A revolver is a repeating handgun with at least one barrel and a revolving cylinder containing multiple chambers (each holding a single cartridge) for firing. Because most revolver models hold six cartridges before needing to be reloaded, revolvers are commonly called six shooters or sixguns. Due to their rotating cylinder mechanism, they may also be called wheel guns. Before firing, cocking the revolver's hammer partially rotates the cylinder, indexing one of the cylinder chambers into alignment with the barrel, allowing the bullet to be fired through the bore. By sequentially rotating through each chamber, the revolver allows the user to fire multiple times until having to reload the gun, unlike older single-shot firearms that had to be reloaded after each shot. The hammer cocking in nearly all revolvers is manually driven and can be cocked either by the user using the thumb to directly pull back the hammer (as in single-action), or via internal linkage relaying the force of the trigger-pull (as in double-action), or both (as in double-action/single-action). Some rare revolver models utilize the blowback of the preceding shot to automatically cock the hammer and index the next chamber, although these self-loading revolvers (known as automatic revolvers, despite technically being semi-automatic) never gained any widespread usage. Though the majority of weapons using a revolver mechanism are handguns, other firearms may also have a revolver action. These include some models of rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers, and autocannons. Revolver weapons differ from Gatling-style rotary weapons in that in a revolver only the chambers rotate, while in a rotary weapon there are multiple full firearm actions with their own barrels which rotate around a common ammunition feed. Famous revolver models include the Colt 1851 Navy Revolver, the Webley, the Colt Single Action Army, the Colt Official Police, Smith & Wesson Model 10, the Smith & Wesson Model 29 of Dirty Harry fame, the Nagant M1895, and the Colt Python. Although largely surpassed in convenience and ammunition capacity by semi-automatic pistols, revolvers still remain popular as backup and off-duty handguns among American law enforcement officers and security guards and are still common in the American private sector as defensive, sporting, and hunting firearms.
History In the development of firearms, an important limiting factor was the time required to reload the weapon after it was fired. While the user was reloading, the weapon was useless, allowing an adversary to attack the user. Several approaches to the problem of increasing the rate of fire were developed, the earliest involving multi-barrelled weapons which allowed two or more shots without reloading. Later weapons featured multiple barrels revolving along a single axis. A matchlock revolver with a single barrel and four chambers held at the Tower of London was originally believed to have been invented some time in the 15th century, but has now been identified as an Indian matchlock of the 1800s. A revolving three-barrelled matchlock pistol in Venice is dated from at least 1548. During the late 16th century in China, Zhao Shi-zhen invented the Xun Lei Chong, a five-barreled musket revolver spear. Around the same time, the earliest examples of the modern revolver were made in Germany. These petronel weapons featured a single barrel with a revolving cylinder holding the powder and ball, with each cylinder having its own separate flash-pan and pan-cover. They would soon be made by many European gun-makers, in numerous designs and configurations. Of particular note is the gun attributed to John Dafte from c.1680, which is the earliest surviving specimen of automatic cylinder rotation. This gun combined in 'one package the three essential ingredients of a successful revolver: mechanical cylinder rotation, individual priming for each chamber, and a cylinder stop for barrel/cylinder alignment, all activated by cocking the firearm.' Commonalities in design suggest the weapon inspired a later, more compact imitation by the gunmaker Thomas Annely. In 1821, the US Navy trialled a revolver belonging to Captain Artemus Wheeler; in 1819 and 1824, two committees of British artillery officers examined a similar revolver from Elisha Collier. FitzRoy Somerset, as secretary to the Master-General of the Ordnance the Duke of Wellington, reported that the gun had fired 'one hundred rounds in twenty-nine minutes at a target distant one-hundred yard, putting seventy-one balls through the target and lodging one in it... [with another] five rounds at two hundred yards... there was not a missfire in the 105 rounds.' The weapon was not adopted, however, for the same reason that previous similar guns had not been widely distributed: they were complicated, difficult to use and prohibitively expensive to make. A rare exception was the early 19th century popularity of multiple-barrel handguns called "pepper-boxes". Originally they were muzzleloaders, but in 1837, the Belgian gunsmith Mariette invented a hammerless pepperbox with a ring trigger and turn-off barrels that could be unscrewed. In 1836, American Samuel Colt patented a popular revolver which led to widespread use, and for which Colt is credited as having invented the first modern practical revolver. Colt used a ratchet and pawl mechanism to rotate the cylinder by cocking the hammer, which provided a reliable and repeatable way to index each round and did away with the need to manually rotate the cylinder. According to Colt, he came up with the idea for the revolver while at sea, inspired by the capstan and its similar ratchet and pawl mechanism, although similar examples of such revolvers did exist in museum collections and the existence of an earlier example could have precluded Colt registering a patent on the mechanism. Nevertheless, the new mechanism, coupled with Colt's ability as a salesman—one historian describing him as 'a pioneer Madison Avenue-style pitchman'—and his approach to manufacturing ensured his influence spread. The build quality of his company's guns became famous, and its armories in America and England trained several seminal generations of toolmakers and other machinists, who had great influence in other manufacturing efforts of the next half century.
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