In 1855, Prussian customs officials discovered a shipment of 3,000 Colt 1851 Navy model revolvers (and their accouterments) hidden in bales of cotton being shipped from New York to Russia. Prussia was a neutral power […]
The most-produced Colt percussion revolver was not one of the big sexy Army models, but rather the humble 1849 Pocket. It was first introduced as the Model 1848 Baby Dragoon, in .31 caliber. By 1850, […]
In 1883, the Brazilian government decided to purchase 3,000 new revolvers, and they chose the Mauser Model 1878 “Zigzag” to procure. The officer charged with making the purchase in Europe, however, appears to have done […]
The Mauser brothers’ first handgun was the single shot C77, which they quickly followed with the C78 “zig zag” revolver, so named for the cam grooves on the circumference of its cylinder. What we are […]
Lot 1328 in the September 2020 RIA Premier auction. Michael Kaufman was a talented gunsmith who worked for the Webley company from 1878 until 1881. While there, he patented a substantially improved clockwork for the […]
Lot 1104 in the September 2020 RIA Premier auction. “XL” was a brand name used by Hopkins & Allen to cover several different styles of revolver, but the first were a series of rimfire, spur-hammer […]
Lot 1149 in RIA’s September 2020 Premier auction. Laban E. Tucker and his sons Elihu and Argyle were several of the original partners in the Tucker & Sherrard Company, which contracted with the State of […]
Lot 3197 in the September 2020 RIA Premier auction. Good inventors are always trying out new solutions to problems. Those solutions may or may not work (hence Thomas Edison’s 10,000 ways not to make a […]
Lot 1249 in the September 2020 RIA Premier auction. Taking what they had learned in developing their series of large-frame .44 caliber revolvers, Smith & Wesson introduced the “Baby Russian” in 1876 as their first […]
Lot 3204 in the September 2020 RIA Premier auction. At the top end of Hopkins & Allen’s revolver line were the XL Navy, XL Police, and XL-8 Army. We covered the Army in a separate […]
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