The Patent That Made Smith & Wesson: Rollin White's Cylinder

A hole all the way through

Look at the cylinder of any modern revolver. Each chamber is a straight tunnel from front to back. You drop a cartridge in from the rear, the case seats against the chamber's shoulder, and the bullet points at the barrel. It is so obvious that it is hard to imagine anyone owning the idea.

Someone did. For fourteen years in the middle of the nineteenth century, a former Colt employee named Rollin White held the American patent on boring a revolver's chambers all the way through. Whoever controlled that patent controlled who could sell a revolver that loaded self-contained metallic cartridges from the back. In the United States, that turned out to be Smith & Wesson.

The man who left Colt

White left Colt's in December 1854. Within three months he held five patents. The one that mattered was U.S. Patent 12,648, "Improvement in repeating fire-arms," published April 3, 1855, which claimed a cylinder bored through so it could be loaded from the rear.

Here is the strange part: White's own gun did not work. Only one sample is recorded as built, and it malfunctioned badly. His drawings implied a percussion cap for each shot, which would have been slower to use than the cap-and-ball revolvers already on the market. The value of the patent was not his design. It was that one sweeping claim about the bored-through chamber.

Two partners looking for a cylinder

Meanwhile, Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson had already been through one venture together. In 1852 they formed a company in Norwich, Connecticut, to develop the Volcanic repeating rifle. By 1855 it had been renamed Volcanic Repeating Arms and bought by Oliver Winchester, whose name would end up on a rather famous rifle company. Smith left in 1856. Volcanic was insolvent by the end of that year.

Wesson, though, had noticed something. Colt's original revolver patent was about to expire, and the future clearly belonged to cartridges. He rejoined Smith, and the two set out to build a cartridge revolver. To do that legally, they needed a bored-through cylinder. That meant they needed Rollin White.

A quarter a gun

The deal was simple and, for Smith & Wesson, a bargain. White granted the partners exclusive use of the bored-through chamber claim, not the rest of his patent, in exchange for a royalty of 25 cents per revolver. They did not make him a partner.

The product was the Smith & Wesson Model 1, made from 1857 to 1882: a small, seven-shot, single-action tip-up revolver firing .22 Short black-powder rimfire cartridges. It is often described as the first commercially successful revolver to use rimfire cartridges. By 1859, orders outpaced production, and the company built a new factory.

Then the Civil War made it a phenomenon. Soldiers on both sides privately bought the little Smiths as personal sidearms, and demand rose sharply. The Model 1 was used by both the Union and the Confederacy. Total production across its three issues ran to roughly a quarter of a million guns.

The cost of a monopoly

Twenty-five cents a gun sounds tidy. The fine print was not. Defending the patent fell heavily on White, and defending it meant suing a lot of people.

White and Smith & Wesson went after Manhattan Firearms, Allen & Wheelock, Merwin & Bray, National Arms and others. Courts mostly sided with White but often let manufacturers keep going if they paid royalties. Some infringing guns were bought back by Smith & Wesson, re-marked and sold, which is why some odd-looking period revolvers carry the stamp "APRIL 3 1855."

The biggest test was White et al. v. Allen in 1863, in the U.S. Circuit Court in Massachusetts. White won even though there was prior art: the French Lefaucheux bored-through revolver had been patented on April 15, 1854, a year before White's. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the justices split 4 to 4, which left the lower ruling standing.

There was a side business, too. White founded the Rollin White Arms Company in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1861. It made about 4,300 revolvers, most of them sold to Smith & Wesson, and White liquidated it in 1864. A successor that bought its assets, the Lowell Arms Company, went on to make about 7,500 revolvers that infringed his patent before White sued them too.

Not everyone was charmed. The Army's Chief of Ordnance, Alexander Dyer, later called White's wartime litigation "an inconvenience and embarrassment" to Union forces.

Colt waits it out

The company that most wanted a bored-through cylinder was the one White had just left. Colt's dominance had been built on percussion revolvers, and it did not want to pay royalties to its rival.

In 1867, White and Smith & Wesson offered to sell the patent to Colt's for a million dollars. Colt's negotiated for a while, then walked away after learning about White's second patent, number 12,649, which had been reissued in 1863 with a breech-loading feature and carried the same date as the first. Buying one patent would not have cleared the path.

So Colt waited. The company could not begin developing bored-through cylinders for metallic cartridges until April 4, 1869. Its engineers, including William Mason and Charles Richards, had worked on cartridge conversions and an 1871 cartridge revolver. Then, in 1873, Colt introduced the gun that would define the American West: the Single Action Army. It is hard not to see that revolver as fourteen years of pent-up demand finally let out.

The extension that never came

The patent expired on December 11, 1869, and Smith & Wesson's exclusivity ended with it. White asked for an extension and was refused.

In 1870 he took his case to Congress, arguing he had earned only about 71,000 dollars from the patent while Smith & Wesson had made more than a million. The historical record suggests the comparison was misleading: White had assigned his royalties to his wife and spent about 17,000 dollars on legal costs, and Smith & Wesson had received nothing further from him. A bill titled "An act for the relief of Rollin White" passed Congress anyway.

President Ulysses S. Grant vetoed it, on the objections of the same ordnance chief, Dyer. There was no override vote, and the bill died. White kept lobbying until 1877, then gave up.

What Smith & Wesson did with its head start

By the time the patent fell, Smith & Wesson had more than a decade of experience making cartridge revolvers and a reputation to match. In 1870, the company pivoted from small pocket guns to large-frame revolvers in serious calibers, beginning with the .44 S&W American. The U.S. Army adopted its Model 3 as the first cartridge-firing revolver in American service.

The firm that started with a royalty deal on someone else's idea went on to build the K-frame Military & Police of 1899, later the Model 10, with more than six million made and often called the most popular centerfire revolver of the twentieth century. Its descendants, like the stainless 686 Plus, still load the way Rollin White described in 1855: straight through the back of a bored-through cylinder.

Rollin White's later years

White did not vanish. He had earlier invented a knife-edge breech block and a self-cocking device for Sharps rifles, and he later built 50 Sharps-based rifles for a possible Navy contract; the Navy bought 12. He died in Lowell on March 22, 1892, at 74.

Why it still matters

Every cartridge revolver you can buy today owes something to that one claim. The story is also a reminder that firearms history is rarely just about clever engineering. Here, a patent that described an unworkable gun, a quarter-per-unit license and a long series of lawsuits shaped which American company led the cartridge-revolver era, and which one had to wait.

If the history sends you looking for something to shoot, a .38 Special wheelgun is the most direct line from that era to the present: the cartridge itself is a Smith & Wesson design from 1898. Store any revolver, antique or modern, unloaded and locked when it is not in use, and have old guns checked by a qualified gunsmith before firing them.

Editorial note: This is an independent editorial overview built from manufacturer specifications, retailer listings and published sources. We have not performed hands-on testing of the products discussed, and nothing here is a performance guarantee. Verify specifications, compatibility and the law where you live.

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