Importantly, this allowed the barrel itself to be rifled, since the user was not required to force the tight fitting bullet down the barrel in order to load it (a traditional muzzle-loading pistol had a smoothbore and relatively loose fitting shot, which allowed easy loading, but gave much less accuracy). This was similar to loading a traditional single-shot muzzle-loading pistol, except that the powder and shot could be loaded directly into the front of the cylinder rather than having to be loaded down the whole length of the barrel. Įarly revolvers were caplocks and muzzleloaders: the user poured black powder into each chamber, rammed down a bullet on top of it, then placed a percussion cap on the nipple at the rear of each chamber, where the hammer would fall on it. 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.
Revolvers proliferated largely due to Colt's ability as a salesman, but his influence spread in other ways as well. This provided a reliable and repeatable way to index each round and did away with the need to manually rotate the cylinder. According to Colt, he came up with the idea for the revolver while at sea, inspired by the capstan, which had a ratchet and pawl mechanism on it, a version of which was used in his guns to rotate the cylinder by cocking the hammer. In 1836, American Samuel Colt patented a popular revolver which led to the widespread use of the revolver. Originally they were muzzleloaders, but in 1837, the Belgian gunsmith Mariette invented a hammerless pepperbox with a ring trigger and turn-off barrels that could be unscrewed. In the early 19th century, multiple-barrel handguns called " pepper-boxes" were popular. However, these weapons were complicated, difficult to use and prohibitively expensive to make, and as such they were not widely distributed. They would soon be made by many European gun-makers, in numerous designs and configurations. These weapons featured a single barrel with a revolving cylinder holding the powder and ball. Around the same time, the earliest examples of what today is called a revolver were made in Germany. During the late 16th century in China, Zhao Shi-zhen invented the Xun Lei Chong, a five-barreled musket revolver spear. Later weapons featured multiple barrels revolving along a single axis.Ī revolving three-barrelled matchlock pistol in Venice is dated from at least 1548. Several approaches to the problem of increasing the rate of fire were developed, the earliest involving multi-barrelled weapons which allowed two or more shots without reloading. While the user was reloading, the weapon was useless, allowing an adversary to attack the user. In the development of firearms, an important limiting factor was the time required to reload the weapon after it was fired.
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Revolver weapons differ from Gatling-style rotary weapons in that in a revolver only the chambers rotate, while in a rotary weapon there are multiple full firearm actions with their own barrels which rotate around a common ammunition feed. These include some models of rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, and cannons.
Though the majority of weapons using a revolver mechanism are handguns, other firearms may also have a revolver action. Famous revolvers models include the Colt 1851 Navy Revolver, the Webley, the Colt Single Action Army, the Colt Official Police, Smith & Wesson Model 10, the Smith & Wesson Model 29 of Dirty Harry fame, the Nagant M1895, and the Colt Python.
By sequentially rotating through each chamber, the revolver allows the user to fire multiple times until having to reload the gun, unlike older single-shot firearms that had to be reloaded after each shot.Īlthough largely surpassed in convenience and ammunition capacity by semi-automatic pistols, revolvers still remain popular as back-up and off-duty handguns among American law enforcement officers and security guards and are still common in the American private sector as defensive, sporting, and hunting firearms. The hammer cocking can be achieved by either the user manually pulling the hammer back (as in single-action), via internal linkage relaying a rearward movement of the trigger (as in double-action), or both (as in double/single-action). Before firing a round, cocking the hammer partially rotates the cylinder, indexing one of the cylinder chambers into alignment with the barrel, allowing the bullet to be fired through the bore.
357 MagnumĪ revolver (also called a six shooter or a wheel gun ) is a repeating handgun that has at least one barrel and uses a revolving cylinder containing multiple chambers (each holding a single cartridge) for firing.
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