[ The Guns of John Pedersen ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House
because they have all sorts of really cool guns for sale here.
And I thought with access to the variety that they have here, what we ought to do
is take a look at the whole collection, or almost the whole collection,
of guns made by one of America's kind of
... most productive but least appreciated gun designers, that being John Pedersen.
If you want to get an idea for how skilled John Pedersen was,
well, you could talk to someone like John Moses Browning, who actually at one point
described Pedersen as the most talented gun designer in the world.
That's published in Julian Hatcher's book, and when Hatcher pressed him for details, saying basically,
"Aren't you the greatest gun designer in the world?"
Browning's reply was that his career was mostly behind him at that point,
but Pedersen's all lay in front of him,
and Pedersen had the potential to do more than Browning ever had.
So clearly getting the respect of someone like Browning
should tell you that Pedersen was quite the accomplished designer and engineer.
Pedersen was born in 1881, and his long-term career connection was with the Remington Company.
He worked almost exclusively with Remington.
Almost all of his designs were produced by Remington,
it was a very fruitful ... partnership for both the man and the company.
So one of the first designs that Pedersen put his mind to,
he started working on in 1907 for Remington.
And it was this, it was originally called the Model 1909.
Later ... they changed that to the designation Model 12,
which is what it's more typically known as.
It's a little pump action .22, there's a bolt release under the frame here.
Very simple, gallery rifle, kid's rifle, plinking rifle.
They were cheap, they were accessible, and they were very popular.
About 832,000 of these rifles were sold.
And while it may not be a particularly glamorous gun,
it's hard to turn your nose up at that kind of production number.
And that's the sort of thing that set Pedersen in a very high profile at Remington,
is being able to design popular guns like that.
So hot on the heels of his success with his pump-action .22
Pedersen went on to design a centrefire pump-action rifle for Remington.
They were trying to put together something that could compete with the Winchester Model 1894.
And given how popular the .22 had been,
they went ahead and tried their hand at a pump-action centrefire rifle.
This was also Pedersen's design.
Initially these were manufactured in the new line of Remington self-loading cartridges,
the .25, .30, .32 and .35 Remington.
Just a couple years later they also introduced a version which they called the Model 14-1/2,
which was in a ... couple of pistol calibres.
This particular one is in .44 Remington, or .44-40 Winchester centrefire.
And basically the same thing, but adapted to a pistol cartridge.
So, we again have, in this case we have a bolt release on the bolt, pump-action design.
The rifle calibre versions of this had a rather innovative spiral twist to the magazine tube,
which it looks neat, but more importantly it has the effect of preventing
the tip of one bullet from contacting the primer of the cartridge in front of it.
Which is really important, you don't want recoil to
detonate all the cartridges in your tube magazine.
That was another Pedersen innovation.
This was also a very popular rifle, although not on the scale of the .22 calibre version.
So the Model 14s first went on the market in 1913, and they sold into the mid-1930s.
Total of about 125,000 of them manufactured and sold, again that's a lot of guns.
That's a very profitable design, well done for Pedersen.
So the next one we'll take a look at is one of Pedersen's very few handgun designs.
This is the Model 51. It has got some unfortunate press and attention in the last couple of years
when Remington made an ill-fated attempt to try and reintroduce it
with a different design, which didn't go well.
The original guns were actually fairly popular,
they are very compact, very nice, .380 calibre pistols.
Just a small number were made in .32.
This is in fact a .32 calibre one, which makes it particularly desirable.
And they had a very interesting delayed blowback sort of breech mechanism.
The idea here was that Pedersen had to avoid patents by people like John Browning
on other mechanisms for locking the breech of a handgun.
So he came up with this design, started working on it in 1913.
They went into production right after World War [One], 1918 or 1919.
And they were in full-scale production into the late 1920s,
and they were being sold into the 1930s.
In total, about 65,000 of these pistols were made.
They are still popular today, they are refined, very nice guns.
Now during the war Pedersen also
took the work he was doing on this pistol and adapted it to .45 ACP.
The M53, or Model 53 pistol, which was tested by the US Army.
Frankly, if it had been about 10 years earlier and in time for the major US pistol trials,
it probably could have beaten the 1911.
They were very good pistols by all reports.
But by 1917 when ... Pedersen actually was able to finish development
and submit one to the Army for testing,
they just weren't better enough than the 1911 to be worth changing over all of the Army's pistols.
So ultimately only a few prototypes of the M53 were made.
One of them survives in the Remington museum, and I think that's about the only one.
There may be one or two others around, but unfortunately
that's the one gun we don't have an example of in front of us here.
So the gun, or rather the device, that Pedersen is probably best recognised for today is this.
It doesn't look much like a gun, because it's not actually a self-contained gun,
this is a Pedersen Device.
And it was going to be the Allied secret weapon in World War One
for the spring offensive of 1919 to really hammer the German forces ... to final Allied victory.
Pedersen came up with this idea ... in 1915, worked on it for a while.
1917 he submitted it to the Ordnance Department and they liked the idea.
And the idea was this would replace the bolt in a 1903 Springfield rifle.
It would convert it from a bolt-action large calibre rifle
into a semi-automatic, straight blowback, pistol calibre,
well not really carbine, because it had a full length barrel, but a pistol calibre semi-auto rifle.
The magazines were detachable, they held 40 rounds of a little straight-walled pistol cartridge.
So it was a .30 calibre pistol cartridge.
Basically identical to what became the 7.65mm French pistol cartridge.
Stronger than the .32 Auto, weaker than 9mm, kind of in that range.
The plan was to make 500,000 of these,
supply them to a whole ton of Allied infantry.
So that they could basically walk across no man's land firing from the hip,
and deliver a huge volume of fire, far superior to what they could get with a bolt action rifle.
So ultimately, like I said, the plan was to use these in the spring offensive of 1919.
Well the war ended in 1918, and that left them kind of not really needed.
About 65,000 had already been made at that point,
those were all put in storage for a number of years.
They did some testing on them in the 1920s, and the Army came to the conclusion
that they were ... obsolete, they weren't all that practical.
And they decided to just destroy them all, because it was too expensive
to pay for warehousing for something that they didn't anticipate ever using.
A very small number of these survive, probably 100 or less.
And that's pretty much solely through people who basically stole them.
Thought they were interesting, and pocketed one or two here and there.
It's a good thing they did, otherwise we wouldn't have any of them left today.
But as far as the military prospects of the Pedersen Device, they just disappeared.
So, we'll move on to Pedersen's other rifle projects.
Into the 1920s John Pedersen took his contacts with the Ordnance Department from World War One
and his growing expertise in firearms design,
and made a really strong attempt, he came very close to success,
at developing the first semi-automatic US service rifle.
This was the Pedersen rifle, and it was a toggle locked rifle ... in some ways much like a Luger.
It's delayed blowback, and the idea is that force on the breech here
acts on a series of very finely machined cams,
breaks this toggle up and open, ... it extracts the spent case, chambers a new one.
He also designed the cartridge that this rifle used, the .276 Pedersen.
... Had it not been for logistical concerns, it was definitely a superior cartridge to .30-06.
It's frankly very close to some of the intermediate cartridges
that are starting to gain popularity again today.
At the time, however, the US Army didn't have a lot of money,
and it did have an awful lot of .30-06 in storage.
And they didn't want to have to replace all that ammunition,
or deal with having rifles and machine guns in different calibres.
So the .276 Pedersen cartridge got scrapped
around the same time that the M1 Garand, or rather Garand's self-loading rifle
which would become adopted as the M1, won out in Army tests.
The Pedersen rifle had a few problems to it. The one that kind of was particularly
concerning to the Ordnance Department was that the Pedersen rifle,
because it was delayed blowback and had a relatively high extraction pressure,
it needed to use cartridges that were lubricated.
Pedersen had come up with this very clever and very effective method
of coating his cartridges with a hard wax solution.
Frankly it's hard to even tell
when you're handling the cartridges at room temperature that they are lubricated.
But that wax was enough to ensure proper extraction.
This probably wouldn't have created any serious reliability or production concerns,
but the Ordnance Department was leery of it anyway.
And for that, and a few other relatively minor reasons,
they ended up choosing the Garand rifle to be the first US [semi-auto] service rifle.
So at that point Pedersen took his design to the UK.
He formed a ... licence agreement with the Vickers Company.
Vickers made about 200 or 250 Pedersen rifles and carbines, of which this is an example.
And Pedersen attempted to market those around the world to other militaries.
He was unsuccessful ultimately.
However, he made one last-ditch attempt after the M1 had been accepted.
In the ... early 1940s, when World War Two was already underway,
he actually made a very small run of what he called "GX" and "GY" rifles.
This is a GY, and it's basically a Pedersen manufactured copy of the M1 Garand.
It uses the same rotating bolt mechanism, the same long-stroke gas piston.
Extremely small numbers of these were made,
... almost certainly less than 20, perhaps fewer than that.
Very rare to even see these, but we happen to have one here at the auction,
which is actually going up for sale, coming up shortly.
... Now Pedersen's hope with this rifle was that
... he thought he had put some improvements in it over the M1, and in a few ways he had.
In a few ways I think it's actually inferior to the M1.
But he was hoping to get a contract to manufacture these,
either alongside, or in replacement of, the M1 Garand.
That also didn't work out for him.
Unfortunately, while Pedersen had a lot of very successful commercial guns,
his military ... track record wasn't quite so great.
Which is exemplified by the last of the ... military guns
that he was really involved in, the M1 carbine.
Pedersen didn't actually have a hand in the design of the M1 carbine,
that happened at the Winchester Company largely.
But what he did do was get together with the Irwin family and form
a gun manufacturing company to produce guns for the US war effort during World War Two.
He had been hoping ...
Well obviously everyone wanted a piece of the contractual pie, so to speak,
to be able to make guns for the Army.
There was of course this huge demand with World War Two.
Pedersen provided the gun expertise and the Ordnance Department ... contacts
for this new company, the Irwin family provided the financial backing.
So the company became known as Irwin Pedersen,
and they actually got a contract to manufacture M1 carbines.
They had a contract to make 100,000 of them.
Unfortunately the place wasn't very well run or managed,
they only managed to manufacture 3,500,
and those all failed Ordnance Department inspection.
So the company's contract was ultimately taken over by the Saginaw Division of GM.
Saginaw ended up producing the guns.
But there are a small number of Irwin Pedersen M1 carbines out there
that are particularly desirable, they're about the rarest of the M1 carbine manufacturers.
And this is in fact one of them.
Now Pedersen didn't confine himself to just rifles and handguns.
In fact in real terms, in production ... quantity terms,
probably his biggest impact has been in shotguns, although a lot of people may not recognise it.
The first one he did with the Remington Company, again like everything, was the Model 10.
This is a pump action, downward ejecting, bottom loading.
It's a pretty good gun for its time, it is a rather complicated gun.
These were successful for Remington, they sold them up until 1929, they sold about 275,000 of them.
But frankly they are too complicated for what they are.
And they hadn't been on the market very long when Remington started looking
for a better way to do a pump shotgun.
And it turned out that it was actually John Browning who came up with the answer for them.
Browning patented his own design for a pump-action shotgun (bottom ejecting) in 1913.
Or he applied for the patent in 1913, he received the patent in 1915,
and he promptly sold it to the Remington Company under licence to use and manufacture.
So Remington initially planned to put this into production in 1917,
hence their designation, Model 17.
Pedersen and another gunsmith at Remington put the final touches on the design
to just kind of polish it for mass production.
And it was a fantastic gun, definitely better than the Model 10.
Really a quite modern shotgun, free from openings on both the left and right side,
it was bottom ejecting, bottom loading.
Unfortunately, when Remington was planning to put it into production in 1917,
they turned out to be swamped with military orders,
because of course World War One was still going on, hot and heavy.
So it turned out they weren't able to actually put it into production until after the war.
It first came on the market in 1921, and it remained on sale until 1933.
You'll notice a lot of these guns go out of production in the early 30s.
That's largely because of the Great Depression, sales of lots of things slumped, including guns.
At any rate, they sold about 73,000 of these after the war. Not a bad run.
And more importantly, these set the tone
for what would become some of the most popular, and longest produced, shotguns ever made.
This particular one, as some of our astute viewers will have noticed,
is not in fact a Remington Model 17. This is an Ithaca 37.
What the Ithaca company did
(now, they'd been building shotguns for decades, Ithaca built its first shotguns in the 1880s),
they wanted to bring onto the market a modern pump-action gun.
So they started looking at their options, and they realised
that Browning's original 1915 patent was going to expire in 1932.
That wasn't that far away for them, and so they figured basically once the patent expired
it would be fair game to simply make their own copy of that gun.
They deemed it to be one of the best on the market.
They got under way developing it, getting their tooling set up.
And ultimately they discovered late in the game
that Pedersen had also filed a patent on an improvement to the 17.
So they had to delay a couple of years, and released this in 1937.
They called it the Model 37, or we commonly see it today, the Ithaca 37,
and they still remain in production today.
They are one of the few shotguns at the very top of general understanding and popularity.
They are extremely good, they're particularly noted for being left-hander friendly
because they are bottom ejecting and bottom loading.
The US military adopted some of them for riot gun duty during World War Two.
They've obviously been used by a great number of police departments,
law enforcement agencies, they're ubiquitous, everyone uses the Ithaca 37.
And ... in many ways it's really cool,
it is a collaborative effort between John Browning and John Pedersen.
And what more honour than to be a guy
who was involved in a significant collaborative work with John Browning.
Well, John Pedersen was: he had the skills, he was in the right place at the right time.
And he did a fantastic lifetime's work at the Remington Company.
He ended up dying in 1951.
I should point out he married in the '20s, his wife has a very impressive résumé of her own.
She hosted ... national radio shows.
She actually wrote for Field & Stream on a number of outdoor subjects.
They had two children.
Ultimately Pedersen, like I said, is one of America's ... most successful,
most prolific, and really under-appreciated gun designers.
So, I hope you guys enjoyed the video.
I hope you learned something that you hadn't known before.
Whether it was something basic about Pedersen himself, or maybe some of his most unusual rifles.
As it stands, every single one of these guns is coming up for sale at Rock Island.
Some of them in the April of 2015 Premier Auction,
some of them in the Regional Auction coming up in the summer of 2015,
and some in the Premier Auction in the fall of 2015.
I will have links to the ones that are available in the description text below.
So if there's anything here that you think would be really cool to add to your own personal collection,
take a look in the description text below, check it out.
And go over to Rock Island's catalogue page on each of the guns and see what you think.
If something there that really strikes your eye, you can place a bid online, or
come down to Rock Island Auction House in Illinois,
yourself in person, and participate in one of the auctions.
Thanks for watching, guys.