What Is A Revolver?

Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 519, 10 December 1853

revolver - colt - india wars - manufacture

london factory

In America, colonels and majors are very plentiful, and are produced, from various grades of life, more quickly and easily than in England. We are not familiar with the military career of Colonel Colt; but it will suffice to say that he established a revolving pistol-manufactory at Patterson, at an expense, it is said, of £30,000. After that he removed it to Hartford, in Connecticut where his chief establishment still exists; it has the reputation of being the largest private manufactory of firearms in the world, producing 300 revolving pistols daily. When the Great Exhibition was opened in Hyde Park in 1851, Colonel Colt sent over some of his revolvers, which at once attracted the notice of military men, for although our shooters had before known something of revolvers, and our farmers of reaping-machines, the Americans had unquestionably the merit of establishing such inventions at once on a firm basis. After the Exhibition was over, Colonel Colt obtained possession of a building near Vauxhall Bridge, wherein to establish an English manufactory of revolvers; and in fifteen or eighteen months, this establishment has been brought to a degree of completeness almost rivalling that of our Whitworths and Fairbairns.

The building is about 250 feet long, with three stories or floors, filled with beautiful machines. The machines and the operatives employed are mostly American. There are said to be nearly 200 separate operations in making these pistols, and almost every operation is performed by machines of exquisite construction. The ground-floor is nearly occupied by machines and tools needed in making other machines and tools; for there are renewals of some of the tools required almost every day. The upper floors are occupied by the machines actually employed in the making of the weapons. Although there are 150 machines altogether, a steam-engine of moderate power suffices to work them all for the operations require delicacy rather than power. The forging, tapping, shaping, slotting, drilling, planing, boring, rifling, and even engraving of the revolvers, are all effected by machinery. It is considered that, in each revolver produced, ten per cent. of the value is for skilled labour, ten per cent. for the labour of women and children in attending the almost automatic machines, and nearly eighty per cent. for the machines themselves and steam-power. Every piece is made so exactly like all others of the same nature and purpose, that there is no filing away or adjusting when the weapon is put together: the most mathematical exactness distinguishes every part. Like as the compositor has a box of As, a box of Bs and so forth, and knows that all in one box are exactly alike, so does Colonel Colt, or his manager, Mr Stickney provide a box of lock-frames, a box of breech-arbois, a box of levers, a box of hammers, &c, and knows that any one in a box will answer his purpose as well as any other - a certainty which can never be attained by hand-labour. The pistols are made better by this rigid system, they are made more rapidly, and there is a remarkable facility for repairing them when any of the component parts become injured. It has been found that seventy or eighty per cent. of pistols injured in action can he renovated by this facility of renewing particular parts. There are five different sizes of revolvers made, in which all the component parts vary in the same ratio as the complete weapon. The largest, a holster-pistol, can shoot to the enormous distance of 1200 yards. In short, the true principle of machinery is here rendered available: the production of a large number of pieces all precisely alike, so that any one will render exactly the same kind of service as any of the others.

This, then, is the warlike, much-talked-of revolver. There are revolvers patented and made by English gunsmiths also, and there are controversies concerning the relative merits of the different inventions; but these matters of detail we need not touch upon. All we have attempted is, to explain simply how a revolver differs from an ordinary pistol, a Minié bullet from an ordinary bullet, a rifle from a musket, and a Prussian zündnadel from a percussion-cap.