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Terrible Inventions.
Wesson and Smith were both gunsmiths from Connecticut. So was Winchester and so was Samuel Colt. A smith named Henry -- as in "Henry repeating rifle" -- was hired by Winchester. And just across the border in Massachusetts was the U. S. government's Springfield Armory, the museum of which you can visit today if you're in the neighborhood. I have no idea why all these innovations came from Connecticut or nearby locations. Something in the water? But experimentation with guns and innovations in other industries were booming in the area in the 1840s, when Smith and Wesson developed (or rather stole) the first self-contained cartridge, the kind we're familiar with today. They invented the speed loader for revolvers. It's more than a historical curiosity. The industrial vigor of the North was the cost the South dearly in the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.
Their .22 and .32 caliber revolvers were much in demand during the Civil War and, despite innumerable legal tangles, the company and its owners prospered. So did Colt and other, more minor, companies. By 1867 the United States was the most heavily armed country in the world. The manufacturing facilities were already there, so Smith and Wesson cultivated the foreign trade. Russia at the time ruled an empire and contracted for the delivery of a .44 caliber pistol in 1869. The Czar placed a massive order for 20,000 pistols in 1871. Over the next decade the Russians ordered more than 160,000 pistols. By this time the .44 caliber Smith and Wesson was a popular gun in the American West. When Gene Autry sings about "totin' my old .44," he's talking about toting the Smith and Wesson Model 3. But three years later, Colt brought out the famous .45 caliber Peacemaker.
By 1877, one partner, Smith was in his sixties and in retiring he sold all the rights to the company to his partner Wesson for what was a piddling sum. He spent his remaining years doing charitable work. There is still a Smith scholarship today. Wesson, in turn, founded two of Springfield's hospitals. I'm not picking on anyone else when I say that this was rather a tradition among New Englanders. It wasn't the individual that mattered, it was the community of which he was a member, and education was at the core of the community. A Boston Brahmin and Supreme Court Chief Justice (and Civil War veteran) Oliver Wendell Holmes was another example. His will left his family comfortable but the bulk of his estate went to Harvard. Two sociologists -- Raymond Gastil and E. Digby Baltzell, who coined the term "WASP", -- have written on the tradition if anyone is interested in looking it up.
Interesting point in the evolution of the pistol. As the population grew towards 1900, cities began to ban the open carrying of guns. Smith and Wesson responded by manufacturing smaller caliber, double action revolvers that could be hidden in a pocket. That's one of the reasons the pistols we see in early gangster movies weren't usually monsters like the Army's .45 automatic. But the outlaws of the 30s were using automatic weapons, bullet-proof glass, and armor left over from World War I. Law enforcement demanded a pistol that would defeat these features and in 1935 Smith's son, Douglas, designed the first .357 magnum, named as it was because Wesson enjoyed drinking champagne in quantity. To publicize the new gun, Douglas made hunting trips to Montana and Alaska. As an anthropologist I studied the Tlingit Indians on Chichigoff Island in Alaska and found an occasional empty magnum cartridge on the forest floor. My first though was, "My God, has EVERYONE started to imitate Dirty Harry?" Then, when I saw the actual bears, the ones that frightened the villagers themselves, I understood.
The program ends with a paean to Smith and Wesson's history in gun manufacture, but the thing is they've stuck to revolvers and semi-automatics are now the pistols du jour.
Their .22 and .32 caliber revolvers were much in demand during the Civil War and, despite innumerable legal tangles, the company and its owners prospered. So did Colt and other, more minor, companies. By 1867 the United States was the most heavily armed country in the world. The manufacturing facilities were already there, so Smith and Wesson cultivated the foreign trade. Russia at the time ruled an empire and contracted for the delivery of a .44 caliber pistol in 1869. The Czar placed a massive order for 20,000 pistols in 1871. Over the next decade the Russians ordered more than 160,000 pistols. By this time the .44 caliber Smith and Wesson was a popular gun in the American West. When Gene Autry sings about "totin' my old .44," he's talking about toting the Smith and Wesson Model 3. But three years later, Colt brought out the famous .45 caliber Peacemaker.
By 1877, one partner, Smith was in his sixties and in retiring he sold all the rights to the company to his partner Wesson for what was a piddling sum. He spent his remaining years doing charitable work. There is still a Smith scholarship today. Wesson, in turn, founded two of Springfield's hospitals. I'm not picking on anyone else when I say that this was rather a tradition among New Englanders. It wasn't the individual that mattered, it was the community of which he was a member, and education was at the core of the community. A Boston Brahmin and Supreme Court Chief Justice (and Civil War veteran) Oliver Wendell Holmes was another example. His will left his family comfortable but the bulk of his estate went to Harvard. Two sociologists -- Raymond Gastil and E. Digby Baltzell, who coined the term "WASP", -- have written on the tradition if anyone is interested in looking it up.
Interesting point in the evolution of the pistol. As the population grew towards 1900, cities began to ban the open carrying of guns. Smith and Wesson responded by manufacturing smaller caliber, double action revolvers that could be hidden in a pocket. That's one of the reasons the pistols we see in early gangster movies weren't usually monsters like the Army's .45 automatic. But the outlaws of the 30s were using automatic weapons, bullet-proof glass, and armor left over from World War I. Law enforcement demanded a pistol that would defeat these features and in 1935 Smith's son, Douglas, designed the first .357 magnum, named as it was because Wesson enjoyed drinking champagne in quantity. To publicize the new gun, Douglas made hunting trips to Montana and Alaska. As an anthropologist I studied the Tlingit Indians on Chichigoff Island in Alaska and found an occasional empty magnum cartridge on the forest floor. My first though was, "My God, has EVERYONE started to imitate Dirty Harry?" Then, when I saw the actual bears, the ones that frightened the villagers themselves, I understood.
The program ends with a paean to Smith and Wesson's history in gun manufacture, but the thing is they've stuck to revolvers and semi-automatics are now the pistols du jour.
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- rmax304823
- Aug 14, 2015
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