Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and today I have the exceptional privilege of
taking a look at the first functional
semi-automatic pistol ever designed.
And also the first semi-automatic pistol designed
from the ground up as a semi-automatic pistol,
instead of as a semi-automatic conversion
of a manually repeating pistol.
This is actually a 1896 pattern Dormus automatic pistol,
or Salvator-Dormus automatic pistol.
These were first patented back in 1891, in fact the first patent was July 11th 1891.
That was followed fairly quickly by a second patent on November 21st of 1891.
The next runner up for the award of first automatic pistol wasn't patented until
November 25th 1891. So ... this was designed by two guys named
Karl Salvator and Georg Dormus, and they take the prize for actually coming in first.
Now this is actually a delayed blowback pistol.
It's got a pretty weird delaying system, and pretty much everything you read about
this will say that it was actually a simple blowback, because it sure appears
that way. But when we look at it more carefully we'll realise that it
does actually have a delaying mechanism. It is fed by a five round Mannlicher
clip of 8mm Dormus ammunition. Not surprisingly proprietary ammo,
because there wasn't any other auto pistol ammo out there, because no one had
invented the auto pistol before. ... There's some other really interesting
features here. This is actually ... more of a modern pistol than you would
expect for 1891. Now in total just about 50 of these were made, the biggest batch
being 31 of them that were made in 1896 and 1897 for an Austrian military trial in 1897.
And that's when this one was made. This is serial number 23, and it actually
has an 1897 Austrian military acceptance mark on it.
And I think we need to just go in and take a closer look at this guy
and I'll show you all of its cool secrets.
So the Dormus is actually in some ways a more modern pistol than you would expect
for an 1891 design. Let's look at all of the controls, it is a single action gun
so we have an exposed hammer here. If you want to fire it, you have to manually cock the hammer.
We then have two levers here on the back. This top lever is the
safety, which is currently engaged. Now this safety allows me to pull the
trigger and drop the hammer, but the hammer stops right there.
This basically drops the hammer to a half-cock notch. It cannot impact the firing pin,
which is right there in front of it. Thus it renders the gun safe.
Now if I deactivate the safety and pull the trigger now, now the hammer goes all the
way down, and you can see it's going to hit our spring-loaded firing pin there,
and fire the gun. So that's what the safety does. Now the safety also acts as a bolt
hold-open (by the way you can see that it cams the ... hammer back when I engage it there),
if I have the safety engaged and I open the bolt, it will lock open. Now the bolt lever is this,
so that opens the bolt up and locks it in place. I can now load it with a five-round
Mannlicher style clip. Now as we know about Mannlicher clips, it's going to sit in there,
the clip will act as the feed lips for the system, and when you chamber the last
round the clip falls out the bottom.
Well, there is in fact an opening in the
bottom of the gun, so the clip is only five rounds, it's like this long, and what
happens is when you chamber the last round, that empty clip falls all of the way
down the grip and, ploop, out here. You could in fact leave this gate closed and
you could probably fire three clips before you had this thing totally full
and you weren't able to stuff in a fourth. In fact, at that point the spring
holding this closed isn't all that strong, you could probably just continue
to load clips in the top and when this grip was completely full of empty clips,
it would probably just force the bottom one to pop that gate open, and dump a
pile of clips at your feet. It's actually kind of a clever idea.
Now once the bolt is open, this bottom lever is our bolt release (I'm going to hold on to the handle
here to do this gently), I ... push this lever down, that releases the bolt,
which then closes, leaves the hammer cocked so I'm ready to fire. And then
this is our clip release, so if I do not want to fire all of the ammunition I
have in the gun (it's a little hard to see in there, but you can see the clip
latch down there slides over to the side when I push this button), so if I don't
want to fire the last rounds in the gun, what I do is lock the bolt open, hit that
release and the remaining cartridges in the clip will spit out the top.
Sights are pretty typical for this period but actually not terrible.
(A little hard to get the camera to focus on them there.)
The only markings on this pistol are the serial number, right there, number 23.
And this WN 97, which is an ... Austrian Army acceptance mark from 1897.
So this is one of the guns that was in the Austrian troop trials.
Now all of the literature out there about the Dormus (and by the way there isn't much),
it all describes it as being a simple blowback action, and it certainly seems
that way. If you handle this gun, when you pull this thing back there's no extra
resistance, ... it seems like a simple blowback pistol. However it came
to my attention that if you look at the patents, this is actually a delayed
blowback gun, and you have to do something kind of wacky to be able to
actually demonstrate that. What's going on here is that the trigger actually
interfaces with this lever, so the bolt is connected to this lever, the trigger has
a component that goes up, and when the trigger is pulled back (go ahead and drop
the ... so you have to have the safety off), when the trigger is pulled back - not the
hammer but when the trigger is back - it actually has this inclined wedge that
prevents the bolt from opening. So this gun is actually set up to use your own
trigger finger strength as the delay in opening. Now ... I can show that by
putting a rod down the barrel and I will hold the trigger down, and when I push on
this rod I can't get the barrel [bolt] to go back.
Now I can feel it pushing on the trigger here and I can close the bolt by pushing
the trigger backwards. That is actually how this gun is delayed. That's a really
unique system. I'm not aware of any other pistol that works that way, and honestly
for good reason. That's not a very good way to control the timing of when the gun opens.
But then again, this wasn't the best automatic pistol ever, this was just
the first automatic pistol ever. And it's perfectly reasonable to assume that it's going to have some
elements to it that aren't going to turn out to be the world's greatest ideas.
Now by 1897 the Austrian trials of this pistol were complete. It was turned down.
Ultimately Austria would adopt a 1907 pattern Roth-Steyr pistol.
It would adopt the Frommer Stop. And it would adopt the, well,
in 1911 or 1912 it would adopt the Steyr-Hahn. Until then they would go on simply using their,
well interestingly, their 1898 Rast & Gasser revolvers, which would have
been in direct competition with the Dormus here.
I should mention the calibre, it is 8mm Dormus. The projectile was I believe 5.1 grams which
is going to be like 125 grain, I believe. I have not been able to determine the
velocity of the cartridge, no idea. Given this very simplistic delaying system, I'm
sure it was a relatively low velocity, and I would expect this cartridge
to be basically on par with .32 ACP.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video. There is very little information
on the ... Salvator-Dormus pistol out there, of course, because there very few of these left.
And it was a very cool opportunity to be able to take a close look at this one, and bring it to you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video, hopefully you learned something cool,
a new appreciation for Karl Salvator and Georg Dormus.
If you enjoy this sort of material, please do consider checking out my Patreon account.
It's my supporters there who make it possible for me to travel about and track down
guns like this to bring to you guys.
Thanks for watching.