

Many later found their way West and was famed both for its use at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and being the basis for the iconic Winchester rifle which is still made to this day.

It was adopted in small quantities by the Union in the Civil War and favored for its greater firepower than the standard issue carbine. The Henry was introduced in 1860 and produced through 1866 in the United States by the New Haven Arms Company. Designed by Benjamin Tyler Henry in 1860, it was one of the first firearms to use self-contained metallic cartridges. The Henry repeating rifle is a lever-action, breech-loading, tubular magazine fed rifle, and was an improved version of the earlier Volcanic rifle. The anemic power of the Rocket Ball ammunition used in the Volcanic doomed it to limited popularity. It was named after a building or room used to store ammunition. The first mass-produced repeating firearm was the Volcanic Rifle which used a hollow bullet with the base filled with powder and primer fed into the chamber from a tube called a "magazine" with an integral spring to push the cartridges in to the action, thence to be loaded into the chamber and fired. The first successful mass-produced repeating weapon to use a "tubular magazine" permanently mounted to the weapon was the Austrian Army's Girandoni air rifle, first produced in 1779. While some early repeaters such as the Kalthoff repeater managed to operate using complex systems with multiple feed sources for ball, powder and primer, easily mass-produced repeating mechanisms did not appear until self-contained cartridges were developed.ĭiagram of the Spencer rifle showing the tubular magazine in the butt Both of these add bulk and weight over a single barrel and a single chamber, however, and many attempts were made to get multiple shots from a single loading of a single barrel through the use of superposed loads. The earliest firearms were loaded with loose powder and a lead ball, and to fire more than a single shot without reloading required multiple barrels, such as in pepper-box guns, double-barreled rifles, double-barreled shotguns, or multiple chambers, such as in revolvers.

Use of the term "clip" to refer to detachable magazines is a point of strong disagreement. Examples of clips are moon clips for revolvers "stripper" clips such as what is used for military 5.56 ammo, in association with a speedloader or the en bloc clip for M1 Garand rifles, among others. A clip may be made of one continuous piece of stamped metal and have no moving parts. A magazine has four parts as follows: a spring, a spring follower, a body and a base. The defining difference between clips and magazines is the presence of a feed mechanism in a magazine, typically a spring-loaded follower, which a clip lacks. Soon after the adoption of the M1911 pistol, the term "magazine" was settled on by the military and firearms experts, though the term " clip" is often used in its place (though only for detachable magazines, never fixed). With the increased use of semi-automatic and automatic firearms, the detachable magazine became increasingly common. 2.2.3 Final fixed-magazine developments.Various jurisdictions ban what they define as " high-capacity magazines". Magazines come in many shapes and sizes, from tubular magazines on lever-action and pump-action firearms that may tandemly hold several rounds, to detachable box and drum magazines for automatic rifles and light machine guns that may pack more than one hundred rounds. The detachable magazine is sometimes colloquially referred to as a " clip", although this is technically inaccurate since a clip is actually an accessory device used to help load ammunition into a magazine. The magazine functions by holding several cartridges within itself and sequentially pushing each one into a position where it may be readily loaded into the barrel chamber by the firearm's moving action. The top image shows the magazine loaded and ready for use, while the lower image shows it unloaded and disassembledĪ magazine is an ammunition storage and feeding device for a repeating firearm, either integral within the gun (internal/fixed magazine) or externally attached (detachable magazine). A staggered-column 9×19mm Browning Hi-Power pistol box magazine.
