Colt 1851 Navy Revolver
revolver
The Colt Revolving Belt Pistol or Navy Pistol, sometimes erroneously referred to as "Colt Revolving Belt Pistol of Naval Caliber" or "of Navy Caliber," is a .36 caliber, six-round cap and ball revolver that was designed by Samuel Colt between 1847 and 1850. Colt first referred to this Revolver as the Ranger Size model, and then the Revolving Belt, but the designation "Navy" quickly took over.
After the Civil War, revolvers using fixed metallic cartridges came into widespread use. The Colt Navy remained in production until 1873, being replaced in the Colt line with what would become one of the manufacturer's most famous handguns, the Colt Single Action Army (also known as the Peacemaker and Colt 45).
Total production numbers of the Colt 1851 Navy Revolver were exceeded only by the Colt Pocket models in concurrent development, and numbered some 215,000 domestic units and about 42,000 produced in the Colt London Armory.
Characteristics
The six-round .36-caliber Navy revolver was much lighter than the contemporary Colt Dragoon Revolvers developed from the .44 Colt Walker revolvers of 1847, which, given their size and weight, were generally carried in saddle holsters. It was an enlarged version of the .31-caliber Colt Pocket Percussion Revolvers, that evolved from the earlier Baby Dragoon, and, like them, was a mechanically improved and simplified descendant of the 1836 Paterson revolver. As the factory designation implied, the Navy revolver was suitably sized for carrying in a belt holster. It became very popular in North America during the Western expansion. Colt's aggressive promotions distributed the Navy and his other revolvers across Europe, Asia, and Africa.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q619709. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1847, 1850, 1873 and 1851.
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This entry incorporates text from “Colt 1851 Navy Revolver” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.