Hammer Guns
While cocked & locked carry has become "the" way to go, John Browning didn't see it that way - at least on his larger pistols (.38 and above) pointed toward the military market. His first .38 pistols didn't have safety locks (manual safeties). Neither did any of his .45 prototypes and Colt's .45 commercial model 1905. In fact he didn't add a manual safety to a .45 prototype until November, 1910, and that was because of insistence by the Army. A slightly modified pistol was adopted as the model 1911 on March 29, 1911 - only 5 months later.
It wasn't that Browning didn't know about manual safeties. His first commercial semi-automatic pistol, the FN model 1900 had one, as did all subsequent FN/Browning pistols made before the First World War. In this country manual safeties are found on Colt's Pocket (.32 & .380) and Vest Pocket (.25) models as well as the pre-Woodsman and Woodsman (.22LR).
In fact it should be noted that with the exception of the model 1911, FN/P-35 Hi Power and perhaps the VIZ-35, all of Browning's pistols with exposed hammers didn't have manual safeties, where all that had enclosed hammers or striker/firing pins did. The above mentioned FN pistols were finalized after Browning's death.
So it's obvious that JMB considered safety locks on exposed hammer pistols to be superfluous and unnecessary. Times have changed of course, but the history is interesting. So is the fact that between 1900 and 1910 (The last Browning/Colt design other then the pre-Woodsman) nothing happened to change the inventor's mind. You can be sure that if lowering-the-hammer accidents had been common - or at least publicized - it wouldn't have taken Colt long to have made some changes. As it was, they didn’t drop the last of the old 1903 period .38 pistols until 1929 when the Super 38 was introduced.