Monday, November 25, 2013

Mr. Colt's Collier's Revolving-Cylinder Firearm

     Hunh.  Who knew?  Like most firearms hobbyists, I was aware of odd precursors to the Colt revolver, but I sure didn't know about Elisha Collier's relatively-successful flintlock revolvers -- or that Samuel Colt had seen them.

     This takes no glory away from Colt, who devised a more-compact mechanism and was the first to incorporate percussion caps, resulting in the first genuinely-reliable repeating sidearm and jumpstarting seventy years of remarkable advancement in gun design.

3 comments:

Keads said...

Very cool post! I did not know the revolver is coming up on 200 years of use.

Dave H said...

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't have OSHA and the Fire Marshal breathing down the back of your neck.

Windy Wilson said...

And Collier's version automatically meted out a bit of primer powder with each cock of the hammer.
More complex, indeed. There's no telling how many complicated hand-manufactured and fitted pieces were eliminated with the invention of the percussion cap.