Remington Model 740 Autoloading Rifle
A New Autoloading Rifle
A report on the new Remington Model 740 .autoloading rifle from Maj. Gen. J. S. Hatcher, USA (Ret’ d), and Elmer Keith
General Hatcher says:
Now for the first time the hunter has available to him a gas-operated semiautomatic in .30-’06 caliber-the same sort of rifle that our doughboys used with such success in World War II and in Korea. This interesting newcomer to the hunting field is made by Remington, and is called the Model 740 Woodsmaster Autoloader.
Of course, there have been many semi-automatic hunting rifles on the market before, but none in the class of this new Remington. Perhaps the first was the Winchester Model 1905 Self-Loader, made for the low-powered .35 Winchester Self-Loading cartridge and the .32 Winchester Self-Loading cartridge. These were straight blowback guns, with a heavy inertia weight in the hollow forearm to keep the breech from opening too fast. They were poorly balanced, and too low in power to be really satisfactory even for deer. 
They were followed by the more powerful Model 1907, for the .351 Winchester Self-Loading, and the Model 1910 for the .401 Winchester Self-Loading cartridges. The last two were adequate in power for deer, but as they had to have a bigger inertia weight, they were even more unbalanced than the Model 1905, which was discontinued in 1920. The Model 1910 lasted until 1936. The Model 1907 is still made, principally as a police weapon.
The short-lived Standard
In 1910, the Standard Automatic, made by a firm in Wilmington, Delaware, appeared on the market. It was made for the .25 Remington, the .30 Remington, the .32 Remington, and the .35 Remington. The first three were good deer cartridges; the .35 was a bit more powerful, but not in the class of the .30-’06. The Standard rifle was a fixed barrel, gas-operated semi-automatic, which could also be used as a hand-operated slide-action job when desired by shutting off the gas system.