Colt .45 Automatic Pistol

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The Colt .45 Automatic Pistol
The Colt .45 automatic pistol was designed to comply with the requirements of the U. S. Army, who had discovered that its .38 revolver was incapable of stopping attackers in the campaign in the Philippines. (Caradimas) John Moses Browning, an employee for Colt Manufacturing, redesigned the .38 revolver to accommodate a .45 diameter cartridge of his own design.
The development of the .45 automatic pistol took about 5 years to perfect. The design requirements for the pistol specified a gun that could be serviced in the field with a minimum number of tools and completely disassembled using only its own parts. The result was a pistol that was selected as the official sidearm of the United States Armed Forces. The story of the Colt .45 automatic pistol includes a brief history of John Moses Browning and how the pistol operates and has changed over the years.
John Moses Browning is considered the most famous and most competent gun maker the world has ever known. (Caradimas) Gun making ran in the family of John Moses Browning. He grew up in his father’s gunsmithing shop and knew the name of every gun part before he could even read. He produced his first gun from scrap iron at the age of 13. It was here that he learned much more than just the art and science of gunsmithing. John was more interested in designing and building new, innovative firearms than repairing broken ones. He received his first patent at the age of 23.
After his father died in 1879, John Moses and his brothers expanded the business into a small gun making workshop that employed several people. They first began producing rifles. When a representative of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company saw the quality of one of John’s guns in 1883, he bought it and sent it to the company headquarters. The managing director of Winchester immediately went to visit the Browning brothers and bought the rights to produce the guns, leaving Joh...