When did the increased desirability of longer barrels begin & why is that so?

[Researcher]

Must have begun when Jack O'Connor retired from being the Shooting Editor of Outdoor Life. His nearly forty years of extolling the virtues of 26-inch barrels had a lot of folks in the 1960s & 70s taking hacksaws to those old 30- and 32-inch guns!! I have mostly favored 28-inch barrels on a break-action gun and 26-inch on a pump or auto. I can't prove it, but I bet I shot a lot more ducks with the 28-inch barrels on my Super-Fox than I did with its original 32-inchers. Did shoot a lot of trap in my college years with those long barrels.