What is the origin of saying tried and true?

Answer 1

This comes from the 1860's. The American Civil war was the first war where rifles replaced muskets as the primary weaponry of the infantrymen. As people familiar with weapons know, compared to a musket, a rifle is far more accurate or "true". However, though the rifle was one of the first mass-produced items in America, that mass production was not up to the quality control standards that we think of in today's production processes. Coupling that with some unscrupulous gun dealers and rigged government contracts, meant that many inaccurate rifles were sent to the troops. Soldiers soon learned that their life depended on testing the weapon themselves before they went into combat to assure it's accuracy-that is they wanted a weapon they had "tried" and found to be "true". After the war, "tried and true" soon was applied to anything that worked correctly.