Gunroom

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

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.

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