What if semi-autos had come first?

Sorry to disagree, but I don't see this as being true. There is nothing you can shoot out of a revolver (and I'm talking about fixed ammunition, not cap & ball) that cannot be fired out of a semi auto design.
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Semi's require a certain amount of recoil to cycle the action, and are finicky about what they will feed

My 44 revolver will shoot shot loads, plastic bullets powered just by a primer, and 300 gr "bear killer " loads, all in one cylinder, and never hesitate

I could even fire 6 blanks with no malfunctions

Maybe a "specialty" semi could be made for each of those, but there are none that could handle them all interchangably
 
Fouling aside, a black powder auto pistol probably would not have been very practical since it takes the longer pressure curve of smokeless powder to reliably operate an auto pistol. Recoil-operated pistols might have worked OK, but blowbacks probably would not.
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Some years back, for amusement, my brother and I loaded about 50 .45ACP rounds with Pyrodex. We shot them through his Springfield 1911, and my Ruger P-90. It was filthy, and smokey (and fun), but both guns fired, cycled and fed new rounds reliably fine for the (short) duration of our test.
 
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hard for me to visualize a semiauto with out a self contained cartridge. May be I am missing the point? That would be been pretty crazy, still trying to wrap my head around the idea.

I think that the revolver would have been a minor note in history and that most handgun hunters would be using big bore single shots or double barrel pistols. But that's just my guess. Perhaps automags would have been much more popular and that is what people would use to hunt with.
 
I'll bet a whole dollar we'd still have had the Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver though. Even "Prideaux "circular magazines", might not have been impossible in an alternate reality.:D

IIRC there were quite functional B/P Weblys.
 
Thanks for the info from those who actually have run black powder in semi autos.. seems to be somewhat workable in .45caliber. Now, think about what the results would be in other calibers. 9mm? .32?

Round ball and a full charge out of a .36 Navy cap & ball gives velocity and energy numbers roughly equivalent to the usual .380ACP ammo from a pocket gun. Building a semi auto that would run on black powder means conquering a number of mechanical challenges, only one of which is cycling the action.

Early cartridge ammo was not robust enough to survive working through the usual semi auto action's feed cycle. In fact, chicken and the egg, but you cannot make a semi auto that works, until you make ammo that will work in it.

You have to take a pretty good step along the development line of metallic cartridges before you run into drawn brass and a bit further to solid head cases. SO, in order to have someone create (and popularize) the semi auto before the revolver, you'll have to change the timeline on development of ammo, too.

Since it's a "what if" question, you can do that, too. But you should have a plausible framework to fit around the "what if". Hmmm, ok, leaving all that aside, for now, if semis had come first, where might the revolver be now?

I think pretty close to where they are today, absent all the influence of police and military use. There is a certain power to weight/size ratio that makes a handgun mass market successful.

You can build a semi auto to handle any load a revolver will. But you can't always do that in a gun that is as easily carried as a revolver. As an example, you can make a .44 Magnum semi auto. Its been done. But it hasn't been done in a gun that matches the size & weight of a Ruger Super Blackhawk.
(or a S&W M29).

And then there is the whole price point popularity thing. IF semis came first, and so became the popular standard, what would the pricing be on revolvers? Would they be (or stay) more expensive than semis? Or would they be made and sold enough cheaper than semis to give them a larger degree of popularity, market wise? There is a LOT of people choosing a gun they can afford, over the best gun for a particular job. Interesting questions...

Getting back to this..
Semi's require a certain amount of recoil to cycle the action, and are finicky about what they will feed
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SOME do. SOME are.
But there are also those who don't, and aren't. Don't fall into the trap of thinking everything under a general classification has the same limitations as what you see most commonly, or what is most popular on the market.

A semi auto only requires a certain amount of recoil if it is recoil operated. There are other designs of semi auto that are not recoil operated.

Finicky about what they will feed is dependent on the individual design, NOT semi auto operation. Semi autos shooting .38 Spl wadcutters have been built, and some designs of semi auto can even be made to feed empty cases. Its not the fact that its a semi auto that determines this, its how you built the particular semi auto. I'm not saying a semi auto can do everything a revolver does, but it can do nearly everything a revolver does, although has to do them a different way.

On the light end, when you get below what it takes to run a semi, you have a manually operated repeater. Which is actually what a revolver is, as well. The semi is more awkward to operate manually, certainly, but it will still shoot.

On the heavy end, there are semi auto designs that will handle 50,000+psi cartridges. Are there any revolvers that can do that? (I admit ignorance of the working pressures of the biggest magnums, .460, .500S&W, etc.) But even if there are revolvers that can do it, they aren't the common usually seen guns, either.
 
I think the OP's question was what if the semi had come along sooner, not which one was more versatile?
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I think the fact that they are more versatile and reliable is why they still would have been developed, and are still being developed even now
 
Another issue is that, had a semi-auto come along sooner, you'd probably see most of them chambered for relatively low-powered cartridges like .32 Short Colt, .38 S&W, or .41 Rimfire or you'd see larger, more cumbersome guns with the magazine housed outside the grip.

You see, even if you could make a practical semi-auto to use black powder with, you still have to use enough black powder to achieve a useful velocity. Black powder is quite bulky and takes up more space than smokeless powder. This is why many revolver cartridges are so much longer than most semi-auto cartridges, they were originally loaded with blackpowder or are based on older black powder cartridges where all that room was needed for the powder.

One of the common complaints about revolver-caliber semi-autos is that, due to the long cartridges, the grip is usually quite large and not very comfortable for many people. Because of this, you'd have to use a shorter, and in a blackpowder world less powerful, cartridge in order to keep the grip dimension small enough to be comfortable for most people. The only way around this would be to house the magazine outside the grip (think Broomhandle Mauser or Bergmann-Bayard), but that makes for a larger, more cumbersome pistol.
 
I believe there is no way a semi auto pistol could have even been developed in the time period we are talking about here. This is just a few years after the concept of interchangeable parts had become a reality and given the metallurgy of the time Colt was having trouble keeping his Walkers in one piece. It would really take the late 1800's advancements in technology to make an auto even remotely possible. And you would have to deal with your first market, the military as being resistant to any change in status quo. Remember the big objection by the military quartermasters bureaucracy to repeating rifles like the Henry & Spencer was the fact that soldiers would fire more rounds thus they might waste ammo, let alone the fact that they would have another yet another different round to supply. The mindset at the time assured that a auto pistol just would be brushed aside by the military, the very market you wanted to capture. The auto pistol would hved to wait until smokeless powder and changing attitudes.
 
hard for me to visualize a semiauto with out a self contained cartridge. May be I am missing the point? That would be been pretty crazy, still trying to wrap my head around the idea.
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A variation of a harmonica gun, maybe. If someone could manage autoadvanceing,that would be (essentially) a semiauto cap and ball gun.

300px-Ten_Shot_Harmonica_Pistol_9mm_%282%29.jpg
 
Now, think about what the results would be in other calibers. 9mm? .32?
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Hmmm. I am actually tempted to load some up in 9mm, and see how my G19 handles them.


Round ball and a full charge out of a .36 Navy cap & ball gives velocity and energy numbers roughly equivalent to the usual .380ACP ammo from a pocket gun. Building a semi auto that would run on black powder means conquering a number of mechanical challenges, only one of which is cycling the action.
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My brother and I also tried Pyrodex in .38 special. Loaded full to the top of the case, it was insanely underpowered, compared to a modern smokeless load. It could barely penetrate rotten punk wood. We were digging bullets out that were undamaged enough that we could, seriously, have reloaded them and used them again.
 
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Semi's didn't come first .... No use thinking about it... Glad we have choices today, cause I'd sure hate to be stuck with a slab-sides for my use. Yuck. ;)
 
Nice post Lee n field :D

I think even if semi-autos came first revolvers would have eventually been invented. I think humans have come up with just about every conceivable way to fire multiple rounds from a single firearm, so the revolver would have surfaced eventually even if it's purpose was just to be different.
 
Revolvers were something that were achievable with the technology of the early 19th century, once the percussion cap had been invented.

Autoloaders were not (unless you count some kind of harmonica gun). To make an autoloader, on top of everything you have to have to make a revolver, you have to also have self contained cartridges, and be able to extract a fired cartridge, and feed a new one from some kind of magazine. Which magazine, BTW, is another thing you have to invent, that you didn't with a revolver.
 
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I think we're a little too channeled into existing designs failing in a B/P world. IN reality there would have been different engineering challenges so there might have been different solutions developed to meet them.

I still like the idea of a hybrid semi-auto revolver as it would have been a logical development to deal with the powder fouling issue. There's no actual rule stating that a semi-auto MUST load from a stick magazine. Heck rifles worked for decades before the box magazine was invented. In a different development cylindrical mags may have been the answer to fouling & speed loading.

Who knows, perhaps there might have been a semi cylindrical magazine self loader so this whole argument would never have gotten started in the first place as the best of both became merged? Dardick anyone:D
 
While I understand the "well that's not the way it happened" or "you had to have self-contained cartridges and a way to extract them first" posts, I don't think it would have been too much of a stretch for someone to have been thinking about loading and removing self-contained cartridges at the same time that Colt was carving his first revolver models.

Further reading shows that in fact, pinfire cartridges were invented around 1836 (pretty much at the same time as Colt's revolver development), and the idea of a metal encased cartridge was definitely in play by the 1850s. Rather than the existence of a suitable cartridge, it seems that the key was the ability to extract and reload another in an efficient and repeatable manner that was the puzzle solved by Borchardt by the 1890s. Browning, of course, was working in parallel on his own automation designs.

The advantage of Colt's design, as I see it, is that it was a smaller step forward to design an en bloc container (cylinder) for the rounds in the gun, whether or not they were enclosed or cap and ball, and figure out how to move that container in a circular motion in a compact handheld design, than it was to move individual cartridges in a tube (magazine) in an automated fashion. Witness the awkwardness of Borchardt's C93, greatly improved in the next iteration of course by Georg Luger.
 
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There's an old quote that goes something like this...

To create it the first time takes genius. The 10th time a skilled craftsman. The 100th time, a tinsmith...

Ok, maybe it slightly misquoted, (I don't care! hehee)
But the idea is that the first time is difficult, it takes inspiration, (and sweat).

improving on something we already KNOW works is easier.

building what others have proven works is easiest. (but not entirely foolproof, even then)
 
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