The Business of Guns

Smith & Wesson: A Company Built on the Revolver Horace Smith and D.B. Wesson partnered together in 1852 in the hopes of manufacturing a gun capable of firing a self-contained cartridge, at a time when many guns required that the shooter first add powder, then a ball bullet, and then more powder just to get a shot off. This laborious process, which might take thirty seconds to a minute, necessitated the invention and popularization of cartridge bullets, but in a time when much gun manufacturing was local, and the cost of a new design was prohibitive, innovation required significant effort. Smith & Wesson achieved this effort after two years, building and patenting the market’s first fully contained cartridge gun in 1854, naming it the “Volcanic pistol” and claiming that its ability to fire shots as rapidly as the user could operate its lever resembled the force of a volcano’s destruction. They renamed their company Volcanic Repeating Arms, though this name lasted just one year before the company was sold and reorganized as the New Haven Arms Company. Smith and Wesson themselves spun off a new company, naming it after themselves, and the name has remained for the past 150 years. The partners hit it big with the Model 1 revolver, a .22 caliber gun holding seven black-powder cartridges, developed in 1857. The gun cost $12 (about two weeks’ salary for an average American) and a box of 100 cartridges cost 75 cents. By the start of the Civil War, just four years later, demand skyrocketed for their guns: the first design of the revolver sold 12,000 copies, but the second design sold ten times as many. Smith & Wesson could not keep up with demand from soldiers on both sides of the conflict, and the company built a new manufacturing facility to increase output. It also struggled to keep up with counterfeits. At the time, so many manufacturers produced mimic designs

The Business of Guns

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