Development and History
The Colt Police Positive was an improvement of Colt’s earlier “New Police” revolver, upgraded with an internal hammer block safety. Colt named this new security device the “Positive Lock”, and its nomenclature ended up being incorporated as a partial namesake for the new revolver. The cylinder of the Police Positive rotated in the clockwise direction, the opposite of firearms maker Smith & Wesson's competing models. Ever a canny competitor in the firearms milieu, Colt missed no opportunity to score a coup d'éclat over its arch rival, and began a marketing campaign which accentuated this detail. In its advertising Colt proclaimed that "All Colt cylinders TURN TO THE RIGHT", and suggested that the Colt design forced the cylinder crane up against the frame, resulting in tighter lockup with less play and better chamber to barrel alignment, thus markedly increasing accuracy. The Police Positive was very successful; along with the Colt Official Police it dominated the law enforcement firearms market in the early 1900s. The Positive was itself incrementally modified in 1908, forming the basis for Colt’s Police Positive Special model.
A nickel Police Positive with pearl grips was used by Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey in Death Wish. The notorious American gangster Al Capone also used a Police Positive, a nickel .38 Police Positive with walnut grips and a 4 inch barrel, manufactured in 1929, to be precise. In June 2011 a private collector sold it at Christie's for a sum of £67,250/$109,080/€75,656.
Read more about this topic: Colt Police Positive
Famous quotes containing the words development and/or history:
“Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known.”
—Loris Malaguzzi (20th century)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)