Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Musée d’Armes
de Liège, the Liège Arms Museum, part of the Grand Curtius
Museum complex.
So they have a set up here in Liège with a whole bunch of
museums relating to the city all under one roof.
And one of them is the Arms Museum,
and they have a tremendous collection of very interesting
firearms including the earliest known Mauser-Norris rifle.
Which is to say the earliest known Mauser rifle in existence.
So the backstory to this I think is really interesting.
And not just because the French Chassepot actually had a guiding hand
in creating the world's most successful bolt action rifle ever.
But that's a separate thing.
What happened here was the Mauser brothers, Paul and Wilhelm Mauser, in 1867 or thereabouts,
came up with their own rifle design. And these are a ... pair of brothers from this small, poor, backwater town Oberndorf in Germany.
Their father had been a gunsmith, they took up the trade.
And they were talented, they were bright, but there aren't a lot of opportunities for advancement in,
what will become Germany, at that time. So they came up with a rifle design and they
[got excited] and they sent it to Vienna for Austrian Army trials in 1867.
And it failed. The Austrian Army wasn't interested in it.
However, it was spotted by a guy named Samuel Norris.
Norris was a sales representative for the Remington company and he was attending these rifle trials trying to sell Remington rifles.
And he noticed the Mauser brothers' rifle and it occurred to him that this rifle might have some real potential to it.
Some potential the Austrians didn't see.
So he came back from the trials and he got in contact with the Mauser brothers,
and he signed a contract with them to pay them to develop this rifle for him.
So the original patents are co-signed with both the Mauser brothers and Norris.
And what Norris saw in this rifle was not a standalone rifle,
he saw an opportunity to convert French Chassepots to a ... metallic cartridge firing design.
Because the Mauser system, the Mauser bolt action system, looked really compatible with the Chassepot.
So he brought the Mauser brothers to here, in Liège (part of the reason that this rifle survives here today),
and put them to work. And the contract was to be paid in 10 annual segments, so in theory it should have been about a 10 year contract.
Now at this point the Mauser brothers are very happy to have this opportunity, the potential,
that maybe their rifle will actually go somewhere and they can get rich and famous.
... So they start working on the gun developing rifles exactly like this one.
Norris goes to work trying to sell this conversion to the French. And that's where things kind of go bad.
So before we ... finish out what happened to this story, let's take a look at what Paul and Wilhelm Mauser were actually making here.
So based on the idea of selling this as a Chassepot conversion, this rifle is largely a Chassepot.
Now it's not a French military Chassepot, those probably would have been relatively difficult for
a private entrepreneur to get in 1868 (and that's when this particular rifle was patented).
Instead, this is a Belgian made, or at least Belgian proofed
(the ELG in a circle mark here on the barrel is a Belgian proof),
Chassepot rifle. We've got the standard Chassepot sight there, we've got
the barrel band that is exactly the same as the Cassepot pattern.
The front end of the rifle has a Chassepot cleaning rod, Chassepot bayonet lug, nose cap, front sight.
These guns were being made under contract for the French in Belgium in Liège at the time.
And so it would have been relatively uncomplicated for the Mauser brothers or Norris
to arrange to buy a commercial version of the Chassepot.
Once they had that, all they had to do was go ahead and build their own bolt mechanism for it.
So the Chassepot is interesting in that ... it's a very early bolt action rifle,
and ... it's a very modern profile bolt action rifle, and that's what made it easily adaptable to metallic cartridges.
Both as ... the Mauser-Norris did it.
The Germans would convert Chassepots to metallic cartridge in a couple of patterns after the Franco-Prussian war.
And of course the French would do it themselves, converting to the Gras pattern.
So this has a single locking lug, right here, which locks against the receiver.
This was different than the Chassepot pattern where the bolt handle came out here
and the locking lug was the root of the bolt handle. On this one the bolt handle has
been moved to the back because it incorporates the striker.
You can see we have a couple of little Belgian proofs on the bolt there.
We then have a pretty unique striker spring system.
This looks like the Beaumont with a flat spring, or V spring, inside the bolt.
In reality this is the striker spring. So when I push this in and cock it,
you can see the back part of the bolt bending off right there.
That is what puts tension on this for it to propel the firing pin when you pull the trigger.
Like that, so.
If I open this up and re-cock it, you can see that is applying your spring tension to the striker.
They actually threaded the bolt face into place, those are those two rectangular holes.
The centre hole is for the firing pin of course. And they have fixed an extractor to the outside of the bolt body there.
We have a cut in the side of the receiver to fit the extractor.
And then it's also cut up around the barrel, so that when you rotate the bolt
the extractor is able to rotate around the case head around the face of the barrel.
I can actually close this without cocking it by holding the trigger down and closing the bolt that way.
... The sear is located right in here, and it just directly catches the back end of the bolt to hold it back for firing.
It's neat to see the high polish sort of commercial blue on this gun.
Early Chassepots at this point would have been produced and accepted all in the white.
So you'll never really see a blued one like this, and that's pretty cool.
So before we go back to the story, I should point out that there are sources all the way back to 1914
that identify this as the earliest known Mauser-Norris, specifically referring to its being in the museum at Liège.
This museum in Liège was put together by basically the same confederation of small gunsmithing shops that would eventually form FN.
And these shops and companies had all gone around and bought up all sorts of guns on the commercial market
for ... reference collections. And they went ahead and combined all of those into a firearms museum, I believe in the 1890s.
So this particular rifle was actually donated to P-J Lemille, who was the founder of the museum,
by Samuel Norris himself, so it's been here basically at least since 1890 something.
That's a pretty good provenance for a gun in a museum collection.
Alright, back to our story. Norris goes to the French and tries to sell them this bolt action conversion.
And the French aren't interested, the French have very consciously made this decision not to use metallic cartridges.
They were concerned about the availability of ammunition in the field, like they didn't want to have all of their ammunition
based on like one or two cartridge production factories that something might go wrong with.
The Germans might capture them, they might break, they might explode. Ammunition is a dangerous thing sometimes.
They liked the idea of paper cartridges that could be very easily made almost anywhere.
So the French turned down Norris. Well at the same time Remington, who is Norris's employer,
and like they're the ones paying for him to be in Europe here,
they get wind that Norris is trying to make this deal with the French under his own name.
Not for Remington, but for Samuel Norris. And this obviously leaves them a bit unhappy and they fire Norris.
So by 1869 this leaves Norris in the unfortunate position of:
not having enough money to continue making his payments to the Mauser brothers,
not having a job with Remington any more, and having gotten rejected by French.
So his whole ambitious plan of, "I'll hire these guys to make the rifle and then I'll sell it to those guys."
This whole plan falls apart and Norris is forced to basically liquidate his contract with the Mauser brothers.
As a result of this the Mauser brothers walk away retaining the rights to the patents that they've filed.
And this would become very valuable to them, because the one last thing that they do with Samuel Norris is they convince him
to help them out at the end and submit the rifle, or present the rifle, to the German military, the GPK.
And the German military at this point actually starts to see some interest in this.
Cartridge firing rifles are substantially better than paper cartridge firing rifles,
and the Germans would work for several years on this and ultimately this would develop into the Gewehr 1871,
which was the first ... metallic cartridge firing rifle adopted by the German military,
in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war.
Of course the Germans were still using the Dreyse needle fire in the Franco-Prussian war,
and that war teaches them very conclusively that, first off, the Dreyse is substantially inferior to the French Chassepot.
And perhaps more importantly, more fundamentally, that metallic cartridge rifles are vastly superior to paper cartridge ones.
So they would go ahead and develop this into their first standard metallic cartridge rifle.
And that would begin the process of the Mauser brothers becoming one of the
most successful firearms companies really in world history.
So this is an incredibly cool piece of firearms history and Mauser company history,
being the earliest known example of one of these rifles which is of course the earliest known rifle made by the Mauser brothers.
So a big thanks to the Liège Arms Museum for giving me access to having this rifle.
A big thanks to the Paul Mauser Archive for helping to coordinate the visit.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. If you ever are in Liège don't hesitate to stop in and see the Arms Museum here.
It is one of the few arms museums left that really displays a lot of guns. It's a gun museum, they display guns.
It's not one of the more modern, more contextual museums. So if you're looking for
firearms on display the Liège Museum is a great place to see them. Hope you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.