The .44 Remington Magnum, also known as .44 Magnum or 10.9x33mmR (as it is known in unofficial metric designation), is a rimmed, large-bore cartridge originally designed for revolvers and quickly adopted for carbines and rifles. Despite the ".44" designation, guns chambered for the .44 Magnum round, and its parent, the .44 Special, use diameter bullets. The .44 Magnum is based on the .44 Special case but lengthened and loaded to higher pressures for greater velocity and energy. Famously called "the most powerful handgun [cartridge] in the world" by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, the .44 Magnum has since been eclipsed in power by the .454 Casull, .460 S&W Magnum, .480 Ruger, .50 Action Express, .500 S&W Magnum, and the .500 Bushwhacker; nevertheless, due in part to its more manageable recoil it has remained one of the most popular commercial large-bore magnum cartridges. Origin The .44 Magnum cartridge was the end result of years of tuned handloading of the .44 Special. In the early 20th century, experimenters loaded the .44 Special and other large-bore handgun cartridges with heavy bullets and higher than normal powder charges to achieve superior ballistics and better hunting performance. One of these hand-loaders was Elmer Keith, a prominent writer and outdoorsman of the 20th century. Keith settled on the .44 Special cartridge as the basis for his experimentation, rather than the larger .45 Colt. At the time, the selection of .44 caliber projectiles for hand-loaders was more varied, and the .44 Special's brass was thicker and stronger than the dated .45 Colt case. Also, the .44 Special case was smaller in diameter than the .45 Colt case. In revolvers of the same cylinder size, this meant that the .44 caliber revolvers had thicker, and thus stronger, cylinder walls than the .45. This allowed higher pressures to be used with less risk of a cylinder failure. Keith and his associates successfully lobbied Smith & Wesson and Remington to produce a commercial version of this new high-pressure loading, along with revolvers chambered for it. Smith & Wesson's first .44 Magnum revolver, the precursor to the Model 29, was built on December 15, 1955, and the gun was announced to the public on January 19, 1956 for a price of US$140 ($1,330 in 2020 dollars) Julian Hatcher (technical editor of American Rifleman) and Keith received two of the first production models. Hatcher's review of the new Smith & Wesson revolver