Interesting .44 History......

[Bob Wright]

Reading an article form an old publication recently, by Roy Jinks, concerning the first S&W .44s:

Smith & Wesson had produced a solid frame revolver in .44 Henry Rimfire. The gun was a single action looking very much like the Model No. 1 Tip Up, except larger and solid frame construction. Their engineers realized this was not enough frame and by then had bought the patents for a top-break revolver. This was designated the Model No. 3, in .44 Henry Rimfire, and one was submitted to the Army for evaluation. It was returned with the suggestion that it be made "of central fire." And, according to Jinks, this was done without changing the dimensions of the cartridge. So the first .44 S&W cartridges were derived directly from the .44 Henry Flat Rimfire, a cartridge now known as the .44 S&W American.

 

[Bob Wright]

Reading an article form an old publication recently, by Roy Jinks, concerning the first S&W .44s:

Smith & Wesson had produced a solid frame revolver in .44 Henry Rimfire. The gun was a single action looking very much like the Model No. 1 Tip Up, except larger and solid frame construction. Their engineers realized this was not enough frame and by then had bought the patents for a top-break revolver. This was designated the Model No. 3, in .44 Henry Rimfire, and one was submitted to the Army for evaluation. It was returned with the suggestion that it be made "of central fire." And, according to Jinks, this was done without changing the dimensions of the cartridge. So the first .44 S&W cartridges were derived directly from the .44 Henry Flat Rimfire, a cartridge now known as the .44 S&W American.

 

[opoefc]

Bob, I don't know that I would say that the .44 S&W cartridge was derived directly from the .44 Henry RF. I think it was probably a case of the usual thrifty thinking at S&W in that the cylinder was already bored to .44 caliber, so using the Martin Patent, S&W made a slightly longer and more powerful central primed cartridge ( 1/10 " longer) than the Henry round to take advantage of the longer cylinder in the American models. The .44 Henry had been around for 8 years before S&W produced the first American models to fill an Army contract made in 1870. The thinking behind the sample gun ( which was a Model 2 on steroids) submitted to the Army came from the desire to make the Model 2 into a larger revolver that could handle the .44 caliber cartridge the Army favored. The period between the end of the civil war and the introduction of the American models was a period of great leaps forward in firearm designs going from cap & ball percussion to metallic cartrige guns. Colt, Remington, Winchester, etc. were all waiting on the expiration of the S&W hold on the Rollin White patent so their own variation of cartridge designs for bored through cylinders could be put on the market. When S&W designed the sample gun for the Army, they used the .44Henry RF as the caliber, as it was a known entity to the Army and easily available and the Model 2 had been a rimfire revolver. By the time the Army got around to testing the gun, central fire ammo. was becoming the latest thing and included the idea of reloading spent cases, which couldn't easily be done with RF cases.

 

[Bob Wright]

The .44 American 1/10" longer? Don't think so. Nominal lengths are identical, as evidenced by the two in this photo:

This is a sample of the .44 S&W as loaded by Frankford in 1871, with Martin "Folded Head" primer:

The centerfire cartridges issued by the Army were non-reloadable, and that was of no importance to the Army. The original cartridges furnished were Farrington primed, I believe, as manufactured by the Union Metallic Cartridge Co. The Army had found that rimfire ammunition was not reliable, due to the inability to evenly distribute the priming compound around the rim. And the Army did not consider commercial centerfire ammunition to be sufficiently waterproof.

As to being an enlarged No.2, the No.2 was a tip-up revolver in .32 caliber, while the proposed Army Model was solid framed with rod ejection.

Incidentally, in 1868 Remington contracted with Smith & Wesson in an agreement which allowed Remington to produce cartridge conversions under the Rollin White patent. These were the first LEGAL cartridge conversions, taking the .46 Short Rimfire cartridge.

 

[BRush]

Bob - Very nice photo display and history. Regarding case length, weren't both round and flat Henry 44 RF available in both long and short cases during this period? Also, was there a different loading for rifle and pistol rounds or was the pressure of the 44 RF low enough so it didn't matter? I know the 44 RF and S&W American were close enough so that many Henry rifles were converted to fire them.

 

[radom]

The .44 american is just the .44 henry in center fire. All the rest of the specs are the same. The army used the internal primed system as at the time Ely owned the patent on boxer priming and you know how cheep they where back then. If recall the american was a Smith design but at the request of the army.

 

[Bob Wright]

Originally posted by radom:
The .44 american is just the .44 henry in center fire. All the rest of the specs are the same. The army used the internal primed system as at the time Ely owned the patent on boxer priming and you know how cheep they where back then. If recall the american was a Smith design but at the request of the army.

The Army used the inside priming because they did not consider outside primed cartridges to be sufficiently waterproof. Commercial ammunition used the Farrington primer at the time. English cartridges of the period (Eley) used a battery cup primer, similar to modern shotgun shell primers.

 

[opoefc]

Bob, very nice photos, however if you take 10 different examples of .44 Henry RF rounds and 10 different samples of .44 S&W American rounds, you will get 20 different measurements of case length, overall length, etc. simply due to the fact that cartridge ammo. making was in it's infancy during the late 1860s & early 1870s. Chuck Suydam's info bears this out in his book on "U.S.Cartridges and Their Handguns. Most of the notes and research references for this book are in the J.M.Davis Museum in Oklahoma and are available to students of the subject for further research. My statement that the American rounds were about 1/10th in. longer does not apply to every round surveyed, just an approximation to emphasize the S&W .44 was longer than the .44 Henry Flat RF. To shooters of that era it didn't make a lot of difference, I don't think. The .44 Henry RF test gun submitted to the Army has a solid frame but looks like a Model 2 Army design with an extractor. I have examined that gun in detail. It's currently in the S&W Academy/store museum exhibit at Springfield. You can see a picture of it in Roy Jink's book "History of Smith & Wesson"