Hi guys
Thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com
I'm Ian and today we're going to take a look at the question of:
"What was the first automatic pistol?"
Now
any time you you look at any question of "what was the first... *blank*?"
The answers are gonna get kinda fractal
in that the more detailed you get
and the closer you look and the more you study
The grey-er everything gets,
because you get more and more questions
and things become less clear.
So for example
The first commercially successful
Semi-auto pistol is...
almost universally considered to be the
The C-93 Borchardt
About 3,000 were made
First developed, first introduced in 1893
That's... There's really no doubt about that
But...
What if you want to consider: "Well maybe what about guns that weren't commercially successful?"
'Cause there were a selection of them
The closer you look... Now...
You have to start considering
Do you... What are your standards?
Is this... Does this need to be a gun that was put into serial production?
Maybe one that was offered for commercial sale,
but wasn't sold in substantial numbers?
In which case the question is "What numbers are considered 'substantial'"?
Uhm...
Would you consider a gun that was submitted to military trials
and did decently, or did badly
or what about a gun that wasn't submitted?
And ultimately you can get all the way down to this very granular level of:
"Well this guy handmade this... thing
that was allegedly semi-auto
does that count?"
So if you ask me "What is the first automatic pistol?"
"Not necessarily commercially successful, just the first one that was built."
I'm going to ignore handmade one-off prototypes
Because ultimately there's no way to really track down all of them and figure out
whose was the first
and then there really is a question of...
"does this thing really actually work?"
Maybe it was luck. Maybe your idea was good, but your prototype was bad.
There are a lot of variables there
I would much rather look at ones... Set the standard at
Making five or ten of them in series
Like to the point they have serial numbers on them.
I think that's a pretty decent standard
And maybe they didn't
pass military trials, or sell commercially
and I wouldn't necessarily expect that, because they're very early guns
Even if they work right they're going to be complex, they're gonna be heavy, they're gonna be expensive,
because they're really bleeding edge technology
So I don't expect the first one to have been
commercially or militarily successful
I just wanna know if it actually worked
Now when we get to that level
We end up with
two main competitors for the title of "first automatic pistol"
One of them is the Salvator-Dormus
And the other is the Schönberger-Laumann
Now it's actually... Or at least that's what you would generally read
In actual fact it's not the "Schönberger-Laumann", it's just the "Laumann"
We have two of the Schönberger-Laumann right here
and they're actually a pistol that comes a couple years later
The Schönberger-Laumann is an 1894 gun
So
actually these Schönberger-Laumann are after the Borchardt
Now we have a Dormus pistol here
A Salvator-Dormus
That particular gun was made in 1896
It's not the first iteration of the Salvator-Dormus
But
When we look at what was the first
Salvator-Dormus remains one of our legit contenders
and the other
is the Laumann automatic pistol
Now unfortunately I don't have a Laumann here to show you
but I do have some pictures of one
What we have here is a Laumann manually repeating pistol
Because
before we had semi-autos
we had manual ring trigger activated repeating pistols
The first of which, the kind of iconic one that people don't usually associate with this sorta stuff
is the volcanic which was invented back in the 1850s
Now in Austria
people in the 1880s... late 1870s into the 1880s
were building these sorts of manual repeating pistols
generally activated by ring triggers
and those are the guns that developed into semi-autos
People realised that "Hey, you know...
if we turn this into like a blowback action
this manual pistol can become a self-loading pistol."
and that's pretty much what happened with the Laumann here
This is a manual Laumann dating to 1888
and by 1891
Laumann had filed a patent for a semi-auto version of his gun
Now within a couple years of that
1892, his gun was actually built
By 1894 he was working with Schönberger and they were making improved versions which are these
So the patent date on the semi-auto Laumann
is November 25, 1891
and that's an Austrian patent filed in Vienna
I'm going with Austrian patents here, because that's where these inventors were pretty much all located
and that would have been the first place they patented their guns
You'll find these patents in other countries like the United States
typically with later patent dates
because either they were filed later, after the fact
or they just took a long time to process through
You have to be careful to look at patent application dates
not patent granting dates in this case
So November 25, 1891 is our current contender, that's the Laumann
However if we start looking at Dormus patents
what we find
is that the Salvator Dormus was also patented in 1891
It was also patented in November 1891
It was in fact patented on November 21st, 1891
So
as I see it, the title of "first automatic pistol"
Goes to the Salvator-Dormus
by four days
Really pretty cool it was that close to the wire
What this practically means is that there were a bunch of guys in Vienna and in Austria
who were working pretty hard on this problem of self-loading pistols
that was really the nexus of development of early semi-autos
Some into Germany as well, but primarily in Austria
If you're interested in this subject in more depth
I would strongly recommend purchasing this book by Mötz and Schuy
It is in german only, and it is an expensive book
but it is a fantastically detailed book
that will get into all sorts of minutiae about
not just the early semi-auto pistols
also some of the later semi-auto pistols that are actually well developed
and a bunch of information on some of these manual pistols
like this Laumann and this Bittner
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video
I think we have an interesting take here, being able to actually look at all these examples
We'll be doing some videos on these guns
individually and independently to get a closer look at them
so make sure to tune back in for that
And if you really enjoy this sorta content and would like to support the channel
Please consider dropping in on my Patreon page
and signing up there to help support
That's really what allows me to
travel about and find guns like these to make videos for you guys
Thanks for watching