Early Hammerless Designs
Early caplock firearms, patterned after their flintlock ancestors, had exposed hammers. The conversion was done by replacing the flash pan with a nipple for a percussion cap, and the flintlock's cock with a hammer to crush the cap and ignite the powder. The hammer was on the side of the firearm, easily reached for priming and cocking.
The earliest cartridge firearms simply copied the older style of action; the .45-70 "Trapdoor" rifle and most early cartridge double-barreled shotguns are good examples of this. In these designs, the loading of the cartridge(s) and the cocking of the hammer(s) were separate operations. While rifles evolved away quickly away from these early breech loading designs, the double barrelled shotgun retained its popularity, and, for some time, its exposed hammers.
American inventor Daniel Myron LeFever was the first to develop a "hammerless" shotgun in 1878. It used internal strikers that were cocked manually, but in 1883, he developed a version that cocked the strikers automatically as the action was closed. This type of hammerless action, or the similar cock-on-open variation, is nearly universal in modern double barrelled shotguns.
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