American Rifle - Alexander Rose [64]
Nevertheless Arrowsmith sold the Jennings patent for the huge sum of $100,000 (about $2.5 million in today’s dollars) to Cortlandt Palmer, a wealthy former president of the Stonington & Providence Railroad who enjoyed a spot of speculative financing. Palmer contracted with Robbins & Lawrence, the Vermont arms firm that was then preparing the six interchangeable firearms for the Crystal Palace Exhibition, to make five thousand .54-caliber Jenningses.51
Ultimately Palmer was the one left holding the (very expensive) bag. Despite Jennings’s improvements, the gun still could not be made to work reliably, and Palmer was forced to market it not as an epochshaking “mechanical” repeater but as a run-of-the-mill single-shot “physical” rifle. It did not sell. Determined to give his investment one last try, Palmer asked Horace Smith, who was supervising production of the Jennings at Robbins & Lawrence, to look into refining both the Rocket Ball and the lever operation; shortly afterward Smith asked a friend of his, Daniel Wesson, to fiddle with the gun’s firing mechanism and see if it was worth salvaging.
Smith was another archetypal gunsmith of the time. Born in 1808, the son of a carpenter, at sixteen he was apprenticed to the Springfield Armory, where he specialized in gun-making machinery. After eighteen years there he left the Armory for the private sector and worked at a variety of plants, including a tool factory, Allen, Brown & Luther. It was while employed there that Smith had first met Wesson. The two kept in touch and became still closer friends after Smith joined Robbins & Lawrence up in Vermont sometime in 1849.52
As for Wesson, he was seventeen years younger than Smith, and their age difference was reflected in their career paths, a consequence of the rapidly changing times. Whereas Smith had come up the traditional way through the government arsenals, Wesson from the get-go was strictly a private businessman. Though their father was a farmer, Wesson’s older brother Edwin had established a rifle-making workshop in Massachusetts to which young Daniel was apprenticed at seventeen. Early on the teenager had been fascinated, not with guns, but with the mechanics of guns. In 1842 Edwin had told their father that “Daniel likes to hunt, but he had rather be at work in the shop on gunlocks, springs or something of that kind.” Unfortunately, just after Daniel completed his apprenticeship, Edwin died, leaving behind unsurmountable debts. The promising little business was wound up, leaving Daniel not just with debts but with nothing, not even a set of tools. He took a superintendent’s job with the Leonard Pistol Works, whose guns were made under contract at Robbins & Lawrence. As such, Wesson oversaw operations and ensured quality control up in Vermont. Hence his working alongside Smith.53
At this early date it was Smith, not Wesson, who did most of the work for Palmer, and a modified Smith-Jennings rifle was patented in August 1851.54 The priming mechanism worked better, but the Rocket Ball was less a majestic Saturn V than an underpowered piece of lead. Most important, Smith used the now-ring-shaped trigger as both the firing trigger and as a lever that, when pulled downward and forward, shoved a cartridge into the chamber from the underbarrel tube. When pushed back into position, the gun was ready to fire. Just over a thousand of the Smith-Jenningses were made.
While worldly success still eluded the increasingly frustrated Palmer, Smith and Wesson were forming a close bond, a union of like minds and equal talents. One of their early meetings