[ M1923 Thompson Autorifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company where we are taking a look at
one of the rifles that the United States tested in 1924.
This was going to, hopefully for the designer,
be adopted as the new US military service rifle.
Fortunately for the US military it was not adopted.
This is a 1923 pattern Thompson Autorifle - manufactured by Colt,
we'll get to why in just a moment.
Now this idea was first developed around 1920 / 1921,
kind of at the same time as Thompson was developing the Thompson submachine gun.
I should actually start with a little bit of background on General John Thompson.
Everyone knows about the Thompson submachine gun,
but Thompson didn't just kind of come out of anywhere.
Before he started designing guns,
Thompson had been in charge of US Ordnance Small Arms
and was instrumental in the adoption of the 1903 Springfield rifle.
Well, after that he retired, and as soon as he retired he started designing guns.
In fact part of the reason for his retirement was so that he could start designing guns
to try and have them adopted by the US military.
Now the Thompson submachine gun is the one that ended up
being long term successful and recognised.
But I think at the time he probably had bigger hopes on this particular rifle,
because in the 1920s the US ... military started kind of seriously looking at self-loading rifles.
And these were tested in 1920 / 1921, and they were found to have sufficient promise
that a batch of ... 25 of them was ordered for production
to actually do serious testing in 1924.
And this would end up competing directly against the 1924 pattern Garand rifle,
which was actually at that point a primer-actuated gun.
So how did it go? Not so well.
Let's take a look at the rifle first, and then I'll tell you what ended up happening to it.
There were a couple of different versions of the Thompson rifle that were tested.
In the initial tests there were basically two.
There was an infantry rifle version with a light barrel
and a fixed 5-round internal Mauser-type magazine.
And then there was a light machine gun version, which was, well, intended to be a light machine gun.
It had a heavier barrel, and it used detachable, 20 round, box magazines.
Now this one has been fitted with what looks like a 5 round, maybe an 8 round magazine.
And this is kind of an interesting example in that
it has the detachable magazine, but it also has the light infantry-profile barrel.
So I don't know exactly what the provenance of this one is.
It is serial number 25, it was one of the guns that was made for this
early batch of testing, pattern of 1923.
The magazine here is a BAR magazine that has had
these two plates tack welded onto the side so that it fits the magazine well there.
And I have to say this is actually really pretty well done, it fits in nice and smoothly.
We have a magazine release button here that pops it out nicely.
... That feels like the best engineered part of the whole gun.
Now mechanically, this is built on the same principle as the Thompson submachine gun.
This was the Blish principle, based on a patent by guy named Blish in 1915.
And his idea, his theory, was that two surfaces,
like two pieces of material that ... sit against each other at an angle,
if you put them under sufficient pressure, they will stick together.
And they won't start to move, to slide against each other, until pressure actually drops.
So the idea was at a certain point your coefficient of friction climbs non-linearly.
So the concept was if you have, say, a brass block and a steel set of locking lugs like this,
so you can see how they are camming against each other, the concept is
as long as the bullet is in the bore (which is way down here),
the pressure will be high enough that there will be no movement between these two parts.
And then when the bullet leaves the bore, pressure will start to drop,
and only then will these be able to move against each other, and the bolt start to open.
Now this doesn't actually work in practice.
The Blish principle isn't real, it doesn't actually work that way.
And the way that this actually operates,
because it has to actually work somehow, physics don't lie,
it actually works as a delayed blowback system.
So in reality, this bolt handle starts to unlock as soon as ... you fire the cartridge.
As soon as any pressure starts to develop in the chamber, this is going to start to open.
However it opens at a severe mechanical disadvantage.
So if you look at this channel that the bolt handle runs in,
and by the way, the bolt handle itself here is polished and hardened,
and this really is sort of your locking surface.
... These two pieces are operating under extremely high pressure on each other.
What happens is this is actually just slightly angled backwards.
So when you push on it in this direction,
most of your force ... is absorbed by this piece, most of it's just pushing back,
but you have a little teeny vector of force pushing vertically.
And that's what starts to open the bolt handle.
Now on top of that, and probably a less significant factor,
is this recoil spring inside here, which is pushing on this brass plug.
So ... because we have an angled surface here and an angled surface on the plug,
as this bolt handle starts to rise it pushes this plug backwards.
And it takes a little more force to do that.
So it's harder to open this with that plug and spring
than it would be to open this if there weren't a spring in it.
So when you fire this is going to move up slowly, but not slowly enough.
And eventually it's going to get up to here, and then things get really easy.
And now pushing backwards on the bolt is going to throw this back like so.
The bolt comes slinging back like this, the spring is fully compressed,
it hits the back of the receiver right there, it's going to eject the cartridge.
And it ejects that cartridge ... at really high velocity.
The story from the testing is that these things would eject like 30 feet,
and cases would occasionally stick in a wooden board that was in line of their travel.
So this was really zinging them out there,
keep in mind this is basically a delayed blowback .30-06.
Now Thompson's idea was that the locking lugs,
which you can see right there on the side of the bolt,
those have matching recesses inside here,
his idea was that those locking lugs would actually be absorbing a lot of the force of firing.
In reality? Maybe not so much.
Because really I think what's absorbing the force of firing is this surface here
that's camming against the bolt handle.
At any rate, they did enough preliminary testing
to make sure that the gun actually did technically work,
it didn't just explode when they fired it.
So, ... they thought they were designing this based on the Blish principle.
In reality, they were ... designing it based on the mechanical disadvantage
of this very slightly angled track for the bolt handle.
By the way, there is a ... bolt hold open here, just like a submachine gun.
Lock this thing in its notch there, and it will stay open
so that you could reload with a stripper clip, if you wanted to.
Remember this receiver is the same as the receiver for the fixed-magazine guns,
it's just the mag well has been added to the trigger guard assembly down here.
So you've got a stripper clip guide if you want to use it, or just leave the gun locked open.
Then we can close it like so.
You'll notice it says "Firing Position" there on that brass plug.
That doesn't make a lot of sense until you engage the safety,
which is this lever and (I have to have it fired to do that)
once I engage the safety, the top of the safety says "Safe Position".
So now it makes sense, that tells you the safety is engaged.
This also covers up this big open slot in the back of the action, which would be a good thing.
We can open that.
And that's just a rotating sleeve inside there.
So on the receiver here we have that very recognisable
Thompson's signature in a bullet trademark. You'll find that on the submachine guns as well.
And then it is the Thompson Autorifle, calibre .30, Model of 1923.
This is serial number 25.
And it was manufactured by Colt (the Colt), for the Auto-Ordnance Company of New York.
Now you might wonder why Colt?
And the answer is Thompson thought that having the Colt name associated with his gun
would give him a leg-up in the military trials, like,
"Hey, this is a respected company. Colt has worked with the US military for decades,
and whatever they're bringing to the table is really ... going to be worth looking at."
And Thompson may well have been right, because this rifle lasted in trials
I think a lot longer than it should have, by all rights.
So maybe not a bad idea there.
There are some additional markings on the side of the receiver,
and these are just patent dates for various elements of the design.
That top one there, 1915, that very first one, top left, is the Blish patent.
And then the rest of those I believe are Thompson's own patents.
He was assisted in this project by a couple of guys,
in particular a guy named Theodore Eickhoff, and a guy named Oscar Payne.
So this wasn't just a single-handed project of John Thompson's.
Normally at this point we would go ahead and disassemble the rifle,
but the disassembly procedure for this thing is tricky.
And to be honest I'm not really willing to do it on a rifle that is
in really quite nice condition like this, and that is this rare and valuable.
There are very few of these things out there. But I can tell you how it's supposed to happen.
So, we have this lug here, and you'll notice there's a little "D" and an arrow, and that's disassemble.
And an "R" and an arrow, which is reassemble.
So what you do is you actually push this forward, like that.
That unlocks the thing, and then this rear section of the receiver ...
(zoom out a little bit to get it all),
this whole thing is going to rotate clockwise, like 30-45 degrees, somewhere in there.
If we look right here
you can actually see the grooves, ... basically the ... interrupted thread
that attaches this rear piece of the receiver to this front piece of the receiver.
Now what makes this doubly tricky
is you have to have the bolt handle up here in order to do that.
So normally if you're going to disassemble a rifle, you want to have the bolt all the way forward
so that you've got the mainspring relaxed as much as possible,
so that it doesn't try and throw parts of the gun across the room.
Well, with this you can't actually do the disassembly
unless you've got the bolt handle back here.
Which means already, automatically, you're putting a lot more force on this thing.
Now at this point you would then start to rotate this rear section,
and you can see I can get it going there, like so.
But I am not going to fully disengage that because I don't want this
to go flying back into the stock, or off the gun, that makes me a bit nervous.
However, you can see the interrupted thread there of this rear piece that wants to come off.
And there we go, now it's back locked in position.
I push this lug ... rearward, ... that locks back into position.
And that is a little tab that prevents this section from rotating at all.
Thompson had a relationship going with the Lyman Company for sights on the submachine gun,
and he went ahead and used a Lyman sight on this rifle as well.
This is a substantially adjustable, commercial, basically target rifle sight setup.
Had this gone into military service, that absolutely would have been changed to something.
Personally, I think it's a little awkward and ugly looking on this rifle.
But it was probably cheaper than trying to design his own sight,
especially for what is essentially a prototype gun.
I also want to point out that in addition to the little safety lever
and the brass piece telling you if the gun is in safe or fire,
the rear cap of the receiver also does.
So it says "Firing Position" right there, and if we engage the safety
up here, now we're in "Safe Position".
No one is ever really going to see that very well, but I suppose
it does serve as a good reference point if you're not sure how to operate the rifle.
So the testing didn't go so well, but because of the Colt and the Thompson names
this thing would stick around in trials for almost a full decade.
It wouldn't be until 1929 that the Thomson Autorifle
finally went away and would not come back.
So there was testing in '24 and '25 when it competed against the Garand,
and it came up second best.
But they cut Thompson some slack and said,
"You've got some issues with this,
go back to the drawing board and let's see if you can improve it."
Really the issues are it's long, it's heavy, it's poorly balanced,
it's difficult - kind of awkward to disassemble.
And maybe worst of all it requires oiled cartridges, it extracts under very high pressure.
It really spits cases out.
These were repeated, continuous problems with this design throughout all of its service.
So it was allegedly updated a bit, but not successfully so.
It was tested again in '26 and '27.
Finally the last test was in 1929 when they put one of these into an endurance test.
It went through 1,106 rounds and then the bolt broke.
And at that point Thompson pulled it from the test,
and never resubmitted a new example.
So it's really kind of obvious when you handle this rifle that it's not ideal.
It ... feels longer than it really is, because the length of pull is actually kind of short.
The trigger's a little bit closer to the butt plate than it ought to be.
Which I suspect is because the thing was already so long out here
that they were trying to cut the overall length if they could.
The receiver is about two inches longer ... than a comparable other rifle.
And all this weight is just way out here at the front so it doesn't handle very well.
And then of course that high-pressure extraction led to reliability issues,
it led to durability issues.
This just wasn't a nice, well put together, rifle.
And probably the nail in the coffin was the oil pads required to keep the thing running.
So in 1929 it finally went away.
Thompson would end up with ... a legacy for the Thompson submachine gun.
And perhaps it's best for all involved that most people
have pretty much forgotten about the Thompson Autorifle.
If you would like to see Rock Island's ... high-res pictures, their description,
their price estimate, or just watch this thing go up to auction and see what it sells for,
you can do that through their catalogue page.
If you take a look at the description text below,
you'll find a link to my website, ForgottenWeapons.com.
And from there you can link to Rock Island's catalogue page,
and see everything you might want to know about this guy.
Thanks for watching.