The oldest surviving revolver dates to 1597. Before Samuel Colt's revolver, the most common multi-shot handgun was the large and awkward pepperbox; it could fire four to six rounds, with each round having its own barrel and firing chamber. Single-barrel revolvers had already been conceptualized and manufactured based on the principles of Captain Artemus Wheeler, who patented a flintlock revolver carbine in 1818. Such revolvers were improved and commercialized by Elisha Collier, but the Collier guns did not work well. He shut down his firearms business in 1828.

Colt made a reliable revolver that could use percussion cap ammunition (the most advanced ammunition of the time) and whose cylinder did not need to be rotated by hand. It was the first mass-produced revolver. The original Colt revolvers were all single-action--that is, the shooter would use his thumb to pull back, or cock, the hammer into a fixed position. The act of cocking the hammer would engage the pawl (a lever connected to ratchets on the cylinder). The ratchet motion would index the cylinder, bringing the next cylinder chamber into alignment with the barrel. When the hammer was cocked, a lever locked the cylinder into alignment with the barrel. Pulling the trigger would drop the hammer, which would hit the percussion cap, igniting the gunpowder, which would propel the lead bullet down the barrel and toward the target. To fire the next shot, the shooter would start the process again by thumb-cocking the hammer.

The cylinder was mounted on a central rod (arbor), to which the barrel was also mounted, and was locked onto the frame by a pin that fit into holes in the barrel and arbor. The cylinder was partitioned so that the percussion cap for one round was isolated from all the other percussion caps. This usually prevented the flash of a single percussion cap from igniting any other percussion cap. Later models by Colt chamfered the cylinder chamber mouths. The chamfering deflected outward the escaping gases from the gunpowder explosion, further reducing the risk that the gas would ignite the percussion cap in an adjacent chamber.

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