Korea's tiny se-chongtong was an early handgun carried by spies
In 1432, under Sejong the Great, Joseon Korea introduced the se-chongtong, a gun under 14 centimetres long that fired small arrows. Officials first wrote it off as a failure because of its short range. Sent to the frontier, it became a favourite of scouts sneaking into enemy territory and of civilians, including women and children.
A handgun is a firearm meant to be used with one hand, as opposed to long guns braced against the shoulder. That convenience costs range and accuracy: without a stock, handguns are much harder to shoot well. The ancestor of them all, the bronze Heilongjiang hand cannon of 1288, is about 34 centimetres long without its handle and weighs 3.55 kilograms. Its bulging breech housed a thick-walled powder chamber with a touch hole for the fuse, and a trumpet-shaped socket at the back held a wooden handle. That bulb gave early Chinese and European cannon their vase or pear shape, which faded as metalworking improved.
The Korean se-chongtong had a bore under a centimetre wide and was gripped with iron tongs, which allowed barrels to be swapped quickly between shots. It shot a standard Joseon arrow up to about 250 metres. After it reached the frontier provinces in June 1437, it spread among soldiers of many units, and carabiniers valued its small size because they could carry several.
Europe's first firing mechanism for hand-held guns, the matchlock, appeared in the mid-fifteenth century. A curved lever called the serpentine gripped a smouldering slow match; pulling a lever, and later a trigger, dipped the match into a pan of priming powder, whose flash passed through the touch hole to fire the main charge. For centuries handguns were costly and of limited use, so they served as badges of office much like ceremonial swords.
Mass production changed that. In 1836 Samuel Colt took out a patent on the Colt Paterson, the earliest revolver practical to mass-produce, able to fire five shots in quick succession. Most handguns since have been revolvers or semi-automatic pistols, defined mainly as personal-defence weapons and today carried chiefly as police sidearms. Legal definitions still differ: Canada's criminal code, for instance, counts a gun designed for one hand as a handgun even if altered for two.
Source: Handgun
