Winchester Repeating Arms Company

The Winchester Repeating Arms Company was a prominent American maker of repeating weapons during the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century.

Early History

Predecessors

The ancestor of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, which manufactured the Volcanic lever action rifle of Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson. It was later reorganized into the New Haven Arms Company, its largest stockholder being Oliver Winchester.

The Volcanic rifle used a form of "caseless" ammunition and had only limited success. Wesson had also designed an early form of rimfire cartridge which was subsequently perfected by B. Tyler Henry. Henry also supervised the redesign of the rifle to use the new ammunition, retaining only the general form of the breech mechanism and the tubular magazine. This became the Henry rifle of 1860, which was manufactured by the New Haven Arms Company and was used in considerable numbers by certain Union army units in the civil war.

The "Winchester" Rifle

After the war Oliver Winchester continued to exercise control of the company, renaming it the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and had the basic design of the Henry rifle completely modified and improved to become the first Winchester rifle, the Model 1866, which fired centerfire cartridges and had an improved magazine and, for the first time, a wooden forearm. Another popular model was rolled out in 1873. These rifle families are both commonly known as the "Gun That Won the West".

20th Century Developments

The World Wars

The company later bought and manufactured several of John Browning's highly superior rifle and shotgun designs and was a major producer of M1917 Enfield military rifles during World War I. Working at the Winchester plant during that war, Browning developed the final design of the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), of which it produced some 27,000. Browning and the Winchester engineers also developed the Browning .50 caliber (12.7 mm) machine gun during the war. The caliber .50 (12.7 mm) ammunition for it was designed by the Winchester ballistic engineers.

The commercial rights to these new Browning guns were owned by Colt's. In 1931 the Winchester firm was purchased by the Olin Corporation and continued its production of civilian rifles and shotguns. The U.S. M1 carbine was designed by Winchester engineers Clifford Warner and Ralph Clarkson (contrary to a widely published myth, not by D.M. Williams) and was then manufactured in large numbers by Winchester and other firms. During World War II Winchester was the sole civilian producer of the M1 rifle and later was the first civilian manufacturer of the M14 rifle.

The Cold War and Beyond

In the mid 1950's S. K. Janson formed a new Winchester design group to advance the use of modern engineering design methods and manufacturing principles in gun design. The result was a new line of guns which replaced most of the older products. Olin later sold off Winchester's firearms manufacturing business, retaining the ammunition business. Winchester guns are today made by the U.S. Repeating Arms Company.

External Links

• Winchester Rifles & Shotguns