Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

330 страница из 495

The 1905 Colt .45, developed by John M. Browning, was a logical development of the locked-breech 38-caliber Colt/Browning pistol. The new .45 had a five-inch barrel, which gave it an overall length of about eight inches. It weighed about 33 ounces. Capacity of the magazine was seven rounds. The cartridge, in its original loading, pushed a 200-grain bullet at about 900 feet per second. It was a potent load for a semiautomatic pistol of the time.

To today’s shooters, the 1905 pistol might seem strange. It had no grip safety and no thumb safety. The shooter just cocked the hammer when he was ready to shoot. The hammer itself was of a rounded burr shape. The recessed magazine release was at the bottom of the grip frame. The only visible control was the slide stop on the left. It worked well, and a contemporary writer called it “a good fighting pistol.” It was the only .45 automatic in commercial production, a fact that gave it a decided advantage when the tests began.

It is worth commenting on the slide of the early Colt automatics. We are so used to semiautomatic pistols having slides that it is difficult to realize now what an innovation Browning had introduced. The earliest high-power auto pistols — the Borchardt, the Bergmann, the Mauser, the Mannlicher and the Luger — had exposed barrels with the locking mechanism completely behind the barrel. Browning designed the slide as a totally new concept, a moving breechblock that extended forward over the barrel. Not only did this make a much more compact pistol for any barrel length, but the slide and barrel could have mating lugs to form the short-recoil locking mechanism.