A look into the history of John M. Browning’s Model 1911 classic design. (In the beginning)
This is a tribute and my honor to John Browning’s Model 1911 Pistol who in my opinion built the best modern automatic pistol the world has ever known. This article is about the creation of the 1911 pistol, and its walk-through time from the late 1880s to the 21st century.
The Model 1911 .45 Automatic Pistol is one of the most copied handguns of all time and over the years has been utilized by many nations in several conflicts prior to WWI including WWI, WWII, Koren, Vietnam and Desert Storm. The Model 1911 is also utilized by many of today’s active military along with a huge civilian population.
Though the Model 1911 has been around for over 100 years, it had to wait for the invention of smokeless gun powder prior to going into production. Traditional black powder leaves so much gun powder residue and will quickly gum up or clog the automatic internal mechanism and render it inoperable. This reduces functionality of the automatic weapon and requires constant disassembly and cleaning. With the invention of smokeless gun powder in 1884 by Paul Marie Eugène Vieille, a French chemist, this allowed firearm inventors to continue pursuing new ways to develop some of the firearms we enjoy today.
John Moses Browning began designing “automatic” or self-loading weapons late in 1889. He recognized that muzzle blast energy could be utilized to work the action of a gun, compared to the traditional mechanical mechanism from bolt action rifles lever action rifles, or revolver type handguns. Browning built his first gas-operated machine gun with his brother Matthew and filed their first patent on 6 January 1890. Over the years Browning filed approximately a dozen or so patents on various types of self-loading weapons/automatic weapons. These were both gas and recoil operated. In 1895 Colt’s began producing Browning’s machine gun, which marked the beginning of a long collaboration between John Browning and the Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company.
The Colt–Browning M1895
Nicknamed “potato digger” was an air-cooled, belt-fed, gas-operated machine gun that fires from a closed bolt position. The M1895 had a cyclic rate of 450 rounds per minute.
Colt The First Automatic Pistol
Browning’s patent №580,924 of 1897, was chambered in a .38 caliber rimmed fire revolver cartridge. The Colt people in Hartford saw new possibilities from Browning’s design, which included military applications. This new prototype could fire seven rounds in less than a second and a half.
This new design has become known as the “parallel ruler” system because the barrel moves on two swinging links at each end, attached to the frame of the gun. When the gun is fired the barrel and slide recoil together for about 0.2 inch. The barrel is forced downward by the two links at each end, which allows the slide to continue in a rearward movement. As this happens the breech opens, and the spent shell casing is ejected. Because the slide is under pressure from the compressed recoil spring a new round is pushed upwards and stripped from the top of the magazine. As the new round is chambered, the barrel is forced upward and locked into alignment with the slide. The sealed alignment allows the gun to be fired again. The seamless timing caused by muzzle energy allows the gun to fire 7 round under 2 seconds
Though this gun was the precursor to the Model 1911, Colt’s “Model 1900” was never the official name designation. Colt simply called the gun the Colt “Automatic Pistol”. It was marked as follows:
AUTOMATIC COLT
CALIBER 38 RIMLESS SMOKELESS
The saga continues next issue part-2