This is Samual Colt, 19th century American Industrialist and Inventor. Many people know of him as the inventor of the Revolver, the first repeating gun.
They are wrong.
Soon after the invention of Handgonnes people were soon confronted with a question: How do I make a gun which can be fired more than once before I need to reload?
The first solution to this problem was simple: add more barrels.
This design of Handgonne was popular among the Chinese during the early Ming Dynasty and quickly could get off three shots before it need to be reloaded.
This method would indeed remain common enough in pistols as time went on...
...but there were complications. The first of which is that even leaving aside all the fancy pants ornamentation is that it it meant there were two (in some cases more) barrels, triggers and the number of mechanical bits for their locks have been doubled simply to get more shots off and the weight of the gun was increased. Eventually people decided to try to address these concerns. One way of doing so was having a mechanism by witch the barrels revolved into place for the lock to fire them, thus allowing you to get away with only one lock.
Even so this were still weight issues and the costs of forging the barrels. As such some gunsmiths found out that multiple barrels were not nessisary for such a design to work and you could get away with one cylinder and a revolving block to store shots in before firing. This was discovered by both Europeans...
...and the Japanese.
In addition to revolvers there were a few weird designs like this...
This gun had numerous shots loaded into the barrel. The user would fire the topmost round nearest to the muzzle, then move the serpentine back along a rail and do the same for the next round working his way back. Needless to say things could go VERY wrong if the user was incautious in it's operation.
This is a Kalhoff Repeater. A Danish designed gun with two magazine for powder and musket balls.
Despite this, these guns were remarkably labor intensive to produce and required the most skilled artisans to make their components in the tight tolerances required and to repair them if they broke down. As such (with the exception of double barreled pistols) these guns were prohibitively expensive to make. For armies on the march, it was much better to have six hundred musketeers armed with single shot flintlocks than to have a hundred armed with revolving muskets that can get off six or so shots early on and can't be repaired by a battalion's gunsmith if they are damaged. For the most part these repeaters were expensive toys owned by wealthy noblemen.
So if repeaters and revolvers were around for centuries, why is this Colt fellow such a big deal? Because a few years before him there was a guy named Eli Whitney who invented the milling machine.
This device made it much easier to form metal shapes to within very tight tolerances. As such it became practical to make large numbers of identical parts to precise specifications. Sam Colt took this machine as well as the new percussion cap design and used it to make a revolver that could be easily mass produced in large quantities.
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