Gunroom
Shooting Times & Country|June 07, 2023
Introduced in 1896, the semi-automatic Mauser 96 became a favourite of officers across Europe and dominated the market for nearly 40 years
Bill Harriman
Gunroom

By the last decades of the 19th century, the revolver had been perfected to become an efficient and reliable pistol with a design that remains essentially the same today. Previous designs for revolvers had suffered from two major drawbacks; one, they were relatively slow to load and reload, and two, they only had a limited capacity, which was normally five or six shots. Consequently, firearms designers began to explore other possibilities for repeating pistols.

Rather than mechanical rotation aligning another cartridge to a firing position, designers started to think outside of the box and utilise the inertia of a firearm’s recoil to reload it automatically. In 1893, veteran designer Hugo Borchardt perfected a pistol that harnessed the recoil of every shot, channelling it through a folding toggle joint to load a successive cartridge.

Best of all, the pistol’s ammunition was contained in a small box magazine, making it quick to reload. Borchardt’s pistol was commercially available from 1894, but it was an ungainly thing that was best fired as a carbine using a detachable stock.

Immediate success 

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