Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson formed their first partnership in 1852--exactly 150 years ago.

Few companies in the United States can claim a history that long. And though Smith & Wesson has recently gone through some dark times, under new U.S. ownership and enlightened management it is working hard to return to the mainstream of the firearms industry community. It is rapidly reacquiring the support and good wishes of the American citizen-shooter who has supported it for so long. This is not the first time S&W has endured a hard period or suffered under less-than-enlightened management only to emerge as a stronger and a better company. The primary reason for its long survival has always been in the quality of its products, the committed core of its hundreds of long-term manufacturing employees, and its continuing history of innovation and leadership in handgun design and manufacture.

Smith & Wesson makes good guns. Some better than others, some more popular than others. But even its failures--the models and configurations that have come and sometimes quickly gone--have always advanced the technology of handgun design and pointed toward the future both for handgun shooters and competing manufacturers alike.

Before I was a firearms writer I was a historian. Historians are always leery of rankings and worry about confusing "most popular" with "most important." My experience is that over the long haul the two concepts merge into "most influential"--that is, those things that have lasting effect on both the makers and the users and also point the way toward important future developments.

As a hearty congratulations from Shooting Times to Smith & Wesson on its 150th birthday, here are my picks for the dozen most significant S&W handguns of all time with brief reasons why. (As a historian, I am interested in your ideas on which S&W models were important. I invite you to write me with what models you think I should have included or not included. If the response is sufficient, I'll report on your feedback in my "Handguns" column in an upcoming issue. If you want to add a different gun to the list, however, you also have to tell me why you think the one being replaced is less important.)

Model 1

1. Model 1 (1857)
Smith & Wesson's first revolver tops the list not because it was the first revolver ever made (Colt patented that in 1836), nor because it was the first firearm to use a self-contained cartridge (Jacques Flobert patented that in France in 1846). The Model 1 is No. 1 because it was the first gun to combine those concepts. The S&W Model 1, introduced in 1857, was the first cartridge revolver. The S&W No. 1 load was the first commercial American metallic cartridge. (Today it's known as the .22 Short and has been in continuous production for 145 years.) All revolvers since, and all American cartridge ammunition, follow from that moment.

Messrs. Smith and Wesson, while working on the finger-lever Magazine Pistol produced by their first partnership in 1854, had patented improvements on a rimmed-case Flobert design with primer compound spread evenly across the base of the cartridge (for reliable ignition) and a tallow "cup" directly behind the lead ball over a propellant charge (to make the load waterproof for outdoor use). With a slightly longer case, a 29-grain bullet, and four grains of fine blackpowder, this would become the S&W No. 1. In 1856, while exploring ideas for expanded applications of the improved S&W self-contained cartridge, D.B. Wesson built a prototype revolver with bored-through cylinders to fire the rimmed .22. Remember that all Colt revolvers at the time were percussion cap with the cylinder chambers closed at the rear. Colt revolver patent had expired in February of 1856, so Wesson was free to manufacture revolvers. But Wesson discovered that a former Colt employee, Rollin White, had already patented a revolver design with cylinders bored end-to-end. Wesson met with White in November 1856, and they agreed on an arrangement giving S&W exclusive license to manufacture bored-through cylinders. Colt was thus frozen out of the new cartridge-revolver era for 18 years and could only continue to make percussion revolvers until the White patent finally expired (after some lengthy court conflicts) in 1872.

2. Model 3 American (1870)
Next on my list is the S&W top-break, self-ejecting .44- and .45-caliber Model 3 series that was initially introduced in 1870. These were the first American big-bore revolvers specifically manufactured for metallic cartridges and not the many after-the-fact "converted" big-bore percussion Colt, Remington, etc., revolvers that appeared on the handgun landscape during the period of S&W's cartridge revolver "monopoly" between 1856 and 1872.

Model 3

The term "Model 3" as used by the S&W factory technically refers to a frame size and not to a specific Model, so there were in reality many different specific revolver configurations in the Model 3 series that we would today call "models" (the way there are currently many different S&W K-Frame models and N-Frame models). Collectively, these guns had great and lasting influence. The basic top-break design was copied by dozens of other handgun makers and remained a mainstay of many lines well into the 20th century.

The more than 130,000 of the Russian Model sold to the Tsar's government established S&W as an international manufacturer and was the company's first major government contract. The Model 3 American was a preferred handgun of frontiersmen and Western lawmen during the 1870s and '80s, with more than 120,000 sold--making it an equal candidate with the Colt Peacemaker SAA for the title of "Gun That Won The West." (Only 30,063 SAAs were bought by the U.S. government between 1873 and 1891, and only 150,683 total in .45 caliber were manufactured up to 1940.) The .45 Schofield version of the Model 3 is probably the most famous. The U.S. Cavalry purchased 7000, and historians still argue that had Custer's men been armed with quick-reload Schofields (and lever-action Winchesters) instead of the slow-punchout Colts (and single-shot falling-block Springfields) at least some would have survived the field of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Later, the.32-44 and .38-44 chambering versions of the Model 3 Target, introduced in 1887, were the first revolvers to have adjustable sights.

3. .38 & .32 Double-Action (1880)
S&W first designed a double-action (then termed "self-cocking") revolver in 1872 as a Model 3 variation offered to the Russian government. But commercial introduction of an S&W DA would not come until 1880 (after DAs from Colt and Forehand & Wadsworth had proved the market) in the form of a series of small-frame, 18-ounce, five-shot top-break .38 S&W and .32 S&W revolvers. These exposed-hammer top-break pocket-size DA .38s and .32s were among the most popular guns S&W ever built. Nearly a million total were sold before they were discontinued in 1919.

38 Double Action, Second Model

Moreover, the Safety Hammerless versions of these same guns are among the least recognized yet most influential guns S&W ever produced. Marketed from 1886 until 1940, they were the first revolvers to have hammers completely enclosed within the frame and were incapable of fire except by a long pull on the trigger--making them the first revolvers to be what is today commonly termed as "Double Action Only"--then termed the "New Departure" by S&W. They also had "hesitation" built into the trigger pull to allow the shooter to stage for a precisely aimed shot and a grip safety in the backstrap that required a firm grip on the butt to depress an internal hammer block before the trigger would work--a feature that would appear again in S&W's side-swing small-frame .38 Special Centennial models from 1952 until 1974.

The Safety Hammerless models are reputed to have been developed after D.B. Wesson heard that a child had been injured by cocking the hammer and pulling the trigger of a conventional revolver. He worked with his designer son Joseph to make a gun that would have an adult-grip compression safety on the handle and require a trigger pull too strong for a child to pull through. Apocryphal or no, the Safety Hammerless series clearly shows that S&W's concern for child-related safety long predates today's political correctness.