Thanks for that great link. Absolutely intriguing. I should have read it sooner.
One term that I am not familiar with is "pellet primer." I am imagining a small chunk of something that ignites and burns completely when struck by the hammer. Also, the primer magazine looks to hold only one primer. The purpose then, of the primer magazine being ease of loading the one primer before each shot. Do I understand that correctly? (Carry a couple dozen rocket balls in the tube, but load primers individually?) Innovation arrives in small steps...
That is a good question. I make the presumption that the primer was a small ball (pellet) containing priming compound, designed to freely move through the mechanism as the repeater was cycled. The fact that the gun held more than one primer is not clear, but if it were a pellet of some sort, the needle firing pin makes sense in that it would puncture the primer to ignite it. I can only assume that there was a way to hold several primers since the gun was designed to be a repeater. The ammunition was an early "rocket-ball", having been a hollow bullet with a powder charge packed in the base. Just a couple year's later, Smith & Wesson's first lever action pistols made the change to incorporate the primer into the base of the hollow bullet as well as the powder. Fascinating to review these old firearms and the big advances made in a relatively short period of time. In only a few more years, the Henry was introduced.
I've read a couple of places on the internet that call this a "pilll box" pellet primer magazine. Apparently you dump a bunch of pellet primers into the pill box, close the lid, then the mechanism loads one at a time from the magazine. So it is a genuine repeater.
Almost . . . since they had not figured out how to cock the hammer after every shot, like the Spencer repeater, you still had to pull back the hammer before shooting each shot.
Sharps rifles used what was referred to as pellet primers.These pellet primers looked like small discs and came in a brass tube that held 25 primers and a wooden plunger.
The tube was used to load the primers into a magazine located in the lock plate, using the plunger to push the pellet primers into the lock plate magazine.
The priming mechanism in the lock plate automatically fed a disc primer over the nipple with each fall of the hammer. Hammer had to be cocked by hand.
I am unfamiliar with the Smith-Jennings rifle, but it might have used the same pellet primers as Sharps.
In reading this fascinating article I noted a reference to the Winchester "Yellow Bow" rifle. I had always thought it was called the "Yellow Boy". Am I incorrect or is this merely a typo?