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Name a single mechanical contraption that has been around, essentially in its original format, for over a hundred years yet is today even more popular than ever. Further, it’s never been out of production and likely never will in the near future. If you are a gun person, the answer is easy: John Browning’s Colt Model 1911 semi-automatic pistol.

John Moses Browning was the rock star of 1900s firearm design. Almost everything that left his drawing board became an instant hit. If it wasn’t for the designs he made for FN, Colt, Remington and Winchester, the entire look of firearms today would be very different. Of his 128 inventions, the Model 1911 is often touted as his most enduring.

It was born from Browning’s earlier work on his Model 1900 and 1903 series pistols for Colt and shows an internal similarity to those guns. However, they were chambered for much smaller cartridges. Colt wanted a .45ACP caliber semi-automatic pistol to compete for the US Army’s pistol trials in the early 1900s. The gun was a single-action only semi-automatic pistol fed from a 7-shot detachable box magazine that could be released with a push-button (most comparable designs of the day had a heel-release that needed both hands to operate), and had a sufficiently long sight radius to make it accurate even with simple fixed sights. It was heavy, at 39-ounces, and large, at 8.25-inches long, but it was rugged and worked well when needed.
Read the rest in my column at University of Guns