The Colt .45 caliber handgun, the Peacemaker, is the oldest model handgun still in production in the world. Buy one today, and you'll have the same pistol used by marshals, cowboys, and bad guys of the 1800's. It was designed in 1872, put into production in 1873, and sold for $17 throughout the United States. Cowboys liked it because it could stop a 2,000 pound raging longhorn dead in his tracks. Marshals and outlaws liked it because it would fire six shots in a row without reloading, and do it accurately. It's one of the most popular handguns ever invented, and Colt Firearms sold 370,000 of them between 1873 and 1941. It is often called "the gun that won the west".
What brought it into such demand? Innovative design was part of it. The rolling cylinder working in tandem with the hammer, all on one trigger pull, made the pistol instantly ready for use in any emergency. And the center fire 45 caliber ammunition eliminated many of the slow and often dangerous activities that went along with the muzzle loading pistols of the time. Just as an example, Mark Twain wrote of a six cylinder predecessor of the Peacemaker, the Allen Pepperbox, which used cap and ball ammunition and fired right out of the top cylinder - it had no barrel. "Sometimes", he wrote of the gun's tendency to crossfire into the other five cylinders, "the whole broadside would go off at once. And then there was no safe place in the country around except behind it."
The Colt company remains in business today, still producing its original .45, but continuing to innovate with modern weapons in common use by civilians, law officers, and the military.
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