spent the next twenty years there. Like Sam Colt and many other great American gunmakers, Smith had little formal education. Smith worked his way through a number of gun firms, focusing on creating more efficient techniques to make weapons and quicker loading times for the weapons he did produce.
Daniel Wesson was seventeen years younger than his business partner, and the age difference would be mirrored in a relationship that was more like a father and his son than equals, as the older Smith was the dominant force in their business partnership. Wesson was used to this arrangement, as he had made his bones apprenticing with his brother, a well-known Massachusetts rifle maker. Those years gave Wesson an education not only in gunmaking but in the ins and outs of patent law, increasingly impor-tant in the nineteenth century.
In 1850, the year California would become a state, the two came together in Windsor, Vermont, at the Robbins & Lawrence factory, a groundbreaking center of the precision tool industry started by Richard Smith Lawrence and Samuel E. Robbins. The firm, which played a vital role in the first American industrial revolution, was home to an array of machines and procedures that were aimed at increasing productivity. By the time Smith and Wesson showed up, the factory was pumping out 10,000 military muskets every year at the amazingly low cost of $12 per item. The system developed by the American armories in Springfield and Harpers Ferry—and private factories like Robbins & Lawrence—was the most advanced in the world. Although the “American system” of manufacturing was not solely about weaponry, it wasn’t until gunmakers like Sam Colt and others appeared at London’s Crystal Palace exhibition to show off their wares that British engineers, and soon the other Europeans, began to embrace it. The British Army, in fact, was impressed enough not only to place a large order for rifles but to purchase Robbins & Lawrence–designed metalworking machines. The Crown’s armory at Enfield would rely on them for years.7
Despite going on to create many manufacturing innovations and producing tens of thousands of rifles for the Union during the Civil War, the names Robbins and Lawrence would be largely forgotten by history. The lesson, of course, is that if you want your name to endure through the annals of time, make sure to put it on the gun. On this front, Smith and Wesson, who had a small but important role in gun design history, would not be outdone. In 1855 they took their first crack at independence with the Smith & Wesson Company. The venture limped along until investors took a controlling interest and renamed the firm Volcanic Repeating Arms Company. One of these stockholders, a man whose name was soon to be stamped on millions of guns in the coming century and a half, was Oliver Winchester.
Unlike many of the enduring names in the industry, Winchester was neither a mechanical innovator nor an engineer nor particularly interested in guns at all. Rather, he was an astute businessman with an aptitude for spotting pioneering ideas, profitable patents, and talented men. Born in 1810 into a family that had inhabited the city of Boston for five generations, Winchester’s hardscrabble upbringing sparked an unrelenting drive for success.8 The man was born at the right time for men of his disposition. By the mid-1830s, Winchester had helmed a string of successful business ventures, including running a highly profitable men’s furnishing store in Baltimore. Winchester soon decided to move to New Haven, where he partnered with a New York industrialist named John M. Davies to become one of the leading shirt manufacturers in America—and, according to him at least, the entire world. In Connecticut, Winchester found himself amid a vibrant wave of early industry. Factories dotted the town, producing everything from clothes to clocks to horse-drawn carriages and, of course, guns. With a nose for profit, Winchester soon expanded his manufacturing efforts.
Much like Colt, Oliver imbued his workforce with the idealism of the industrial age, entwining capitalism with strains of religiosity and patriotism. “Let us, therefore, be united in our efforts and purpose,” he once lectured his workers, “to devote to our several departments, all the energies we possess, nor be satisfied while a stitch is misplaced, a stain unremoved, or a wrinkle unsmoothed; remembering that a shirt, however coarse, is an emblem of purity, and as the work of our hands, which are directed by our minds, it is the index to our character, to which the close observer of human natures requires no more certain key.”9
Well, perhaps one. Money was to be made, and lots of it. Considering the time and place, it’s unsurprising that the enterprising Winchester would have been drawn to gun manufacturing. And at the age of forty-five, Winchester, although he knew practically nothing about the business or mechanics of firearms, pulled together a group of investors and took a controlling interest in the newly minted Volcanic Repeating Arms Company from Smith and Wesson. The technology was not there yet, however, and although Winchester plowed his own money into the flailing enterprise, the attempt went belly-up in 1857.
Smith & Wesson Model 1
Smith and Wesson would give it another shot, founding the Smith & Wesson Revolver Company in Springfield less than a year later. It was here that they brought together many of the ideas they had worked on in the past decade to create the Model 1, the first revolver to use rimfire cartridges instead of powder, ball, and percussion cap. The cartridges would make the gun easier to reload than any ever made. The Model 1 held seven .22-caliber bullets that were mounted in copper casings that held the black powder. At the bottom was a hollow rim with priming compound. When the firing pin on the hammer hit the rim of the cartridge, the priming powder was ignited, leaving a spent copper casing in the chamber but propelling a cylindrical bullet. The gun fired a small .22-caliber, so it did not interest the Army. But the revolver soon became a favorite of many gun slingers and went through various iterations: the Model 2 featured a .32-caliber, and then the Model 3, a .44-caliber.
The duo also began experimenting with innovations like an unsnapping latch that allowed both barrel and cylinder to drop down and forward, or a spring-loaded ejection that would clear the used casings from the cylinder. All of which made reloading faster. While the Colt company outdid them with a gate-opening mechanism that pushed out all the spent casing when opened, soon every new revolver was utilizing the cartridge technology, and guns would never be the same.
In 1862, Winchester wrote stockholders to say that, since “the commencement of our organization, till the past three months, five years and a half, there has not been a month in which our expenditures have not exceeded our receipts.”10 Winchester’s company teetered on the edge of insolvency for years. That is, until a Winchester employee named Benjamin Tyler Henry, an engineer who had worked with Smith and Wesson, cobbled together a number of existing patents and invented his namesake, the Henry repeating rifle. The obsessive Henry would have a complicated relationship with Winchester, who was impatient with the slow development of his firearm. Henry was, in modern parlance, a workaholic. Perhaps even this is an understatement. Henry lived virtually full-time in the factory and worked inhumane hours for years trying to perfect his ideas.
In 1860, Henry finally fixed all the problems with his gun and gave Winchester what he wanted: a lever-action (behind the trigger) breech-loading rifle with a sixteen-shot tubular magazine that could repeatedly fire. During one Navy test, the Henry fired 187 shots in 340 seconds. In time, the Ordnance Board placed an order of nearly 1,700 of his rifles for use, mostly by the cavalry.
Although it proved less sturdy in wartime conditions than some of the repeaters that would come, many soldiers purchased the gun on their own dime. Rather than rely solely on federal purchases, Winchester took a page from Colt’s book and made inroads with local editors, politicians, and military men, showering them with praise and gifts—and always selling the new technology. Winchester’s company, the New Haven Arms Company, reorganized after the Civil War and was renamed the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, with Oliver taking the helm as president, treasurer, chairman of the board, and about everything other than janitor. Winchester became a tireless advocate for his weapon.
The year after the Civil War ended, Winchester introduced the Model 1866, nicknamed the Yellow Boy due to the bronze-brass alloy receiver.11 (Western Indians often referred to it as “many shots” and “spirit gun.”) The rifle found a big market on the western frontier. Initially, the brass-framed rifles and carbines used .44 rimfire caliber. The “rimfire” cartridge is shot when the firing pin strikes the rim cartridge base, igniting the primer. Most of the future models featured “center-fire” ammunition, which is still today’s predominant style of cartridge, in which the pin strikes the center of the cartridge base.
As the revolver made the flintlock pistol obsolete, the repeating rifle—and the cartridge that fueled it—would add a new, dangerous dimension to firearm technology.