Osprey - Weapon 58 - The Broomhandle Mauser.pdf

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THE ‘BROOMHANDLE’
MAUSER
JONATHAN FERGUSON
THE ‘BROOMHANDLE’
MAUSER
JONATHAN FERGUSON
Series Editor Martin Pegler
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
DEVELOPMENT
The Feederle pistol
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6
20
60
76
78
78
80
USE
A global success story
IMPACT
A legendary weapon
CONCLUSION
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Today, on hearing the word ‘pistol’, we automatically think of self-loading
designs produced by companies like Colt and Glock. But in the 1890s, the
revolver was absolutely dominant, to the extent that even the word
‘revolver’ had become synonymous with ‘pistol’. Single-shot and multi-
barrelled pistols had largely fallen by the wayside, being similar in size,
weight and cost to a revolver, but lacking in capacity. At the same time,
one of the world’s famous gunmaking firms, Waffenfabrik Mauser, sought
to enter the lucrative pistol market. Known to most simply as ‘Mauser’,
the present-day company can trace its history back beyond the creation
of the German state. In 1811 a state arsenal was founded in Oberndorf by
Friedrich I of Württemberg. The factory’s landmark design was the bolt-
action mechanism conceived by the Mauser brothers Wilhelm and Paul in
1867. Four years later their Gewehr 71 rifle became the first standardized
arm of the new German Empire. A series of successful refinements
followed, and by the end of the century Mauser had arrived at its definitive
bolt-action magazine rifle design. The Mauser Gewehr 98 remains in
production after well over a century, and variations on the design are
found across a range of civilian and even military precision rifles today.
As a result of this unrivalled success with rifles, Mauser also produced
a less well-known series of pistols, beginning in 1877 with the C77 (‘C’
standing for
Construktion
meaning ‘design’) single-shot pistol. Their first
The Mauser M1889 Belgian
contract rifle, the first firearm
to feature charger loading.
(© Royal Armouries PR.6275)
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revolver followed the year afterwards. This, the C78, was a
novel design employing zig-zag rotation slots on the cylinder,
leading to the nickname ‘Zig-Zag’ revolver. The C78 was
passed over for military selection in favour of the more
conventional M79 Reichsrevolver, which was still to be found in
service during World War I. Paul Mauser was not deterred by this,
however, and personally designed in 1886 what would become the Mauser
C87. This was one of a few transitional designs including the Reiger
(1889) and the Bittner (1893) that abandoned the revolver principle but
retained manual operation, in this case by means of a ring-shaped trigger.
None of these designs offered much advantage over the traditional
revolver, however, and would be surpassed by the first generation of self-
loading pistols.
In 1893, the innovative C93 Borchardt pistol was brought to market
by Ludwig Loewe & Cie (later Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken:
DWM). Like the later C96, the Hugo Borchardt-designed C93 employed
the ‘short recoil’ system of operation in which barrel and bolt are locked
together to contain the high pressures generated on firing, but are then
mechanically unlocked after travelling a short distance. This allows the
bolt to move rearwards, extract and eject the empty cartridge case, and
then return forward under spring pressure to chamber the next cartridge.
Rather than the more conventional reciprocating bolt approach of the
C96, the C93 Borchardt utilized a hinged ‘toggle-lock’ inspired by the
internal mechanism of the Maxim machine gun. It was clumsy and
expensive to manufacture, however, and no more than 3,000 were ever
sold. Even so, it established a safe and effective system of operation for a
self-loading pistol, and showed much promise. In 1894 further offerings
appeared from the German gunsmith and engineer Theodor Bergmann
and the Austrian inventor and small-arms designer Ferdinand Ritter von
Mannlicher. Mauser’s early ambitions in the field of pistol design seemed
thwarted, and it must have seemed that another company was destined to
bring the self-loading pistol into the 20th century.
The Mauser C78 ‘Zig-Zag’
revolver. (© Royal Armouries
PR.3508)
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