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In 1898 John Browning entered into an agreement with Colt. He would design some "magazine pistols," and they would manufacturer and market them within an assigned area, that included the United States, England and a large part of South America. Browning would receive a royalty on each pistol sold. He had a similar agreement with Fabrique Nationale (FN) in Belgium that covered most of Europe.
The first pistol marketed by Colt was a short-recoil, locked breech, .38 caliber pistol
that did not have either a safety lock (manual safety) nor grip safety. I can safely say that he didn’t intend on users carrying the piece, with a round in the chamber, cocked but unlocked. We may not get along on anything else, but I hope we can agree on this point.
So how was one supposed to carry the pistol? Well they could:
1. Carry it with a loaded magazine but empty chamber, in which case a cocked or uncocked hammer was a moot point, but obviously with the hammer down was preferred.
2. Carry it with the magazine and chamber loaded, but with the hammer down. Now this idea drives some of today’s users of the 1911 pistol up the wall, but it didn’t bother Browning at all. But then, what did he know…
Well he knew a lot. He had designed and patented what was called an “Inertia Firing Pin.” The firing pin itself was shorter then the tunnel in the slide, and the pin was held backwards by a coil spring. When the hammer (falling from full cock) hit the firing pin it was driven forward and literally bounced off the primer, detonating it in the process. The firing pin spring pushed the pin back to its rearward position so that the nose did not rest on the next cartridge that was fed into the chamber. So long as the hammer was carried in a fully down position the firing pin could not be impacted with enough force to drive it forward to hit the primer.
However in theory, if the pistol was dropped on the muzzle, and the firing pin spring was weak, kinked, or otherwise damaged, and the sun/moon was under a cloud on the fifth Sunday of the month, the firing pin might, because of its own weight, go forward with enough velocity to set off a primer.
This makes an excellent theory, but in practice such an incident is so rare that one is hard pressed to find an actual, confirmed case of it happening. I only know of 2 such incidents (and I’ve been looking for them for over 50 years) and in both cases the firing pin spring had been degraded by extensive dry firing with nothing but air in the chamber. This practice can indeed ruin firing pin springs.
All of Browning’s pistols that had exposed hammers (the kind that you can cock) had inertia firing pins, and that included both the 1905 and 1911 .45 designs. However the 1911 prototypes did not have a manual safety lock until about 4 months before the Army adopted the pistol, and it was included over Browning’s recommendations.
In or about 1938, Colt introduced a positive firing pin block that would prevent any possibility of an unintentional discharge if the pistol was dropped on the muzzle. It was called the “Swartz Safety,” after William Swartz who invented it.
Colt tried to sell the Army on it, but Uncle Sam (and Brazil for that matter) wouldn’t buy it. After World War Two Colt quietly dropped it.
Now I don’t really care how people decide to carry their 1911 pattern pistols, but it is a solid fact that generations of users – both civilian and military – occasionally carried the pistol with the hammer down on a loaded chamber. If this practice had led to an inordinate number of unintentional shootings two things would have happened. First, it would have been widely reported in firearms literature of the day, and second, Colt would have done something about it long before the Series 80 pistols came out. The fact that neither of these things happened should tell you something.
So says The Old Fuff – who has indeed done his homework.
