Where do .22 and .177 come from? ...and Why?

[ccdjg]

The following may add a bit more into the story:

The earliest airgun catalogue I have is for Hawley's Patent Target air pistol, otherwise known as the Kalamazoo, from 1870, and the pistol was advertised as available in three caibres .22, .26 and .28. [The calibres are actually expressed as 22-100, 26-100 and 28-100, in other words 22 hundredths of an inch etc.]
A later catalogue, from 1880, advertises the Haviland & Gunn air rifles (which pre-date the Gems) in calibre 22/100. Quackenbush on the other hand at that time sold his airguns in "21/100" calibre. The .177 calibre is not mentioned anywhere.

I am not suggesting that Hawley originated the .22 calibre, but it does seem that there were a lot of arbitrary calibres around by 1870, so could the .22 size have become dominant just by chance?

The first catalogue references I could find for .177 (as the metric equivalent 4.5mm) were actually German, and this calibre was evidently in common use in Germany for airguns by 1890. Possibly German manufacturers introduced the calibre around the time that mass produced airguns first came onto the market in the late 1870's, when the Germans adopted the Haviland & Gunn designs. If they wanted something substantially smaller then the American .22, then 4.5mm would have been a reasonable size to choose and is a more or less round number when expressed in mm. With the subsequent importation of Gems from Germany into the UK, the 4.5mm would then have become better known as .177 inches.

[chieffool]

The following may add a bit more into the story:

The earliest airgun catalogue I have is for Hawley's Patent Target air pistol, otherwise known as the Kalamazoo, from 1870, and the pistol was advertised as available in three caibres .22, .26 and .28. [The calibres are actually expressed as 22-100, 26-100 and 28-100, in other words 22 hundredths of an inch etc.]
A later catalogue, from 1880, advertises the Haviland & Gunn air rifles (which pre-date the Gems) in calibre 22/100. Quackenbush on the other hand at that time sold his airguns in "21/100" calibre. The .177 calibre is not mentioned anywhere.

I am not suggesting that Hawley originated the .22 calibre, but it does seem that there were a lot of arbitrary calibres around by 1870, so could the .22 size have become dominant just by chance?

The first catalogue references I could find for .177 (as the metric equivalent 4.5mm) were actually German, and this calibre was evidently in common use in Germany for airguns by 1890. Possibly German manufacturers introduced the calibre around the time that mass produced airguns first came onto the market in the late 1870's, when the Germans adopted the Haviland & Gunn designs. If they wanted something substantially smaller then the American .22, then 4.5mm would have been a reasonable size to choose and is a more or less round number when expressed in mm. With the subsequent importation of Gems from Germany into the UK, the 4.5mm would then have become better known as .177 inches.

i think the concept of .22 being adopted and developed as a main caliber for airgun could quite possibly fall into the area of "...QUITE BY CHANCE...".

ALSO:
Just to enlarge on your earlier point [lifted from an earlier post #18 from the thread mentioned at the beginning sitting in GENERAL] i didn't realise fully the following until I started poking around for this thread:

Because a CALIBER is expressed in 'decimal inches'....
Essentially, a "caliber" is one inch.
So a .45 caliber bullet is 45 1/100ths of an inch in diameter (and a .50 caliber...One half-inch)


Which means a 0.22 is actually 22 x 1/100ths of an inch

Seriously - what twisted 'genius' comes up with this stuff?

[chieffool]

Does this mean (if expressed as a caliber) that .177 is actually 17.7 x 1/100th of an inch?

[Gareth W-B]

.
There was a thread on this very topic in the General Airgun section a week or so ago, with many of the answers, and much of the info you are looking for.

[chieffool]

.
There was a thread on this very topic in the General Airgun section a week or so ago, with many of the answers, and much of the info you are looking for.

I know... I started it. But although it helped gather a lot of the ballistic history of the caliber and it's development for rimfire, it still didn't produce a definitive answer for the WHO and WHEN concerning the adoption of .22 and .177 for airguns....
...which is why the thread is reiterated here among the gurus and Illuminati of COLLECTABLES.

'Cos sometimes it is GOOD to be a pedantic geek, and I really want to know the history of the stuff I like to do!

[Gareth W-B]

'Cos sometimes it is GOOD to be a pedantic geek, and I really want to know the history of the stuff I like to do!

Ahh-ha, a Kindred Spirt. Then I totally Sopport your M.O. Nice one, well done, and keep on keeping on with your quest. After all, every day is a school day (as I believe I may have said once or twice before ??? ). Ha ha. Atb: G.

[ccdjg]

Does this mean (if expressed as a caliber) that .177 is actually 17.7 x 1/100th of an inch?

Yes, that's right. 0.01 inches means 1 hundredth of an inch, so 17.7 of these comes to 0.177 inches. Althernatively you can think of .177 inches as 177 thousandths of an inch, or as engineers would say: "177 thou'.

[ccdjg]

I now take back my earlier suggestion that the .177 calibre probably started in Germany around 1880-90, as 4.5 mm. I had forgotten that examples of the American Haviland and Gunn air pistol (or perhaps more accurately referred to as the Morse pistol) from the 1870's are known with .177 calibre.
So could Haviland and Gunn not only have been the first to introduce break-barrel airguns, but also the first to popularise the .22 and .177 calibres?

In the 1870's there were really only two companies driving the popular airgun manufacturing scene, Haviland & Gunn favouring 0.177 and 0.22 calibres, and Quackenbush (who was heavily into airgun pellet and dart manufacture) favouring 0.21. When the break-barel design migrated to Germany and the Gems started to appear in Europe, it seems that the H & G calibres were preferred and won the day.

I can understand that gunsmiths experimented with 0.20, 0.21, 0.22, 0.25 calibres, and probably also 0.23 and 0.24 at some point, and by chance 0.22 became the most accepted, but I can't understand where .177 came from. Why not 0.18 inches, which would be the next size down in this series?

The only logical explanation I can think of is that the calibre did start off as a perfectly logical 0.18 inches (probably by H & G), and when their designs migrated to Germany this was metricised to a nice round 4.5 mm (it would actually have come to 4.57mm without rounding down). Then after the German Gems has been imported into the UK for a few years and British gunmakers began to make ammunition and even their own guns to this calibre, they converted 4.5mm back to inches, which would be 0.177 inches if done precisely.

It would be nice to have old catalogue information about the H & G Morse pistol which specifies the calibre, but I do not know of any such thing. If it did, the chances are it would say 0.18 rather than 0.177. So according to my theory, the 0.177 calibre arose by a sequence of misleading events ( a bit like a Chinese whisper).

[chieffool]

Dear ccdjg - I think we are getting nearer to truth for .22 if we consider development of these calibers for airguns as an accidental progression from the likely tooling base that the introduction of rimfire made available. Basically, if you have the machinery to make the barrel for one, then you can adapt and make the barrel for the other.

If so: do we have any evidence of 'identical' barrels for both air rifle and rimfire to mark the first 'prototype'?

....which then still leaves us with the oddity of .177. Perhaps six of one and half a dozen of the other?.

OR Does this mean Havilland & Gunn are the first makers of .177?

[mel h]

Inches, yards, chains, furlongs, miles, not forgetting the fathoms and leagues, along with pints quarts gallons, pounds and bushels etc. etc. then four, eight, twelve or 20 balls to the pound of lead, you never expected a simple answer did you?