Smith and Wesson and the Rimfire Cartridge

Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson had already failed once together. Their first partnership, formed in eighteen fifty-two in Norwich, Connecticut, produced a lever-action pistol firing a caseless self-consuming bullet, an ingenious idea that the market declined to buy. They dissolved the company, went their separate ways, and tried again.

In eighteen fifty-six, they set up in Springfield, Massachusetts, with a different product: a small tip-up revolver chambered for a .twenty-two caliber self-contained metallic cartridge of their own design. That cartridge was the innovation.

Every revolver before it required the shooter to load powder, ball, and percussion cap separately into each cylinder chamber. Smith and Wesson's rimfire cartridge put all three components into a single brass case. You loaded it in seconds.

You could do it in the dark. The American Civil War, which began five years after the Springfield shop opened, made Smith and Wesson. Soldiers on both sides, unable to get enough government-issue firearms, bought Smith and Wesson revolvers with their own money.

By eighteen sixty the company could not fill its orders fast enough and had to move to a larger factory on Stockbridge Street. The company has been in Springfield ever since, through wars and economic collapses, through the invention of the magnum cartridge, through a century and a half of American gun culture in which their name became a synonym for the handgun itself. The revolver that started it all was small enough to disappear in a coat pocket.

The company that made it is still here.