Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, and today I have the exceptional privilege of taking a look at the first functional semi-automatic pistol ever designed. And also the first semi-automatic pistol designed from the ground up as a semi-automatic pistol, instead of as a semi-automatic conversion of a manually repeating pistol. This is actually a 1896 pattern Dormus automatic pistol, or Salvator-Dormus automatic pistol. These were first patented back in 1891,
in fact the first patent was July 11th 1891. That was followed fairly quickly by a
second patent on November 21st of 1891. The next runner up for the award of
first automatic pistol wasn't patented until November 25th 1891. So ... this
was designed by two guys named Karl Salvator and Georg Dormus, and they
take the prize for actually coming in first. Now this is actually a delayed blowback pistol. It's got a pretty weird delaying system,
and pretty much everything you read about this will say that it was actually a
simple blowback, because it sure appears that way. But when we look at it
more carefully we'll realise that it does actually have a delaying mechanism.
It is fed by a five round Mannlicher clip of 8mm Dormus ammunition.
Not surprisingly proprietary ammo, because there wasn't any other auto
pistol ammo out there, because no one had invented the auto pistol before.
... There's some other really interesting features here. This is actually
... more of a modern pistol than you would expect for 1891. Now in total just about
50 of these were made, the biggest batch being 31 of them that were made in 1896
and 1897 for an Austrian military trial in 1897. And that's when this one was made.
This is serial number 23, and it actually has an 1897 Austrian military acceptance mark on it. And I think we need to just go in
and take a closer look at this guy and I'll show you all of its cool secrets. So the Dormus is actually in some ways
a more modern pistol than you would expect for an 1891 design. Let's look at all of
the controls, it is a single action gun so we have an exposed hammer here. If you want
to fire it, you have to manually cock the hammer. We then have two levers here
on the back. This top lever is the safety, which is currently engaged.
Now this safety allows me to pull the trigger and drop the hammer,
but the hammer stops right there. This basically drops the hammer to a
half-cock notch. It cannot impact the firing pin, which is right there in front of it.
Thus it renders the gun safe. Now if I deactivate the safety and pull the
trigger now, now the hammer goes all the way down, and you can see it's going
to hit our spring-loaded firing pin there, and fire the gun. So that's what the safety
does. Now the safety also acts as a bolt hold-open (by the way you can see that it cams
the ... hammer back when I engage it there), if I have the safety engaged and I open the bolt,
it will lock open. Now the bolt lever is this, so that opens the bolt up and locks it in
place. I can now load it with a five-round Mannlicher style clip. Now as we know
about Mannlicher clips, it's going to sit in there, the clip will act as the feed lips for the
system, and when you chamber the last round the clip falls out the bottom. Well, there is in fact an opening in the bottom of the gun, so the clip is only
five rounds, it's like this long, and what happens is when you chamber the last
round, that empty clip falls all of the way down the grip and, ploop, out here. You
could in fact leave this gate closed and you could probably fire three clips
before you had this thing totally full and you weren't able to stuff in a
fourth. In fact, at that point the spring holding this closed isn't all that
strong, you could probably just continue to load clips in the top and when this
grip was completely full of empty clips, it would probably just force the bottom
one to pop that gate open, and dump a pile of clips at your feet. It's
actually kind of a clever idea. Now once the bolt is open, this bottom lever is
our bolt release (I'm going to hold on to the handle here to do this gently), I ... push
this lever down, that releases the bolt, which then closes, leaves the hammer
cocked so I'm ready to fire. And then this is our clip release, so if I do not
want to fire all of the ammunition I have in the gun (it's a little hard to
see in there, but you can see the clip latch down there slides over to the side
when I push this button), so if I don't want to fire the last rounds in the gun,
what I do is lock the bolt open, hit that release and the remaining cartridges
in the clip will spit out the top. Sights are pretty typical for
this period but actually not terrible. (A little hard to get the camera to focus on them there.) The only markings on this pistol are
the serial number, right there, number 23. And this WN 97, which is an ... Austrian
Army acceptance mark from 1897. So this is one of the guns that
was in the Austrian troop trials. Now all of the literature out there about the
Dormus (and by the way there isn't much), it all describes it as being a simple
blowback action, and it certainly seems that way. If you handle this gun, when
you pull this thing back there's no extra resistance, ... it seems like a simple
blowback pistol. However it came to my attention that if you look at
the patents, this is actually a delayed blowback gun, and you have to do
something kind of wacky to be able to actually demonstrate that. What's
going on here is that the trigger actually interfaces with this lever, so the bolt is
connected to this lever, the trigger has a component that goes up, and when the
trigger is pulled back (go ahead and drop the ... so you have to have the safety off),
when the trigger is pulled back - not the hammer but when the trigger is back - it
actually has this inclined wedge that prevents the bolt from opening. So this
gun is actually set up to use your own trigger finger strength as the delay in
opening. Now ... I can show that by putting a rod down the barrel and I will
hold the trigger down, and when I push on this rod I can't get the barrel [bolt] to go back. Now I can feel it pushing on the trigger
here and I can close the bolt by pushing the trigger backwards. That is actually
how this gun is delayed. That's a really unique system. I'm not aware of any other
pistol that works that way, and honestly for good reason. That's not a very good way
to control the timing of when the gun opens. But then again, this wasn't the best
automatic pistol ever, this was just the first automatic pistol ever. And it's perfectly
reasonable to assume that it's going to have some elements to it that aren't going to
turn out to be the world's greatest ideas. Now by 1897 the Austrian trials of this
pistol were complete. It was turned down. Ultimately Austria would adopt
a 1907 pattern Roth-Steyr pistol. It would adopt the Frommer Stop.
And it would adopt the, well, in 1911 or 1912 it would adopt the Steyr-Hahn.
Until then they would go on simply using their, well interestingly, their 1898
Rast & Gasser revolvers, which would have been in direct competition with the Dormus here. I should mention the calibre, it is 8mm Dormus.
The projectile was I believe 5.1 grams which is going to be like 125 grain, I believe.
I have not been able to determine the velocity of the cartridge, no idea. Given
this very simplistic delaying system, I'm sure it was a relatively low velocity,
and I would expect this cartridge to be basically on par with .32 ACP. Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed
the video. There is very little information on the ... Salvator-Dormus pistol out there,
of course, because there very few of these left. And it was a very cool opportunity to be able to
take a close look at this one, and bring it to you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed the video,
hopefully you learned something cool, a new appreciation for Karl
Salvator and Georg Dormus. If you enjoy this sort of material, please do
consider checking out my Patreon account. It's my supporters there who make it possible
for me to travel about and track down guns like this to bring to you guys. Thanks for watching.
*first assault rifle
Why is this linked to youtube and not full30? I would be a fan of knowing which channel makes Ian the most money and going there.