Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at a Powell Cartridge Indicator, or a "Cartridge Counter" Luger.
This was a pattern of the Luger that was tested by the US military in 1904
and 1905. It is in fact the first ... batch of US test Lugers in 9mm.
So it's a very cool gun, both in Luger history and in American military history.
And this is I think about the nicest one still in existence.
There were very few of these originally made.
So the story of US testing of the Luger begins in 1901 when
the US government got two very early old model Lugers in 7.65mm ... presented
to them to do some testing. And they did a little bit of shooting with them
and went, "You know, this thing actually might have some real potential."
This is 1901, there's not much else out there in terms of really reliable military,
legitimately military style ... semi-auto handguns, so.
These things looked like they might go somewhere. So the US government allocates $15,000 and buys
1,000 7.65mm old model Lugers to do some testing on. Those arrive later in 1901, and they're tested in 1901 and 1902.
And the US military comes back, largely the cavalry service, and they have a bunch of criticisms and
complaints about the pistol on a variety of subjects, but in particular they don't like the small calibre.
They don't like this 7.65mm thing.
So they discuss this with Luger and Georg Luger comes back and his response is to create the 9mm cartridge.
It was in fact primarily US, and also British, complaints about the small calibre
that actually prompted development of 9x19mm.
So in 1903 Luger comes back and actually hand delivers three new trial Luger pistols,
(they have three different barrel lengths), in this brand new 9mm cartridge to the US military,
like, "How about this? ... You know, you wanted it bigger and now I've made it bigger."
He's basically made it as big as he can get within the confines of the original grip frame.
So ... the 7.65 was this necked case and he's blown it out to pretty much straight wall.
It is a relatively high pressure cartridge by the standards of 1903 for a semi-auto pistol.
And it really will go on to prove to be an extremely efficient and well-designed round,
because of course it's still the most popular, by a long shot, military handgun cartridge today.
Anyway, Luger delivers three of them. The US goes, "Well. Maybe. Maybe we got something going there."
And what the US ends up doing is making this deal to swap 50 of the 7.65 calibre guns it already has
for 50 of these new 9mm Lugers. They're not willing to buy new ones, but you know, we'll do a trade with you.
However, there was a caveat that they need to include a cartridge counter grip.
This was designed by a guy named Graham Powell, who was actually one of the early proponents of the Luger in the US.
He wrote a really pretty nice article about the pistol for American Machinist magazine in 1901.
That caught Luger's attention. I haven't been able to find exactly what his relationship was to the military,
but he came up with this idea for a see-through grip window so you could just look at the gun
and tell how much ammunition you still had in it.
And the US dictated that their 50 nine millimeters needed to have those.
Well, development of these pistols took a little bit longer than anyone had anticipated,
and they wouldn't show up until the middle of 1904.
And this is a combination of some issues making and fitting these cartridge counter grips,
but probably also ... the final developmental stages of the 9mm cartridge and pistol.
So, they had to tweak the timing of the gun just a little bit so it ran properly on 9mm and that took some time,
and these are kind of all toolroom production guns, these 50 cartridge counter pieces.
So before I tell you how the trials went with them although, spoiler, we have the 1911 instead of the Luger.
But first let's take a look at ... what this actually does.
Well, it's not exactly rocket science to get the idea that if you cut a slot in the grip
you can see how many cartridges are still in it, but it does make for a cool and visually distinctive gun.
And the way they did this was really just cut a slot in the grip panel,
because the frame itself underneath is open in that area, and then half of that was filled with a little plate, a nickel plate,
with numbers that correspond to how many cartridges are still left in the magazine.
There is a tab on the magazine that indicates here, I'll show you that in a moment.
The fact that it's yellow is because the open slot was filled with a piece of celluloid,
and over time that oxidises and turns yellow, just like old film. So, originally, this would have been perfectly clear,
and it's only with the passage of time that it has inevitably turned yellow on all of them.
The magazine with this pistol (and by the way, originally each of these was issued with two of these magazines),
and they are slightly special magazines because they have this little screw attached to the follower.
And that's your indicator that tells you how many cartridges are left in the magazine.
So it's a special follower, and then they also put this little divot in the back of the magazine body.
That doesn't actually do anything mechanically functional for the gun.
That is simply there so that you can't reassemble the magazine with a standard follower,
because there's a matching notch in this special follower.
So you don't want someone taking your special cartridge counter magazine
and basically making it useless by getting rid of the special follower.
You'll notice at the bottom it has this wooden base plate with the central little metal bits.
That's typical for these very, very early Lugers. You'll find it primarily on the really early Swiss guns.
So that's a cool distinctive feature as well.
I can demonstrate this with a couple of snap caps here.
Put three of these guys into the magazine.
So you can see that our little follower pointer here has dropped down,
and when I go ahead and load that magazine you can see my little indicator now says I have 3 rounds in the magazine.
Take one out, now I have two rounds in the magazine and so on.
This would have been easier to see when this cellulose plate was actually clear,
as opposed to now in its time yellowed condition.
There were a total of 50 of these that were manufactured and sent to the US.
They run in a discrete serial number range from 22,401 to [22,450].
You'll find that of course on the frame,
on the barrel,
and then on a variety of other small parts.
Because this is so early some of those small parts actually have three digit numbers on them, the last three digits. While some have two.
The back of the toggle here is another example of a part with a three digit number.
For the Luger enthusiast I will point out that these have the heavier version of the 9mm barrel,
what's typically called a fat barrel variant. This was an early version of the barrel before they realised,
"You know, we can make it a little bit thinner, save some weight on the gun."
And they were of course made with a US crest on the top of the chamber.
... That applies to both US trials guns as well as commercial sale guns meant for the US.
But it's pretty cool, we don't actually really typically see that on American firearms.
And of course the toggle has a DWM script logo on it, because of course it was DWM that made it.
Everything else on there is simply very early old pattern Luger. So you've got the dished out toggles.
We have a grip safety. We have no shoulder stock lug.
It's rather cool that this example also comes with a holster.
This looks like kind of a bit of a cheesy, simplistic holster.
And that's because these were actually manufactured at the Rock Island Arsenal by the US.
These were not supplied with the guns, so it's just a very simple flap holster.
Not much on it with the exception of a US Ordnance Department stamp,
right up there.
These are not unique to the cartridge counter guns, these were made and issued to all of those first 1,000
guns that were tested in 7.65 calibre.
By 1905 the US had finished testing the cartridge counter guns as much as they were going to test them, and they came back negative again.
And again the reason was calibre. The increase to 9mm was nice, but it wasn't good enough.
In 1904 the US military had run what are called the Thompson-LaGarde tests, run by a Captain Thompson and a Colonel LaGarde,
on cartridge lethality. And fortunately we have more scientific methods today, but what they did was
take a whole bunch of different pistols and a bunch of livestock and some human cadavers and shot them up.
And they would check to see like how many bullets does it take to kill a cow, or a horse.
And the conclusion that they came to was we needed a .45, we shouldn't adopt anything less than .45 calibre.
And that was kind of the death knell for the 9mm Luger in American trials.
There would be a new hand gun testing commission that ... was put together in 1907,
... well, that's where the 1911 originated was testing from 1907 onward. Luger would participate in those trials as well.
He would be convinced to build a .45 calibre version of the Luger, that's a story for an entirely separate video.
I will add one last little aside that interestingly in like 1906, he made one last effort to try and interest the US
in 9mm by developing a duplex cartridge. Where he actually had two truncated conical bullets stuffed,
you know, ... the nose of one into the tail of the other into a single 9mm casing.
They had different bullet weights, the two bullets had different weights, so that they would
definitely always separate and fly on independent trajectories after being fired. Total weight of 137 grains.
Interesting idea, but he wasn't able to to garner any military interest in that. But it could have been really interesting if he had.
Anyway, that is the story of the US look at the 9mm Luger, and in particular the cartridge counter variation that was briefly tested.
Now you may be wondering how did a gun this magnificently pristine survive
for, what would it be, 114 years in this kind of condition. Well the story there is even cool too.
After the testing was done, the Springfield Armory ended up with 24 of these guns left over and they really didn't need them.
And what do you do with that sort of thing back in the day? Well, they sold them off to employees.
In the 1920s they had a bunch of excess inventory lying around of stuff like this, that you know
they'd tested out, or bought in small batches, and they just offered it to employees.
Like if you wanted it we'll sell it to you, allegedly as cheap as like 10 bucks for a pistol.
And so one of the employees bought this,
along with apparently like an officer's model trapdoor carbine, kind of cool. And didn't ever use them.
He just kept them in a box for like 50 years, and then I believe it was his grandson
inherited them, found them, and brought them to sell. And that's when they appeared on the collectors market.
So that's how something like this ... survives in this sort of perfect, well, not perfect, but very, very nice condition.
So it does happen from time to time.
If you'd like to see more details on this they have a big write-up on it, not surprisingly,
in Rock Island's most recent auction catalogue, so you can check it out there.
In the description below I have links to Rock Island's Instagram page and their YouTube channel.
There's a bunch of other cool stuff there that you should definitely take a look at.
Thanks for watching.