The No.2 was Bergmann’s first offering of a civilian pocket pistol, introduced in 1896 alongside the larger-framed No.3 and No.4 pistols. It was chambered for a truly anemic 5mm cartridge, using a simple blowback system […]
The initial patent for what would become the Bergmann pistols was actually a delayed blowback mechanism, and it was quickly revised to simple blowback by Louis Schmeisser. The first actual production pistols, designated the No.1, […]
Theodore Bergmann, despite having his name on a lot of different guns, was not actually a gun designer. Bergmann was a financier and industrialist, in many ways like Eli Whitney in the US decades earlier. […]
Isaac Newton Lewis is best known as the designer of the Lewis light machine gun, of course – but that was not his only work in the firearms field. In 1919, he patented a semiauto […]
In 1936, Lewis Nolan Nomar patented this device, which is basically a large 40-round magazine for the 1911 pistol. He envisioned a military use for the device in trench raiding, giving men a compact weapon […]
What was the first true semiautomatic pistol? Let’s take a look… Before there were self-loading pistols, there were manually operated repeating pistols with magazines – like the 1850s Volcanics. A surprising number of this type […]
Georg Roth’s company in Austria presided over a wonderful variety of interesting handgun development, and this is one example of that lineage. Roth’s licensed or purchased the patent for this pistol from its inventor, Wasa […]
Rudolf Frommer was a self-taught engineer and firearms designer who worked his way up through the FEG concern in Budapest to eventually hold the position of CEO. During this time he developed a series of […]
The JoLoAr pistol was a combination of a poor-selling and unremarkable Spanish blowback semiauto pistol called the Sharpshooter and an idea by a man named Jose Lopez Arnaiz (whose name is the source of the […]
The 1902 “Grandpa” Nambu is one of the first wave of successful military automatic pistols, developed by Kijiro Nambu and his team over the course of 5 years, from 1897 to 1902. It was the […]
© 2025 Forgotten Weapons.
Site developed by Cardinal Acres Web Development.