American Rifle - Alexander Rose [67]
Regarding Oliver Winchester, he too suffered the usual trials afflicting private arms-makers at the time. Like Colt’s Patent Arms Manufacturing Company, his undercapitalized Smith and Wesson–less Volcanic Company lurched into insolvency, but when its president died, Winchester bought out most of the shareholders and assumed almost complete control. Renaming it the New Haven Arms Company in 1857, Winchester set out not only to cultivate a network of retailers and suppliers but to hire skilled staff. Always a keen talent spotter, Winchester knew exactly who he wanted to head the factory: Benjamin Tyler Henry, a former Springfield Armory engineer who had gone to work for Robbins & Lawrence in 1842. There (the arms world being a small one) he had become friendly with Wesson and helped him out with the Jennings firelock; then when Palmer went into business with Wesson and Smith, Henry had gone with them. Taking a shine to the thirty-something, Winchester hired him as master mechanic at his shirt company before promoting him to the superintendency of the new arms company. His primary responsibility was making Winchester’s newly purchased gun patents work.72
Key among them was the metallic cartridge. Henry began experimenting with the cartridges during the fall of 1858, and by the end of the year he had designed a .44-caliber rimfire bearing a conical bullet. The choice of caliber is interesting. Smith & Wesson’s Flobert-based .22-caliber was nice and light, but it lacked stopping power and was therefore unsuitable for military use; then again, .44 was still much smaller than the usual army rifle caliber of .58 and above. Henry, however, had a practical reason for deciding to shift toward a smaller caliber: with the company’s sales still anemic, and now that the rifle’s firing and chambering actions were working smoothly, neither he nor Winchester wanted to delay production by having to readapt the breech to accommodate the lengthier, wider .58s.
Once he was finished with the ammunition, Henry began making improvements to the Volcanic Company’s version of the Smith-Jennings rifle. Most of his work was devoted to adapting the breech and lever mechanism so that it could load, fire, and then eject the spent all-in-one rimfire cartridge while pushing a fresh round into the chamber. By October 1860 he’d done it, and what’s more—thanks to keeping the caliber size down—he had managed to squeeze no fewer than fifteen cartridges into the underbarrel tube. When added to the live round in the chamber ready to fire, these made the “Henry,” as Winchester had generously christened the newly patented weapon, the world’s first dependable “16-shooter.”73 His sales agents boldly claimed to potential customers that “a resolute man, armed with one of these rifles, particularly if on horseback, CANNOT BE CAPTURED.”74
The Henry did have competition, strong competition, from a rival arm, the Spencer repeater. Christopher Spencer was a perhaps unique combination of Yankee businessman and skilled gunsmith, thereby blending the best attributes of Colt and Winchester. Born into a Connecticut farmer’s family in 1833, which made him about twenty years younger than Winchester and Colt and a fortunate heir to the cando spirit of Jacksonian America, Spencer was taught the fundamentals of gunsmithing by his ninety-year-old grandfather, a veteran of the Revolutionary War. In 1847 the wispy boy with piercing eyes was apprenticed as a machinist at