Rollin White

In 1849 he went to work for his brothers who had a contract at Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company for turning and finishing revolver barrels.

During this time he appropriated two "junk" or scrapped revolver cylinders from Colt and placed them in his barrel lathe, cutting the front off one and the rear off the other.

While the cartridge revolver was known in Europe, Rollin White's famous patent combined a cylinder and a box magazine.

It was a completely unworkable design which never went into production (only one sample was built which malfunctioned dramatically),[2] yet it was the first US patent to include a cylinder bored through so that a revolver could be loaded from the breech.

The patent drawings imply that a percussion cap would have had to be applied to the single nipple for each shot, so it would have been far slower than the existing cap-&-ball revolvers.

In addition to White's design not actually being functional, prior art existed of revolvers with bored-through cylinders predating his patent.

Smith and Wesson's exclusive rights to manufacture bored-through cylinder cartridge revolvers in the United States ended when White's patent expired on December 11, 1869.

Dyer went on to write that "its further extension will operate prejudicially to its interests by compelling it to pay to parties already well paid a large royalty for altering its revolvers to use metallic cartridges.

White invented the knife-edge breech block and self-cocking device for the "box-lock" Model 1851 Sharps rifle.

These rifles were built by White, Christian Sharps, and Richard Lawrence at Robbins & Laurence in Windsor, Vermont.