.22 short

The .22 Short is the first American metallic cartridge, developed in 1857 for the original Smith & Wesson Model 1 revolver. It combined the .22 caliber rimfire priming system, then new, with a straight, rimmed brass case just under 11 mm long, and it went into production alongside the pistol it was built for at a moment when nearly every American handgun still loaded from the muzzle.

Renamed “Short” only in 1871, when the longer .22 Long arrived beside it, the cartridge has outlived the revolver it was designed for by more than a century and a half. Its low recoil and mild report kept it in production for gallery guns at shooting arcades and fairs, for a handful of pocket pistols and mini-revolvers built specifically around its small dimensions, and — until the discipline moved to air pistols in 2004 — for Olympic 25-metre rapid-fire pistol shooting, where its light recoil suited five shots fired in as little as four seconds. It is still made today, mostly for the recreational and gallery-gun market, largely unchanged from the shape it had in the nineteenth century.

This entry’s dimensions and maximum pressure are transcribed from the current C.I.P. datasheet and are verified. No manufacturer publishes a muzzle velocity for this cartridge alongside a stated test-barrel length — the figures that circulate for it in ballistics tables and encyclopedia entries give a velocity with no barrel length attached, which this site’s own rule treats as no measurement at all — so no load is recorded here. The photograph shows a specimen beside a .22 Long Rifle round for scale; no image of the cartridge on its own, isolated, was found under a free licence.