The Winchester rifle grew out of a fragile invention and a bankrupt company
Before it was sold as the gun that won the West, the Winchester was a chain of flops: a fragile 1848 repeater, a bankrupt company, a weak bullet called the Rocket Ball. Its largest investor, Oliver Winchester, bought the wreckage in 1857, and his foreman turned it into a rifle Confederates dreaded.
In 1848 the New York inventor Walter Hunt took out a patent on a repeater he called the Volition, feeding a tubular magazine of caseless Rocket Balls, bullets with powder packed into their hollow bases. It was delicate and impractical. Lewis Jennings bought the patents in 1849 and made a working if complicated version, and Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson later acquired the design, along with a shop foreman named Benjamin Tyler Henry. In 1855 they launched the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, with Winchester as its biggest shareholder.
The Volcanic's feeble ammunition doomed it, but Smith's tinkering produced something historic: a copper case holding bullet and powder, with the primer in its rim. This metallic rimfire cartridge reached the market in 1857 as the .22 Short, which is still made. Volcanic went insolvent at the end of 1856, and in April 1857 Winchester relaunched what was left under a new name, the New Haven Arms Company.
Henry scaled Smith's idea up into the powerful .44 Henry cartridge and redesigned the gun around it. The Henry rifle of 1860 armed some Union units in the Civil War, and Confederates grumbled about a Yankee rifle you could load on Sunday and fire all week. After the war Winchester renamed the firm the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and released the Model 1866, nicknamed the Yellow Boy for its brassy gunmetal frame. France bought 6,000 during the Franco-Prussian War, and Ottoman troops armed with it at the Siege of Plevna in 1877 stunned their opponents. The Swiss nearly adopted it before choosing a domestic design that copied its magazine.
The steel-framed Model 1873, made until 1923, fired the .44-40, Winchester's first centerfire cartridge, and became the icon the company advertised as having won the West. From 1883 the gun designer John Moses Browning worked with Winchester, producing lever-action classics such as the Model 1894.
Source: Winchester rifle
