When was the derringer made

But it does have some other benefits. The High Standard had a perceived ballistic advantage, especially the. According to some of the prevailing wisdom from that period,. The High Standard Derringer was discontinued in when the company closed down. The rights to the Derringer were acquired by Bellmore Johnson Tool who started making a.

The American Derringer Company picked up the design shortly after and they made double action Derringers in a few calibers, but none of them appear to be in current production. With the dozens of polymer pocket. But when it was in production, the High Standard Derringer was actually very well regarded as a backup gun by those who were considered the self-defense experts of that time.

Our friend and firearms instructor Darryl Bolke was recently telling me that when he was just getting started as a young police officer in the 80s, a lot of the older and more experienced guys he looked up to were carrying High Standard Derringers for backup in a front pants pocket. He told me about one incident where an officer managed to survive a fight with a suspect in an elevator thanks to a High Standard.

It's rumored that. It might Mar, 07, Aug. What should happen to the weapon has been a question ever since. The gun John Wilkes Booth used to change American history was a. Booth could easily hide the weapon in his pocket. After the assassination, theatre patron William T.

Kent found the pistol on the floor of the Presidential Box and turned it over to investigators. The U.

In , General Ulysses S. The Adjutant General of the U. Army denied the request, saying:. Eventually, the War Department relented. After further questions about propriety, they first went on display in , when a military tribunal for German saboteurs was taking place nearby. Take Poll. Accuracy was highly variable; although front sights were common, rear sights were less common, and some Philadelphia Deringers had no sights at all, being intended for point and shoot use instead of aim and shoot, across Poker-table distances.

Professional gamblers, and others who carried regularly, often would fire and reload daily, to decrease the chance of a misfire upon needing to use a Philadelphia Deringer. A common magician's trick from this era called the " bullet catch " was commonly done with a Philadelphia Deringer without applying a patch on the lead ball. The magician would, with great fanfare, go through the motions of pouring a small amount of black powder down the barrel. He would insert a very light overpowder wad, then drop an intentionally undersized lead ball down the barrel, unpatched, after showing it carefully to the audience and getting one of them to mark it for later identification.

Finally he placed a cap on the tube. Prior to handing the gun to another person, the magician would tip the Philadelphia Deringer, causing the lead ball to drop into a closed palm. The accomplice or a volunteer from the audience would then aim the Philadelphia Deringer at the magician, squeeze the trigger, the gun would fire, a large cloud of black-powder smoke would appear, and the magician would, with great fanfare, have "caught" a bullet out of the air, holding the palmed bullet between his fingers.

The trick was highly dangerous, as the overpowder could kill at short distances, and a real bullet, or other small object, could be dropped down the barrel before the handgun was fired by a volunteer or accomplice intent on malice. Currier and Ives depiction of Lincoln's assassination with a Philadelphia Deringer. Henry Deringer's production records, and contemporaneous records of his imitators, indicate that these pistols were almost always sold in matching pairs.

The choice of buying a pair, in part, was to compensate for the limited power of a single-shot, short-barreled pistol, and to compensate for a design considerably less reliable than subsequent cartridge derringer designs. Original Deringers are almost never found still in their matched pairs today. Initially popular with military officers, the Deringer became widely popular among civilians who wished to own a small and easily concealable pistol for self-defense.

In total, approximately 15, Deringer pistols were manufactured. All were single barrel pistols with back action percussion locks, typically. Barrel length varied from 1. The back action lock was a later, improved design among locks, which had its spring and mechanism located behind the hammer, where it was thereby protected from dirt, fired cap residue, and gunpowder residue unlike earlier front action locks that had their springs and mechanism located directly in the path of such residue in front of the hammer, under the tube.

Because of their small size and easy availability, Deringers sometimes had the dubious reputation of being a favored tool of assassins.

The single most famous Deringer used for this purpose was fired by John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Booth's Deringer was unusual in that the rifling twisted counterclockwise left-handed twist , rather than the typical clockwise twist used on most Philadelphia Deringers. Remington Model 95 over-under double-barreled derringers were manufactured from until , in several rimfire calibers, the most common of which was.

They were never serially numbered, but were numbered within production batches. Batches apparently went from to 5, guns per batch depending on demand. There were 3 trademarks — "E. The 1st model derringer had a hollow rather than skeleton butt and no extractor.

It was marked "E. The 2nd had a skeleton butt but no extractor and the same trademark. The 3rd model had a 2-part extractor and same trademark. The 4th model had a one piece extractor and all 3 trademarks. Remington went bankrupt in The derringer continued to be marked Remington-UMC until production ceased in Hollow-butt derringers were made only in