357 Magnum
Choosing the .357 Magnum as top revolver cartridge of the 20th century was not as difficult as selecting the 9mm for auto pistols, and it will probably provoke a bit less objection or criticism. As they say of Yellowstone National Park, the .357 is “first and still best” in many handgunners’ eyes when it comes to magnum revolvers.
It was almost exactly 65 years ago, on April 8, 1935, that the very first “.357 Magnum” revolver was completed by Smith & Wesson and presented to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It was a seminal moment. The .357 Magnum was the first American cartridge of any kind—handgun, rifle, or shotgun—to bear the label “Magnum.” It was the first of many-to-come, extra-power cartridges to be based on a slightly lengthened version of a previously standard load. For more than two decades after its introduction—until eclipsed by the .44 Magnum—it was the most powerful handgun cartridge produced anywhere in the world, and even today it is still the largest selling and most widely used of all the many handgun cartridges to bear that evocative “Magnum” label.
The .357 had its origins in the roaring days of the 1920s, when Prohibition Era gangsters like the Dillinger bunch and Bonnie and Clyde confronted law enforcement agencies with a new situation in history: highway vehicle pursuit. Police departments began pressuring handgun and ammunition companies for a revolver cartridge that would have more power and penetration than the standard .38 Special that was then the near-universal “major” police round. So in 1930 S&W introduced a new .38/44 Heavy Duty .38 Special revolver built on the company’s .44-size N-Frame, and Remington and Winchester began loading a special high-velocity .38 Special cartridge called the .38/44 S&W Special. This load was contained in an ordinary .38 Special case but was about one-third more powerful than a standard 158-grain roundnose lead .38 Special load. It was recommended for use only in the heavy-frame S&W .38 Special revolvers.
After these products appeared, one of the renowned firearms authorities of the day, Philip B. Sharpe, began working on even more powerful .38 Special handloads and repeatedly urged S&W to develop a special revolver to handle them. Sharpe’s loads were fine to shoot in the big N-Frame S&W but could damage or substantially shorten the use-life of typical smaller frame .38 Special revolvers. The solution, reached by Sharpe and S&W’s Major Douglas B. Wesson, was to slightly lengthen the standard .38 Special case and make a new revolver specially for it. The new gun would be able to chamber both the longer, more powerful loads as well as the shorter, standard-length .38 Special, while regular .38 Special revolvers would not be able to chamber the new, longer load.
By mid-1934 Winchester had completed specifications for the cartridge, which had a case length 1/8 inch longer than the .38 Special and powered a 158-grain semiwadcutter lead bullet to a muzzle velocity of 1515 fps—nearly twice the velocity of the same-weight bullet from an ordinary .38 Special. It was called the .357 Magnum. The name is interesting. Why .357 instead of .38? Actually, .357 inch is the true caliber diameter of nearly all cartridges commonly called .38s, and Doug Wesson and the Winchester designers felt that using the .357 designation would make it easier to keep people from reaming out their .38 Special revolver chambers so it would fit. And why are .38s actually closer to .36s instead of real .38s in the first place? Primarily because when people first started loading .36-caliber lead balls into self-contained metallic cartridges in the 19th century, the result could be chambered in bored-through .38-caliber cap and ball revolver cylinders. So the .38 designation actually refers more to chamber diameter than bore diameter, and a .38 Special is actually a .36 Special.
And where did the Magnum come from? Again, it was Doug Wesson who made the call. The Major was a renowned connoisseur of fine champagne, and in the vintner’s world the term “magnum” refers to a slightly larger than standard bottle. When Wesson went out to dine, he never ordered anything less than a magnum bottle, and it seemed to him a natural extension of the term to the slightly larger than standard case of the new cartridge. And so was coined one of the most enduring—and misunderstood—labels in firearms and ammunition history.
The .357 Magnum cartridge (and S&W gun) was an instant runaway success. S&W had originally conceived a very limited demand, with individual registered revolvers being individually built to individual customer’s specifications. That lasted for only about two years. Not only did every cop in the nation want one, but Major Wesson also made the new revolver a sportsman’s choice by setting out on a highly publicized hunting trip to take nearly every major species of big game in North America with an eight-inch version of the new revolver. And he did it. For the next 20 years, until Elmer Keith’s heavy-loaded .44 Specials became the second ammo recipe to be poured from a magnum bottle, the .357 was the cartridge that every serious handgun shooter had to have. Even today, nearly three generations later, the .357 Magnum remains second to none in popularity for general-purpose sport, hunting, and law enforcement/personal-defense use in a revolver.