American Rifle - Alexander Rose [65]
By good fortune, Smith and Wesson had both become interested in a French gun that was used for short-range indoor-target shooting: more specifically, various dandies prepared for duels by aiming it at targets shaped like themselves. Sold in 1849 by the Parisian Louis-Nicolas Flobert, the pistol itself was little more than a .22-caliber toy, but what had attracted Smith and Wesson’s attention was the ammunition Flobert had engineered for it. He used a metallic cartridge containing fulminate at the bottom and a bullet at the top. Just a few grains of powder were present, for the cartridge was too delicate to withstand the shock of a full gunpowder charge—and in any case, salon shooters would find the experience too alarming.
Target-range owners were also accommodated. In order to prevent fouling of the barrel, the constant cleaning of which would annoy them, Flobert had thoughtfully left a large amount of empty space inside the cartridge so as to “confine the burning inside.”55 Little did Flobert know (and he certainly wouldn’t profit from it), but his fops’ ammunition would form the foundation of the American gun industry in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Smith and Wesson continued working with the long-suffering Palmer, who fronted them additional funds to finish and patent a prototype of a Flobert-based salon pistol—but one integrating a simple lever-action firing mechanism.56 No one paid it any attention, which was all very well for Smith and Wesson (and Palmer), since at the same time they were secretly refining a new, somewhat more powerful type of all-in-one cartridge based on Flobert’s basic design. Four months after patenting the pistol in February 1854, Smith, Wesson, and Palmer formed a limited partnership company, and two months after that Smith & Wesson patented their upgraded metallic cartridge, the forerunner of those used today.57
Even Palmer, by this time, was running short of cash, and the new partnership was reorganized as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company with the financial backing of a consortium of New Haven and New York investors. Most of the twenty-nine new shareholders were local Connecticut businessmen or respectable white-collar employees—six clockmakers, a railroad conductor, a shipping merchant, a shoe seller, and a grocer, for instance—but there was one among them who would achieve lasting fame: Oliver Winchester, of 57 Court Street, New Haven, who described himself as a “shirt manufacturer.”58
At this point the original partners transferred the patents on their various firearms and cartridges and went their separate ways. Palmer, having received $65,000 in cash and 2,800 shares of stock in the new Volcanic company, retired from the arms-making business and nursed his huge losses back in New York. Smith and Wesson meanwhile took their profits and established their own pistol-making company, which still exists.59 In league with Rollin White, another inventor, they soon produced a six-shot revolver firing a modified Flobert cartridge.60
Winchester, in his midforties and well-to-do thanks to his shirt selling, was among the first of a new breed of Yankee businessmen.61 They were more marketers than makers, more moneymen than mechanics. Unlike Smith, Wesson, and Hall, Winchester himself had no gun experience but entered the trade because he saw a profit in it.
Another member of this club was Samuel Colt, who emerged from a very American tradition of fast-talking, hard-sell showmanship. After all, anyone who could immortalize a .45 revolver as the “Peacemaker” was not just an advertising natural but a gunsmithing superstar.62 This same man gave a shooting display at his own brother’s trial for murder (with an ax)