Smith & Wesson

Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson formed a partnership at Norwich in 1852 to build a lever-action repeating pistol, failed at that, and succeeded instead with the bored-through revolver cylinder that made the self-contained metallic cartridge commercially practical. The Springfield works was a revolver house for a century and a quarter afterwards. Its move first into self-loading pistols and then into AR-pattern rifles is recent by the firm’s own standards, and the M&P designation it applies to both is borrowed from its Military & Police revolver of 1899.