Major Fosbery's Automatic Revolver: History and Mechanics

Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com I'm Ian McCollum and today We are taking a look at Colonel. Fosbery's automatic revolver specifically this is a model of 1901 Webley Fosbery automatic revolver in Caliber 455 This was originally the idea of one George Fosbery VC He did in fact win the Victoria cross for some of his military service in India he actually retired from the British military in 1877 Became pretty well renowned as an arms - a small arms - expert he had made some previous inventions in small arms He invented the Paradox which was a rifled choke to allow Shotguns to shoot slugs accurately that's actually a pretty cool thing that's something I ought to covered later on but He invented an exploding bullet that was used for range estimation in India And then he went on to come up with this idea now, what this idea is is a way to harness the energy from firing a revolver to rotate the cylinder and cock the hammer and Absorb some of the recoil energy instead of transmitting it all to the shooter So when you fire the whole upper receiver of this gun slides backwards Cylinder indexes the Hammer is recocked, and it's left ready to fire with a single action Trigger pull It's pretty cool now the question obviously the question that arises is why this? instead of a semi-automatic pistol the answer is because fosbury came up with this in 1895 and there weren't a whole lot of Functional semi-Auto pistols on the market at that point remember this is a year before the broom-handle mauser was even out there so the reason why this is because the semi-Auto pistols were not that great at this point, so fosbury first developed this idea on a colt 1873 a single action army and built an experimental model and And I got the details Sorta worked out he patented it in the uk in 1895 he then went on to file patents in the us Germany, and Italy in 1896 I think three different patents in the uk various features and Unfortunately the lock work in the colt revolver was Kinda weak now Not as it stands alone But when adapted in this way with the part sliding and banging together the colt didn't work out all that well, so Fosbery changed up and went to a british Webley pattern revolver something he would have been quite intimately familiar with at the time I'm sure and the lock work in the webley was stouter and better suited to this sort of adaptation, so And I should also point out in the process he got the advantage of the webley's faster loading and unloading Compared to the single action army because this is a break action revolver Pop it open. It automatically. Ejects all six cartridges, and then it's a lot faster to Load then a gate loading revolver like the colt In the late 1890s fosbury went and approached the webley company. They were one of the premier manufacturers of handguns in Britain at the time and well Fosbery needed a manufacturer to build his cool neat guns, so Webley was interested they saw the growing popularity of self-loading pistols in Europe and in the United states and of course militaries are starting to adopt these the swiss would adopt the luger in 1900 and the only other self-loading pistol that webley had going on at that point was the Mars pistol by Sir Hugh Gabot Fairfax, and this thing is just gigantic behemoth of a magnum pistol And Webley is looking at this and going this isn't really looking like it's going all that well maybe we should have a second option and the webley fosbery became a second option for them, so Fosbery doesn't appear to have had much direct Influence working at Webley instead he licensed the idea to webley Webley turned it over to one of their shop foreman a guy named William whiting would go on to design pretty much all of Webley's domestic self-loading pistols But that's a later story whiting takes over this and they start ironing some of the the last bits of the problems out and The first public demonstrations of these pistols were at in june 1900 at the Bisley shooting matches. This is a big national Was a big national shooting event at Bisley in England and it was where it was the equivalent to the u.s. National Matches really like Camp Perry All of the best shots in the country came out as a big competition prizes The works and so webley premiered this gun there they had what were presumably some hand fitted kind of prototypes that they let a whole bunch of shooters play with basically shoot they had a couple sponsored shooters in the event who are using Webley Fosberys and Everyone actually came away really impressed with the gun now these are target shooters. Not military mind you and The elements they liked were especially in Rapid-Fire stages It was a lot faster to work than a double-action revolver because it automatically cycled and left you with the hammer cocked ready for a single action very short very crisp Trigger pull they really liked the recoil absorption of the the action of the gun and These proved to be very accurate guns as well. They were well made the sights are both fitted directly to the barrels So there's not a whole lot of stuff. There's not a whole lot of potential for Changes in in alignment between the sights and the barrel like there can be in the self-loading pistol Anyway, they came away very impressed a lot of good PR from the 1900 Bisley Matches they went ahead and finalized production got tooled up And the first guns came on the market for sale in 1901 now at this point they were chambered in the 455 webley cartridge which was the standard British service cartridge of the time and while the initial interest or this initial PR had been at the Bisley Target Matches the Sales were primarily to military officers of course at that point in the British military as an officer you had to provide your own Sidearm and it they didn't tell you what sidearm it had to be but it did have to use the standard 455 service ammunition So there were a lot of different models of standard revolvers you could get you could buy a very nicely Kind of like a custom called a custom shop version of the the service revolver from Webley But this was also an option and especially for the guys who wanted the newest coolest high-tech Awesome, whiz-bang gun a webley fosbery revolver worked great as a military sidearm They didn't sell all that many in total about 5000 of these were made but That would go through Several later models and the sales didn't really pick up until world war one when of course at that point you Have a lot of new officers coming into the army looking for sidearms so This particular one is number 1004 it was manufactured in 1902 In 1902 1903 they manufactured a big batch of these which would then hold them for many years Unfortunately they never really sold as well as I'm sure webley hoped they would be and by the time they were really getting into People's hands, we're talking several years into the 1900s Self-loading true semi-automatic pistols really improved quickly and and you did get to the point of well Why would I buy this which is half revolver in half semi-Auto? When I can go to a real semi-auto like say the colt model of 1911 only a Few years later I can just get that and it does everything better than this does so that was the big problem for Webley with these guns Cool idea, but they didn't sell well enough right off the bat and they quickly became obsolescent so front webley you could get this with a four a six or a seven and a half inch barrel prices went from 105 to 115 shillings respectively 5, 10 and 115 if you wanted nickel plated instead of polished and blued that would add an extra five shillings to the price and They were tested by the British military in 1901 and 1902 never actually formally adopted They're actually substantially heavier than a standard Pattern Webley revolver of the time just under 44 ounces which is kind of a heavy pistol Although I'm sure that is part of what makes them very comfortable to shoot now I'm going to find out myself how comfortable to shoot these are because we are going to take this out on the range but before We do that I want to take a look at a couple of the features and show you a couple of the mechanical elements of this gun now these guns would go on to be manufactured in 38 acp as well as 455 and so those of you who recognize this gun from the maltese Falcon? may know or may not that had begun in the Dashiell Hammett detective story the Maltese Falcon is in fact a 38 caliber Webley fosbury which was an each shotgun as Opposed to the six shot version here in 455 One other element you may recognize from that story Is that this gun has safety on it Safety's on revolvers are a thing, but they're not super common And in most cases in my opinion anyway, they're redundant and kind of goofy and unnecessary on the Webley fosbury however They do make good sense the reason for that is this does have a fixed firing pin now It does have a half cock notch but a lot of people don't really want to trust the half cock notch for carry on a revolver with a fixed firing pin because if you have a cartridge in the chamber under the hammer And you strike a sharp blow to the back of the hammer you do risk potentially detonating that cartridge and firing it unintentionally So the better way to do this with single action guns is typically to carry them cocked and locked so cock the hammer Then you need a safety or else all that stopping it from hiring is the very nice light crisp Trigger pull, so on The Webley fosbury when you engage the safety you can see that it actually slides the frame slightly backward The Trigger is completely disconnected the hammer is locked in place the gun is now quite safe Then when you're ready to fire it as a right-hander the safety sits right underneath your thumb All you have to do is flick it down, and you're ready to fire when you do fire There is a stud operating in the bottom of the frame here that cycles the cylinder back and forth And that's what the zigzag pattern is. It is actually a track for this little stud to run in so if I open this up You can see this diamond-shaped little stud Interestingly this started as a round stud on the very early guns they found that when it was round It would occasionally not quite pick up the grooves properly and the cylinder would rotate partway and then rotate back onto a previously fired cartridge Changing it to a diamond shape made it more reliable in tracking in these grooves There's another interesting feature here in this little tab which I can push in it's a little spring-loaded tab right there Operates inside the top of the frame and what it does is it actually has a little stud that locks the cylinder in position so if I push it out, I can then Rotate the cylinder out of alignment Now it was very important when you open this You have to this is actually kind of like the top cover in a machine gun like an MG42 These grooves in the cylinder have to line up with this stud or else the gun can't close When you open it to eject empty cases and reload new ones if you didn't have a locking mechanism It would get it would really be quite a noxious to try and have to position the cylinder in just the right place Before you could close the gun it would make it very difficult to reload the gun quickly so this little stud in the top of the frame Locks the cylinder in position for you when you close the gun when you close the frame That little tab gets pushed onto the locking surface up and out of engagement So now it has handed off responsibility for controlling the cylinder from this stud up here to the operating one down here in the frame Now I can take the right grip panel off, and we can see the the actual recoil mechanism down in here We have this lever which is going to cycle back and a compression spring in there that provides the force To slow it down, and then cycle it forward Now this is a 1901 Pattern of Webley fosbury in later years they would change this to a V spring much like Webley's Later self-loading pistols, so that's one way to distinguish between the models But really pretty simple down here the the finicky part of getting these guns working right was really the cylinder I'm getting the cylinder to properly track and index reliably that was really the biggest issue that they had And I should say with production guns. They pretty well accomplished that but you will see a wide variety of changes to the cylinders with the style of the grooves and Fluting or in this case lack of fluting in the cylinder you want to take a look at a couple of the markings on here there aren't a whole lot up on the top of the Frame we have webley fosbury automatic and then down on the bottom they note that it is 455 cordite only don't use black powder in this because you'll just follow the gun up and There is a Webley & Scott Little winged Bullet logo down now When the safety is engaged we have a little line here that says that it is safe. When it's on When the safety is disengaged there's nothing and you just have to know that you're ready to shoot Serial number is located here on the side of the frame This is 1004 these did start at serial number one so this isn't like one of the very very first ones So lastly it's a little hard to see but up on top of the barrel here We have a marking that says army and maybe CSL and that is the the army Navy cooperative was Like a commissary type of store They had a catalog and as as an officer you could order guns or various other types of stuff Through the Army Navy CSL and have them shipped out to you in whatever Colonial Outpost you might be in so a lot of webley fosbury sales as well as webley commercial revolver sales went through the cooperative Last but not least we have this engraving on the back strap which identifies the officer who? purchased or owned this particular gun this was Captain Norman frazier of the Cameron Highlanders now we happen to know a bit about captain fraser But that is the subject for another video right now It's time to take this out to the range and see if we can shoot it as well as captain fraser could as I'm sure you will have guessed these are not exactly easy guns to come across in the us these days They're fairly rare and quite expensive They're only like I said less than four less than 5,000 of them made And then a lot of those were lost in world war one or were sent overseas these were popular probably more so with colonial British officers than with ones in the uk itself so a lot of them ended up in places like India and While they may still exist today They're not the kind of gun I can get my hands on here in the United States Like to give a big thank you to Mike carrick from Arms heritage magazine for letting me Take a look at this revolver and take it out and shoot it Definitely check out arms heritage if you're looking for a good print magazine still on interesting historical firearms And of course don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and full30 check back in tomorrow or next week for more semi-Automatic revolvers, thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 268,636

Rating: 4.9688592 out of 5

Keywords: George Fosbery, major fosbery's automatic revolver, webley fosbery, fosbery revolver, BF1, BATTLEFIELD 1, Forgotten Weapons, history and mechanics, excellent trigger pull, Colt SAA, Webley revolvers, British officer, target gun, better sidearm, semiauto handguns, double action revolver, semiauto revolver, selfcocking revolver, automatic revolver, history, development, ww1, 455, 455 webley, 38 super, prideaux, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, pistol, sidearm, handgun

Id: 52t2jdLDHHg

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2017