Revolver - History

History

In the development of firearms, an important limiting factor was the time it took to reload the weapon after it was fired. While the user was reloading, the weapon was nearly useless, and an adversary might be able to take advantage of the situation and kill or wound the user. Several approaches to the problem of increasing the rate of fire were developed, the earliest being multi-barrelled weapons which allowed two or more shots without reloading.

An example of these is the 3-Barrel Pole Gun, invented by the Chinese during the Ming Dynasty. The weapon consists of three barrels arranged in a triangle, with metal rings around the barrels. The barrels were mounted on a single wooden handle, which rested on a wooden pole. It is fired two handed by igniting the black powder through a touch hole on the barrel. The weapon is then rotated one-third of the way to bring the next barrel into the rotation. The ability to fire multiple shots before reloading it gave it great value for its time.

The first real revolvers were partly an attempt to improve on pepper-box type weapons, which used a revolving cylinder with one set of firing mechanisms, but which had multiple barrels as well. Firing through a single barrel saved the expense and weight of having the multiple barrels of the pepper-box.

The earliest example of a revolver is a revolving arquebus, produced by Hans Stopler of Nuremberg in 1597. Another early specimen, now in the Tower of London armouries, is dated to the middle 17th century and attributed to John Dafte of London. This example, a flintlock, uses a single lock, with a flash pan for each of the six chambers. The cylinder is rotated by hand, and locks in place for firing. This was still not perfected, however, as it was apparently destroyed by a misfire.

James Puckle patented a revolving chamber gun in 1718. This gun, which had a 1.25 inch bore (30 mm), was tripod mounted, and the 11-shot cylinder was operated by a hand crank. It is often cited as the first machine gun. By changing cylinders to reload (an early example of a speedloader), the gun was fired and reloaded to fire a total of 63 rounds in seven minutes. Elisha Collier patented a flintlock revolver in Britain in 1818, and significant numbers were being produced in London by 1822.

In 1836, Samuel Colt patented a revolver mechanism that led to the widespread use of the revolver. According to Samuel Colt, he came up with the idea for the revolver while at sea, inspired by the capstan winch, which had a ratchet and pawl mechanism on it, a version of which was used in his guns to rotate the cylinder. Revolvers proliferated largely due to Colt's ability as a salesman. But his influence spread in other ways as well; the build quality of his company's guns became famous, and its armories in America and England trained several seminal generations of toolmakers and other machinists, who had great influence in other manufacturing efforts of the next half century.

Early revolvers were caplocks and loaded like muskets: the user poured powder into a chamber, rammed down a bullet, then placed percussion caps between the hammer and cylinder. After firing a shot, the user would raise his pistol vertically as he cocked the hammer back so as to let the fragments of the percussion cap fall out and not jam the mechanism.

Revolvers have remained popular to the present day in many areas, although in the military and law enforcement they have largely been supplanted by magazine-fed semi-automatic pistols such as the Colt M1911, especially in circumstances where reload time and higher cartridge capacity are deemed important.