Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House, I'm taking a look at some of the guns
in their upcoming June of 2016 Regional Auction. And there's one here that... there's a lot of misconception about this.
This is a Beretta Model of 1915 pistol. Now it's really cool in that this is ... basically the first automatic pistol made by Beretta.
It's got a ... couple of features that will become very distinctive, that we still see on a lot of Beretta pistols to this very day.
But this was the very first one, and it's got some weird features, and there's a lot of misconception
about the actual nomenclature, and what this thing was, and how it worked.
So, I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a close look at one, and dispel a lot of that misunderstanding.
So this is a Model of 1915, it was put into development originally in 1910 by a guy named Tullio Marengoni,
who would go on to be Beretta's chief firearms designer for quite a long time.
And most of the Beretta automatic pistols that we're familiar with today are the result of Tullio Marengoni's work.
Now in 1910 the Italian military had adopted the Glisenti pistol, which was this sort of Luger looking, sort of, kind of.
It was a short-recoil pistol (locked breech) in the 9mm Glisenti cartridge.
... This is one of the very beginning misconceptions about these pistols. 9mm Glisenti was developed,
it's dimensionally identical to 9mm Parabellum (or 9mm Luger), but it's about 30% less powerful.
So 30% lower powder charge.
Now this is very important, because 9mm Parabellum ammo will fit just perfectly in 1915 Berettas,
or 1910 Glisentis, or 1910 Brixias, and it will severely damage those pistols if you shoot very much of it.
Do not shoot 9mm Luger in a 9mm Glisenti pistol. I know it fits, still not a good idea.
So Marengoni realised that he could develop a blowback pistol for 9mm Glisenti,
he didn't actually need to have a locked breech for that cartridge.
And that's what would really allow him to make an affordable and relatively quick to produce gun.
certainly one that was better than the 1910 Glisenti. So, that's exactly what he did.
Why don't we go ahead and take a closer look at this, and I'll show you some of the really cool little engineering features inside it.
So the 1910 Glisenti was just too expensive. In 1915 the Italian military
formally adopted this as a substitute standard gun. Now the official sidearm was still the 1910,
the upshot of that is you will, despite the fact that these were virtually all used by the military,
you will not find the typical crown and RE, or the Royal Armoury marking, on these.
However, they were almost all made for the military. In total 15,300 were manufactured.
15,000 of them being direct military contracts in three batches of 5,000 each.
There was also a very small order of 300 made for the commercial market.
I suspect those 300 were probably mostly purchased by officers and ended up in military service anyway.
... Mechanically this is a simple blowback pistol, but it's got some cool features to it.
So first off, notice this. This is the classic Beretta open slide design that you'll recognise all the way up to the Beretta 92
today, and it's more modern iterations. This is the very first gun where that was used.
Now at this point in its development it actually had a separate ejection port right here.
So that's where the cartridge ejects, and then the open top of the slide is just for simplicity really.
One of the interesting features about the Model of 1915 is that it actually has two safeties.
We have a safety here, which blocks the trigger.
And then we also have a safety back here, which is a bit unusual and curious.
That is in the safe position, that is in the fire position.
And this safety actually blocks the hammer, so if I put this in safe,
I can click the disconnector and the trigger, but the gun doesn't fire.
It's only when I take that safety off and this safety off
that now the gun will dry fire.
It's also interesting that this does lock open on an empty magazine.
Now it's locking open on the magazine itself, when you pull the magazine out the slide does drop closed.
But this does let you know when it's out of ammunition, which is kind of nice.
The correct magazines for these guns are this style. Again this is a Beretta open-sided magazine.
Now that didn't last up to the 92, but you'll see this on a lot of early and transitional Beretta pistols.
It's a big magazine, this whole gun is larger than one might expect because it is in 9mm Glisenti. It's a fairly big cartridge.
Now disassembly is really slick.
We're going to use this trigger safety, and you'll see there's a second catch for it right up here,
I lock the slide back there, and then the barrel just lifts straight out of the gun.
Then I can disengage this safety
and the slide comes right off the gun, we've got our recoil spring and guide rod,
and the safety lever.
So the safety lever here is actually what locks the barrel in place, when it's engaged.
Alright, I took the grips off so we can get a better view of the firing mechanism itself,
which is again pretty clever, very simple, and very efficiently and elegantly done.
So I'm going to go ahead and engage the hammer safety for the moment.
Now I can dry fire this. The hammer is being held in place, I'll show you how that works in a moment.
But when you pull the trigger this pushes back,
that's just a pivoting arm connected to the trigger. And it pushes this piece
around the axis of that screw.
This is connected to
this flat metal spring.
Now this is a little tricky to see, but when the trigger goes back this piece right here pushes forward,
see it right there?
And after it's gone a certain distance
this bar ... slips off the bottom of the sear there.
Now that acts as your disconnector. That guarantees that you can only fire one shot and that this isn't a machine pistol,
because after that hammer has been released,
before the the trigger can fire again you have to bring it back and it resets itself.
... Now this sheet metal spring here is actually sitting under the end of the hammer.
So when this sheet metal spring goes forward there's no longer anything holding the hammer back.
There is a hammer spring, a coil spring, under the hammer that then pushes it up, and it fires.
So you can see that there's a strut
way down in there.
There's a strut and a coil spring that pushes the hammer. This is a very strong hammer spring.
And that is going to cause it to snap forward as soon as
this is no longer holding under the front of the hammer.
When I reset it ...
So right up in here is where it's going to hold onto the hammer. You can see that right
there. That flat spring snaps into place, locks the hammer in place.
Now the hammer safety is very simple. It's just a flap directly connected to this lever that flips into the path of the hammer.
And you can see on this side there's a little cutout in the hammer. So when I have that safety engaged,
that little metal flap
right there, holds the hammer in place.
So it doesn't matter if the sear has released the hammer, it can't go anywhere because that's holding it down.
One other feature I want to point out here.
9mm Glisenti, while it is suitable for blowback, it is still a pretty potent cartridge for a blowback pistol.
Much more so than, say, .32 Automatic.
So there were a number of things that Marengoni did to allow this pistol to function effectively.
One of them is he's got pretty big, heavy slide. There's a lot of weight in this, and that weight
gives you inertia that slows down the opening of the gun.
It also has a relatively stiff recoil spring, not super-heavy, but it's not a very light spring either.
And then in addition to that, he has a spring buffer here.
And this ... helps decelerate the slide at the end of its travel.
I can't pull this out because it's held in place by that little screw,
and I don't want to force it out, but we can pull it up so you can see it there.
This is a very big, hefty, square coil spring, and it just gives that little bit of give
and deceleration when the slide opens all the way.
So the face of the slide here at the bottom impacts on that spring, and that prevents it from battering the frame.
The slide markings here are one of the things that gives rise to some of the confusion about these guns.
Now this is marked Pietro Beretta, Brescia, Casa Fondata Nel 1880.
And then the important element down here: Calibre 9mm and then Patent 1915.
Now Beretta went on to make a .32 calibre version of this pistol that is very similar, almost a scaled-down version.
And ... the .32 calibre version has this same line that says: Calibre 7.65 - Brevetto 1915.
Now a lot of people look at that and assume that that's a Model of 1915.
It's actually not, it's actually a patent date.
Now the .32 calibre guns ... they're actually the Model of 1915/17, they were made a couple years later.
And there are a number of changes to the design.
For one thing this rear safety was removed, it was seen as redundant and unnecessary.
The spring buffer under the slide was removed, because in .32 ACP it really was unnecessary.
And this has led to speculation of people thinking that the 1915 was available in two models,
and at some point they decided to like retro-actively remove the safety.
In reality these are two distinctly separate pistols, the 9mm version and the 7.65 version.
So the serial numbers are here on the back of the slide and frame, and if you find a serial number under 15,300
that's going to be a 1915 in 9mm. These were all made in one consecutive run.
The 7.65 pistols started at approximately 16,000 and ran to almost 72,000.
So the significant majority of the guns were actually made in 7.65.
There were about 55,000, 56,000 of those made, compared to 15,000 of these Model 1915s.
So a little bit of potential confusion there, ... hopefully I can help to clear that up.
So ultimately these turned out to be pretty satisfactory pistols for the Italian military.
A bit large, they're a bit bulkier than they need to be,
and you can see that reflected in the fact that Beretta ended up making far more of the .32 calibre versions.
It turned out that for the sorts of uses that the Italians were using pistols for in the First World War
having the extra oomph of a 9mm cartridge wasn't really necessary, the .32 worked fine.
It was lighter, it was handier, it was cheaper. It was more practical for them in pretty much every way.
So, these did their job well, ... really they were a little more than was actually necessary,
and that's why there were relatively few of them produced.
Alright guys, so there you go, the Beretta 1915. Not to be confused with the 1915/17,
the 1915/19, the 1919, the 1921, the 1923, and so on.
We'll touch on some of these other guns in the development cycle later, but
I definitely wanted to take a look at this pretty nice condition, as far as they go, Beretta 1915.
... One of the main Italian service pistols in World War One, and something that we don't see very often.
Now if you'd like to own this one yourself, it'd make a really cool addition to any collection
for someone who's interested in Italian firearms, or the history of Beretta for example, the world's oldest gun maker.
This one of course is coming up for sale here. If you take a look at the description text below
you'll find a link to Rock Island's catalogue page on it,
where you can take a look at their pictures and description, and place a bid right there on-line.
Thanks for watching.
[ cc by sk cn2 ]