Rollin White
| Rollin White | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Rollin White June 6, 1817 Williamstown, Vermont, United States |
| Died | March 22, 1892 (aged 74) Lowell, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Inventor, gunsmith |
Rollin White (June 6, 1817 – March 22, 1892) was an American gunsmith who invented a bored-through revolver cylinder that allowed metallic cartridges to be loaded from the rear of a revolver's cylinder.
White was born in Williamstown, Vermont in 1818. He learned gunsmithing from his older brother, J. D. White in 1837 and would later claim that the idea for a "rear-loading" Pepper-box revolver came to him while working in his brother's shop in 1839. In 1849 he went to work for Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company as a gunsmith under contract, turning revolver barrels on a lathe. During this time he procured two "junk" or scrapped revolver cylinders from Colt and placed them in his barrel lathe, cutting the front off one and the rear off the other. He assembled these parts into a single bored-through cylinder that would fit in a Colt revolver.
Up until that time, revolvers were black-powder percussion arms. The shooter had to pour powder into each of the six cylinder mouths, push a bullet over the powder, and load a percussion cap on the rear of the cylinder, making the reloading process cumbersome.
While the cartridge revolver was known in Europe, Rollin White's famous patent combined a cylinder and a box magazine. It was a completely unworkable design which never went into production (only one sample was built which malfunctioned dramatically), Yet it was the first US patent to include a cylinder bored through so that a revolver could be loaded from the breech. White's original solution for the misfires that plagued early revolvers was to plug the rear of the chambers with pieces of leather. The patent drawings imply that a percussion cap would have had to be applied to the single nipple for each shot, so it would have been far slower than the existing cap-&-ball revolvers.
For the next three years, White worked on his idea while working at Colt's, during which Colt granted White a contract to manufacture the lockwork of revolvers. White was granted a patent in 1855: "Improvement in Repeating Fire-arms". The next year, White signed an agreement granting Smith & Wesson the exclusive use of his patent, at a royalty rate of 25 cents for every revolver.
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