Smith & Wesson Smith & Wesson Smith & Wesson (S&W) is an American manufacturer of firearms, ammunition and restraints. The corporate headquarters are in Springfield, Massachusetts. Smith & Wesson was founded in 1852 and after various corporate changes is now a unit of American Outdoor Brands Corporation. Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson founded the Smith & Wesson Company in Norwich, Connecticut in 1852 to develop the Volcanic rifle. Smith developed a new Volcanic Cartridge, which he patented in 1854. The Smith & Wesson Company was renamed Volcanic Repeating Arms in 1855, and was purchased by Oliver Winchester. Smith left the company and
Smith & Wesson Model 3 gunsmiths to reverse-engineer the Smith & Wesson design, and then began to produce copies of the revolver—both in their own arsenal at Tula and by contracting other manufacturers in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to manufacture copies of the revolver (a common practice at the time—Webley & Scott's British Bulldog revolver was widely copied, too, by European and American gunsmiths). The Russian and European copies of the S&W Model 3 revolver were generally of very high quality, but considerably cheaper than the S&W produced revolvers. This led to the Imperial government cancelling the order for significant quantities of Smith &