Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Rock Island
taking a look at a very rare Rollin White single-shot .38 calibre rimfire pistol.
And it kind of looks like one of those .22 conversions of a revolver, but it's not.
This is from the ground up a .38 calibre single-shot pistol.
Now Rollin White is the guy who originally patented the concept
of a bored-through cylinder in the US.
Although he shouldn't have been able to because
Lefacheaux in Europe had actually done that a year earlier.
But the Patent Office didn't catch that, and so he ended up with a valid patent.
Now the gun he designed ... that this patent applied to was impractical and unworkable.
However that didn't make the patent invalid, and what he ended up doing
was selling exclusive licence to his patent to the Smith & Wesson Company.
They recognised what he had in his patent,
and that was basically the ability to have a monopoly on self-contained cartridges,
or at least practical self-contained cartridges.
So Smith & Wesson bought ... an exclusive licence to his patent,
proceeded to start making ... rimfire revolvers that were quite popular,
and would lead to the growth of Smith & Wesson into
one of the largest gun companies in the United States.
Now, while this is going on, Rollin White is in this interesting position of,
"Well OK, like now what?"
And when the Civil War starts in 1861 he's in a particularly interesting position
where there's a huge demand for arms, ...
but he can't actually manufacture his own patented revolver
because he's given an exclusive licence to Smith & Wesson.
So he forms an arms company, the Rollin White Arms Company.
Or it was formed in association with him, the actual origins of the company are a little hazy.
And in fact he would cease to have any association with it in 1865, and they'd rename it.
But during the Civil War he forms this company, or he's associated with this company,
and they start making .22 calibre rimfire revolvers.
But they can't sell them directly themselves, they can only sell them to Smith & Wesson
who then markets them because of this contractual agreement.
However, Rollin White's patent applied to revolvers, it did not apply to single shot pistols.
And so he was able to actually manufacture a single-shot pistol as well.
And there were other people doing this, usually in the form of derringers.
What Rollin White went with was a much larger framed gun.
He made them in both .32 and .38, this is the larger and scarcer .38 variety.
And so, well, let's take a close look at it.
The overall exterior design here is very reminiscent of an early Smith & Wesson revolver,
just with a flat-sided, single-shot, quasi ... not really a cylinder.
It has a sheath trigger here.
So you have three positions on the hammer, this is the fired position.
There is a safety notch on it where the hammer doesn't ... extend all the way down.
So this is where you would carry it,
because pushing the hammer forward doesn't do anything, this is your safety position.
And then fully cocked back there.
... When the gun is cocked the trigger protrudes out from the two sides of the frame.
Not very much, but enough that when you pull the trigger it will drop and fire.
There we go, it will drop all the way.
And then you pull it back to the half-cock notch there.
Now in order to reload it, we have a little spring-loaded button here on the side.
Pull that back, ... and then push in, and this will pivot out to one side.
This button at the front is a spring-loaded extractor.
So that allows you to punch out the case,
this was .38 calibre rimfire in this particular example.
So pop out your case, load a new one in, latch it over.
It's already at the half-cock position, and so it's good to go.
This is the threaded pin. I won't take that all the way out,
but that's the pin that the breech block rotates around.
And there's really not much else to it.
We do have a very, very small set of sights,
those are, I would say, bordering on useless there.
The front sight's at least a little bigger, so you can catch the front sight.
But trying to line it up in that notch? Yeah - good luck.
Some of these are marked Rollin White Arms Company
on the side of the breech block, but this one is not.
It does however have the markings of B. Kittredge and Company, of C-I-N-.-O, and that's Cincinnati, Ohio.
Kittredge was a distributor who dealt in a wide variety of firearms.
He shows up actually in some of the patent infringement cases filed by Rollin White.
He's involved with the Manhattan [Firearms] Company and some others.
But Kittredge is a significant distributor, so clearly he's
who Rollin White went to to market some of these single-shot pistols.
This was made in .32 as well as .38, and the .32 calibre version has a much smaller frame.
In fact it's kind of distinguishable in photos because on the .32
this bar is basically at the top of the breech.
It kind of looks like the breech block is ... two-thirds the size, you take off the top chunk.
So that's an easy way to tell the two apart in photos if you don't have any additional context.
The .32 calibre guns would prove reasonably popular for White and his arms company.
He made some 3,000 of those, which is about 10 times as many as the .38.
So it's only 2-300 of the .38 calibre guns that were produced during the Civil War.
And I think really the problem is this is a rather large pistol for only getting one shot.
So I think a lot of people who were potentially interested in something like this
would go for a much smaller scale derringer.
And they weren't really concerned that they wouldn't get as much velocity out of a shorter barrel.
Just this was too big for what it offered.
And so very few of these would be produced, they'd be very scarce.
Rollin White had a long and unfortunate life in relation to the firearms industry.
He would actually appeal to Congress for an extension of his patent in 1870
on the argument that he hadn't really made any money at all.
He'd made like $71,000, which he claimed he'd spent almost all of fighting patent infringement lawsuits.
And the bill, interestingly, was passed without debate by both Houses of Congress,
and then it was vetoed by President Ulysses S. Grant.
Basically on the advice of the Army who said that, first off,
Rollin White's litigation and exclusive licensing deal had made it
rather difficult for the Army to acquire repeating handguns during the war,
and they were kind of annoyed at him for it.
And also that, going forward, if the patent were extended it'd make it really
difficult to ... do conversions of percussion guns to self-contained cartridges.
So Congress took no further action after the Presidential veto,
and Rollin White ... did not get an extension on his patent,
and really didn't benefit all that much from his work.
However, that work ... was thoroughly very well exploited by Smith & Wesson,
who turned it into a base of a huge arms production company.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed getting a chance to take a look at this,
one of the very unusual Rollin White Arms Company single shot pistols.
Thanks for watching.