Who invented the revolver? From sixteenth-century Venice to Samuel Colt, the true story of a contested invention

In the third article on the registers of the Bregaglia I came across a detail that intrigued me: in 1849, in an Alpine valley, a man attempted suicide with a revolver. A weapon that was still something of a novelty at the time. From there came a question that only seems simple: who invented the revolver, and when?

The answer most often given is "Samuel Colt". But, as with many inventions, the true story is longer, more crowded and more interesting than the legend.

A note on method: this is an article on the history of technology. I describe operating principles in general terms, without operational technical detail. I distinguish between what is documented, for example in patents, and what belongs to stories and legends.

The problem to solve

For centuries portable firearms had one enormous limitation: one shot, then a long reload. Powder down the barrel, ball, wadding, priming: an experienced soldier could fire perhaps two or three shots a minute with a musket. With a pistol, in a moment of danger, the second shot often never came.

Many solutions were tried: multi-barrelled guns, stacked barrels, more or less complicated repeating systems. The one that eventually prevailed was a simple idea: a cylinder with several chambers, each holding its own charge, rotating to line them up one after another with a single barrel. This is the cylinder, the heart of the revolver.

The origins: revolving guns before Colt

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

The idea of a rotating cylinder is old. Examples of firearms with several rotating chambers survive from the sixteenth century. A matchlock pistol with three revolving barrels is dated in Venice from at least 1548, and around 1580 matchlock guns with a true revolving cylinder appear in the German lands. In the same period, in China, the inventor Zhao Shizhen designed a weapon with several rotating barrels.

These were expensive, handcrafted, delicate weapons. The cylinder had to be turned by hand, and the ignition systems of the time, matchlock or flintlock, made a truly reliable weapon hard to achieve. Around 1680 the London gunsmith John Dafte made a weapon with automatic cylinder rotation, now considered the oldest surviving example of this mechanism.

Puckle's gun

In 1718 the English lawyer and inventor James Puckle patented a tripod-mounted gun with a hand-cranked revolving cylinder, intended to defend ships against boarders. The patent described two versions: one firing round bullets, for use against Christian enemies, and one firing square bullets, intended for the Ottoman Turks, which according to the text would "convince the Turks of the benefits of Christian civilisation".

The gun never entered service: perhaps two were built. But it shows that, by the early eighteenth century, the idea of a cylinder feeding a barrel was well understood.

Elisha Collier and the flintlock revolver

The next step came in 1818, when the American Elisha Collier patented a flintlock revolver in Britain. Significant numbers were produced in London by the early 1820s, and some examples were examined by British artillery officers. In the same period other inventors, such as Artemus Wheeler and Cornelius Coolidge, patented similar designs.

Collier's revolver was ingenious, but the flintlock remained its weak point: each chamber needed separate priming, exposed to damp and prone to misfires.

The technical breakthrough: percussion ignition

The real obstacle was not the cylinder but ignition. The solution came in the early nineteenth century with percussion ignition: a small amount of compound that explodes when struck, igniting the charge.

The Scottish minister Alexander Forsyth patented a percussion ignition system in 1807. In the following years the percussion cap spread: a small metal cap containing the priming compound, whose invention is credited to several people.

For the revolver it was a revolution: each chamber of the cylinder could have its own cap, compact, damp-resistant and far more reliable than the flintlock. Without the cap, the practical revolver would not have existed.

Pepperboxes

In the 1830s and 1840s pepperboxes became widespread, so called because of their resemblance to a pepper mill: a cluster of barrels that rotated together. They were fairly common in Europe and the United States, mainly for self-defence. In 1837 the Belgian gunsmith Mariette produced a pepperbox without an external hammer. They were muzzle-heavy and inaccurate, but for a decade they were, for many, "the" multi-shot pistol.

It is likely that many of the multi-shot firearms circulating in Europe in 1849, such as the one mentioned in the Bregaglia register, were pepperboxes or European-made revolvers rather than American Colts.

Samuel Colt: a genius of patents and production

The boy aboard the Corvo

Samuel Colt was born in 1814 in Hartford, Connecticut. After a fire ended his schooling in 1830, he was sent to learn the seaman's trade. During a voyage aboard the Corvo, bound for Calcutta, by his own account he carved a wooden model of a revolving firearm. It is the founding episode of the legend: the young sailor who invents the revolver by watching, so it is said, the ship's wheel or capstan.

As an investigator I insist on a distinction: this account comes from Colt himself. There is no reason to doubt that he carved a model, but the romantic version of an invention born from nothing should be treated with caution. Colt knew, or could have known, of earlier attempts, including Collier's.

The patents

Colt's novelty was not the cylinder itself, but a mechanism in which cocking the hammer automatically rotated and locked the cylinder, lining up the next chamber with the barrel. It was a robust solution, well suited to mass production.

Failure and revival

The first Paterson revolvers did not achieve the hoped-for success: expensive, delicate and viewed with suspicion by the US Army. In 1843 the company failed.

The turning point came from Texas. On 4 January 1847, during the war between the United States and Mexico, Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers ordered a thousand revolvers from Colt. Colt no longer had a factory: he had the weapons made at the Whitneyville armory, linked to the family of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, and later acquired its machinery and tooling. In 1848 he opened his own factory in Hartford.

Industry before the weapon

Perhaps Colt's greatest contribution was not mechanical but industrial. With his chief mechanic Elisha K. Root, Colt developed production based on machine tools and interchangeable parts: an example of the so-called "American system of manufacturing". The historian Herbert G. Houze wrote that, without Root's inventive genius, Colt's dream of mass production would never have been realised.

Colt was also a formidable promoter. In 1851 he exhibited his weapons at the Great Exhibition in London, at the Crystal Palace, and from 1853 to 1856 he ran a factory in London. He died in Hartford on 10 January 1862, extremely wealthy.

The investigator's lesson. "Who invented" something is often the wrong question. Patents tell you who protected a specific solution on a certain date, not who first had the idea. Legends, by contrast, tend to concentrate the work of many into one person and one moment. To reconstruct the history of an invention, as of an investigation, you have to separate documents from stories.

The European challenge: Robert Adams and double action

When Colt's English patents expired in 1851, the London gunmaker Robert Adams patented a profoundly different revolver and presented it at the same Great Exhibition.

The rivalry between the two systems, American and British, ran through the whole century. In 1856 the Beaumont-Adams appeared, which could fire in both single and double action, combining the advantages of the two approaches.

The metallic cartridge changes everything

Until the 1850s, loading a revolver was still a lengthy business: powder, ball and cap had to be inserted chamber by chamber. The next real revolution was the metallic cartridge, which combined bullet, charge and primer in a single case.

Lefaucheux and the pinfire cartridge

In France the Lefaucheux family developed the pinfire cartridge, in which a small protruding pin transmitted the blow to the primer. In 1854 one of the first metallic-cartridge revolvers appeared, the Lefaucheux model, which became widespread in Europe and was also adopted for military use.

Rollin White and the patent that blocked America

In the United States the story took a legal turn. In 1855 the inventor Rollin White patented the bored-through cylinder, which allowed cartridges to be loaded from the rear. On 17 November 1856 the firm of Smith & Wesson secured exclusive use of the patent, paying White 25 cents for every revolver produced. Production began in late 1857.

For more than a decade Smith & Wesson effectively had a monopoly on rear-loading cartridge revolvers in the United States, and competitors, Colt included, had to find workarounds or risk lawsuits. The patent expired in April 1869, when a request for a further extension was refused.

The Peacemaker and the age of service revolvers

Freed from the patent, Colt introduced in 1873 the Single Action Army, remembered as the "Peacemaker" and tied to the imagery of the Wild West. In the same period European armies adopted their own service revolvers:

The revolver in Switzerland

Switzerland too had its service revolver story. The army adopted the Model 1872, very similar to the French Chamelot-Delvigne, initially in 10.4 mm rimfire; from 1878 most examples were adapted to the new centrefire cartridge. Then came the Model 1878, produced by the Waffenfabrik in Bern with modifications by Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmidt, and finally the Model 1882, designed by Schmidt himself, which long remained the army's service sidearm.

For anyone who collects or inherits a historic firearm, an important note: in Switzerland, buying, owning and selling weapons, including antique ones, is governed by the Federal Weapons Act. Before buying, selling or simply keeping an inherited weapon, it is wise to check with the cantonal weapons office or the police.

Myths and facts

In short

The revolver was not born in a flash of genius aboard a ship, but from three centuries of attempts. Colt's merit was to arrive at the right moment, with the right technology, a solid patent and above all a factory capable of mass production. It is a lesson that holds for many inventions: history remembers who succeeded, but behind every success there is almost always a long chain of forgotten predecessors.

I have approached the history of other famous weapons in a similar way, such as the AK-47 and its legendary reliability and the condom on the M16 muzzle in Vietnam.

Main sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry "Revolver"; encyclopaedic entries on Samuel Colt, Robert Adams, James Puckle, Rollin White and the Swiss Model 1872 revolver; H. G. Houze, Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention (2006), cited for Elisha Root's role; S. Colt's US patent of 25 February 1836.