Very interesting. I had a quick look on the net and found this, which describes a signed Flobert pistol dated to about 1855, and definitely .22. https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/24936Originally Posted by chieffool
Flobert is 1840'ish... the suggestion being his indoor guns (a novelty 'parlour' toy) originally developed out of putting a lead ball into a percussion cap. Eventually refined into 'Rimfire' in .22, which predates any airgun caliber by decades.
(In France the metric system was in place, so Flobert would have considered his calibre to be 5.6 mm rather than .22 inches)
So we can now push the date of .22 calibre back to the 1840-50’s period, and can assume that airguns played no part in developing this calibre. The question now remains, did Flobert come up with the size himself, or was he just using 5.6mm percussion caps that were already in common usage at the time?We now need an expert historian in early nineteenth century firearms to comment.
Incidentally, it is very true as noted earlier that it is often the simplest questions that are the most difficult to answer. A classic example is the waisted airgun pellet. Despite being one of the most important advances in airgun technoloigy, no one has yet been able to determine who invented them, or who was the first to commercialise them.
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