Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. Today I want to take a look at some early automatic
pistol cartridges, because there's a lot of weird stuff that was available at the ... inception of the automatic pistol,
and a lot of people aren't really familiar with these things. And, you know, what are these weird
cartridges? And why did people use them? And what's the deal with all this,
you know, strange proprietary stuff? So I figured taking a look at this, we can
break this down into a couple different time periods that I think will really help
clarify what was being used and why. ... Why certain cartridges became
popular and why some others didn't. So let's get started. The three time
periods we're going to look at here are: the years leading up to 1900, which are
the very beginning of the automatic pistol; the years 1900 to 1904, which is when we start
to see some actual maturation of the market; and then 1905 and the years
afterwards when we have a last few couple of straggling cartridges that are ultimately developed. Alright, I do have a couple of quick
disclaimers I want to get out of the way. First off visuals and scaling: I
did an approximate job of getting the pistols and the
cartridges to the appropriate scale, but this has not been done mathematically,
scientifically measured down to the last pixel, so there will be some problems
that I'm sure people will pick out. Secondly, we're only going to take a look
at production guns, so things that are cool but only a few were made, like the Schönberger-
Laumann here, we're not going to touch. Another really cool one, the Salvator-Dormus
the other of the first two really effective, really functional semi-auto pistols, you
know what, it was only military testing, very few were made, we're not
going to touch that one either. Even the Maxim-Silverman, a really
sleek gun, legitimately ahead of its time. Only a handful made, we're not going to cover that one. This video is going to be about what
your options were as an ordinary civilian, someone who wanted an automatic pistol
in these time periods that we're looking at. So by only looking at guns that were available
I think this will give us a better idea of why certain choices were made and why certain
cartridges became popular and others didn't. On that note, the last disclaimer I've got is going to be
on the exact numbers with some of these cartridges, exact bullet weights and velocities. I've done
my best to get the original factory loadings, but some of these cartridges ... there's
extremely little information about. There's going to be some debate, especially
on velocities, of some of these cartridges. So, with that in mind, let's go ahead and start by looking
at the guns that were available up to the year 1900. All right, we'll be taking this chronologically,
so we'll start with in 1893 the C93 Borchardt. This was the first automatic pistol actually
manufactured in substantial quantities and sold successfully on the civilian market. They made
about 3,000 of these and it used a bottle necked and really, for the time, quite high-power
cartridge, the 7.63 Borchardt. This is 7.63x25mm, it's the same physical
dimensions as the later 7.63 Mauser, and then 7.63 Tokarev cartridges, but it is loaded a bit lighter. So you'll
see it has a muzzle velocity of 1,300 feet per second. That's kind of our baseline, that's where we're
going to start. So let's move on to the next one. So right about the time the Borchardt came on the
market Theodor Bergmann started working on his own automatic pistols and in 1896 he would have
actually three different versions come on the market. And we're going to look at two of those
that were in relatively common production. The first is the Bergmann Number 2, which
was chambered for this incredibly tiny and pipsqueak little 5mm Bergmann cartridge. ... 35 grains at
580 feet per second, a whopping 26 foot-pounds of energy. Really the only thing that this gun had
going for it was it was a relatively small pistol. Certainly in comparison to the Borchardt, the
Borchardt was basically a carbine without a stock. The Number 2 Bergmann you could
conceivably slip into a pocket, and that's absolutely what it's
commercial raison d'etre was. Now the other one of these pistols was the Bergman
Number 3, which is basically the same action (they're both blowback), but in a 6.5mm cartridge
that, while it's still pretty puny, it's definitely better. Now the downside to the Bergmann Number 3 was
it was a substantially larger pistol, larger frame and really not... Kind of one of these weird neither fish nor fowl sorts
of designs, where it was too big to put in a pocket, but it was too wimpy to be a military service pistol.
That was tried and rejected by everyone who tried it. The Bergmann Number 4 was the
same action in an 8mm cartridge, which we're not going to look at because
only a couple hundred were made in total. But that's the Bergmann Number 3
for us. So let's move on to the next one. Now here in 1896 we also have
what is definitely going to be the most recognisable of the pistols from this time
period, and that's the C96 "Broom-Handle" Mauser. What this pistol really brought to the table
was strength and mechanical reliability. It was by far the strongest of these guns and
... while it was a bit awkward by today's standards, it took a lot of the really awkward
elements of the Borchardt and got rid of them. This was a pistol that you could really slip into a
holster, carry with you, you could shoot it normally, you didn't have to have a shoulder
stock on it to really use it. And while the cartridge was dimensionally the same
as the Borchardt, it was notably more powerful. Not just that it had 100 feet per second
higher velocity, but that's out of a shorter barrel. So the the difference is greater than you'd
recognise just by looking at the muzzle velocities. Now we have one last pistol here before 1900, and
that's the Charola-Anitua, which is a little Spanish pistol. Structurally kind of looks like a Broom-Handle Mauser,
but it's in 5mm Clement, which is an even smaller, lighter projectile than the 5mm Bergmann,
although it is going faster. You'll see it has a lot more muzzle energy, although 62 foot-pounds of muzzle
energy isn't really anything all that significant. The problem with these is they're
really kind of ... awkward pistols, and they don't really engender a lot of confidence. So that pretty much rounds out our pistols up to 1900. Alright, let's go ahead and take a look at the
muzzle energy of these five different cartridges. Obviously, we've got kind of
two categories here. On the left we have the blowback pistols and on the
right we have the locked-breech pistols. Now what this does allow us to look at are... The locked-breech pistols are the ones that are
potentially eligible to be service pistols for the military. While the blowback pistols are generally
going to be much more suitable as civilian pistols. They in theory could be ...
small enough to stick in a pocket, and of those three the best of them, or rather the least
bad of them, I would say is the Bergmann Number 2. What it really has going for it is that it is compact. As
we saw in the chart it has the worst muzzle energy, only 26 foot-pounds, but it's going to be easier to
carry. This particular model has a folding trigger which was an option on the Number 2. The problem
with the 5mm Clement pistols, the Charola-Anitua, is that they just don't engender a
lot of confidence mechanically. Now maybe that's just the examples
I've seen, but they didn't sell very well, I don't think they sold as well as the Bergmanns.
You didn't get that much more muzzle energy, I think I would have gone with the
Bergmann Number 2 here personally. Of course the best option is just to carry a revolver instead. Now, why not the Bergmann Number 3?
It looks a lot better in that chart. Well the answer is the Bergmann Number 3
used a much larger frame, it's 10 inches long. That thing's like bigger than a 1911,
it was not a suitable pocket pistol, but it still fired a pocket pistol cartridge, so
it's really this neither fish nor fowl sort of gun. Bergmann did try and get military contracts
with them, which all failed badly because the cartridge was just so underpowered. So not suitable. Now interestingly the Bergmann Number 3 is probably
the best selling of these three unlocked pistols, because a lot of people did buy them I suspect as
technological novelties and as recreational pistols. They were good target guns because
they were big enough to get a good grip on, but they had a nice light cartridge
that was pleasant to shoot. Now when we go ahead and take a look at
the potential service pistols the easy winner (now, there are only two options), but the easy
one to choose is the Broom-Handle Mauser. It has a more powerful cartridge, which
is nice, but probably more importantly it's not nearly as awkward to
handle and use as the Borchardt. The Borchardt was really in its element when
you put a shoulder stock on it and treated it like a short-barreled carbine. If you're looking for a
handgun, the C96 Mauser is the easy choice. While it's considered awkward and kind of goofy by
today's standards, it hands-down beats the Borchardt. So, with that in mind, this tells us ... as of 1900
with pistols that were actually commercially available, the C96 Mauser was going to be by far the
best choice people could have for an actual powerful military-style pistol, and that's
reflected in the actual market results. The C96 became a very popular
pistol and sold very well. Now let's go ahead and take a look at what's going to
be coming up in the next couple of years, 1900 to1904. The first thing we have up is the Browning
Model of 1900. Now, technically this was actually introduced in 1899, but I think
it really fits better into this second period here, and that's when it really became commercially available. Now what's interesting about the 1900 is that
it was built around this brand new cartridge, the .32 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) in the
US, called 7.65mm Browning in Europe. And it's not that great of a cartridge really, ballistically
it's not bad, but it's actually a semi-rimmed cartridge. Meaning that it actually head spaces
on a small extended rim at the base, rather than being fully rimless like
pretty much all modern cartridges are. Now what really sold the 1900 wasn't
so much the cartridge, as it was the pistol. This was the very first pistol to actually have the
concept of a slide. It was invented by John Browning, manufactured and marketed by FN out of Belgium,
and in fact the Belgian Army actually adopted this in 1900, very early. It was adopted by
a number of other countries as well, and it became a fantastically popular
pistol on the civilian market as well as a potential armament for military officers who had
to ... purchase and provide their own handguns. So, the .32 ACP would go on to be
used in a wide variety of other pistols, largely based on the popularity of
the Browning Model of 1900. Now at the same time also in 1900 we have another Browning pistol, this time being marketed in the US by Colt. And that's also maybe confusingly
called the Model of 1900, but in this case it's a pistol based on the .38 Automatic cartridge.
This would go on later to be powered up a bit, same outside dimensions but higher
pressure and called the .38 Super. For our purposes here this is
actually the .38 ACP or .38 Automatic. It will be used in a couple of Colt pistols, the
1900, the 1902, also the 1903 Pocket Hammer. And it never really became all that successful,
which is kind of interesting because on paper it's actually a pretty decent round for the period. Really, I think what happened here is Colt ended
up trying to follow the American military market, (not necessarily a bad plan, certainly not in
retrospect), and their development ended up going much more into the .45 Automatic cartridge,
which would come a few years later. For that reason you could buy .38 ACP pistols for a
while. This was also the cartridge that would be used in the Webley-Fosbery semi-auto sort of revolver. They had
.45 calibre ones, as well as an 8 shot version in .38 ACP. So an interesting piece there that has
definitely fallen out of favour in modern times. Now in 1900 we have another very influential
pistol come on the market and that is the Luger. Hugo Borchardt had been unwilling
to modernise his C93 Borchardt pistol, so the manufacturer, DWM, brought in a
guy named Georg Luger to do the job for him. And Luger put together what would become
one of the most iconic pistols in history. Now when this was first introduced in 1900 it was
chambered for the 7.65mm Parabellum cartridge, which is a new cartridge developed for this gun. And
it was a remarkably powerful cartridge for the time. Still, relatively speaking, a little bit hampered by having a
lightweight bullet because it was a small bore diameter. But this would be tested by virtually
every major military on the planet, and adopted by a bunch of them. First
off, it was adopted by the Swiss in 1900, making them one of the very first
countries to actually adopt a self-loading automatic pistol, and in this case a self-
loading locked-breech true service pistol. It would go on to be adopted by the
German military, but not in this calibre, so we're going to leave that for a future pistol
here which we'll get to in a few moments. Because, before we get to that, we do also
have Ferdinand Mannlicher to take a look at. Now Mannlicher had tried for a while
to develop his own semi-auto pistol, and he had a bunch of not quite successes, until
finally in 1901 he came up with a pistol that would actually become successful on the commercial
and, to a lesser extent, the military market This is the (obviously) Model of 1901
Mannlicher. It's a delayed blowback pistol, and it uses, again, a brand new proprietary cartridge. You're seeing that most of the guns around this
time, ... the gun comes with its own specific cartridge. And that's because there aren't really a whole lot of
cartridges that have taken off and become popular. Certainly for a gun like this, which is delayed
blowback, you couldn't chamber it for the 7.63 Mauser cartridge because
that would be a little too powerful. You'll notice here that the velocity on the
Mannlicher cartridge is rather slower, about like 30% slower, than the Mauser cartridge. And that's simply because of the mechanical
limitations of the operating system of this pistol. However it was a relatively small, relatively compact
pistol, small in the hand, very comfortable to shoot. And it would be adopted actually
by the Argentine military in 1905, as well as being a legitimate
commercial success for Mannlicher. So that's another cartridge that we'll have to keep
an eye on because it was out there and being used. Now the next one I have up here is
the model of 1901 Frommer pistol, ... I should say that the Frommer itself was
not a widespread pistol, it failed military trials, was not produced commercially in
any substantial numbers. However I've included it because it did use the 8mm
Steyr cartridge, and we will see this cartridge come up in just a couple years later in the Roth-Steyr
Model of 1907 pistol, which was adopted by the Austro-Hungarian military in, of
course, 1907. ... While the Frommer pistol was kind of a footnote that went nowhere,
the cartridge actually did stick around. In fact 8mm Steyr is still being
manufactured new today by Fiocchi. So it survived that long, that
alone makes it worthy of note. 8mm Steyr is actually relatively
similar to that 7.63 Mannlicher, it's a little bit bigger bullet, a little
bigger bore diameter, so a little heavier, but right about at the same velocity. And it would
be used by a number of locked-breech pistols, so. Now also in 1901, yet another 1901 development,
we've got an entry going back into the sort of compact civilian carry pistol
market, and that's the Bergmann Simplex. Now, you remember Bergmann from our earlier segment. Theodor Bergmann had been working on a whole bunch
of pistols, he has a continuous development process. We've skipped a couple here that were experimental,
or didn't sell, or were rejected by militaries. The Simplex is an interesting one in that it's
kind of a dead end of its own development. And it's a little, a very compact, blowback pistol designed
specifically for the civilian concealed carry market. And you can see ... we have an
18mm long case, pretty small. A lot of people will say the case is
kind of a knockoff of the .32 ACP, the 7.65 Browning. You can see it's got the
same bullet weight, it's a little bit slower. And between the cartridge being a little bit
slower and the pistol being more complex, it was not a successful competitor to Browning's
model 1900 and later model 1903 pistols, which would become phenomenally popular. The Bergmann was just a bit too funky weird and
probably not as reliable as the Browning guns. However ... multiple thousands of them
were made and sold, and so it's worthy of a spot here with its own proprietary
8mm Bergmann Simplex cartridge. Not to be confused with a longer 8x22mm
cartridge for a locked-breech Bergmann. Anyway, 1902 is when we finally see the
9mm Parabellum aka 9mm Luger cartridge appear on the market. The German military had wanted
a bit larger cartridge, in fact a number of countries did. The US was also interested in a larger cartridge than
the 7.65 Parabellum, so DWM obliged, they basically took the 7.65 Parabellum, necked it up to 9mm,
stuck it right back in the same Luger frame (no changes to the frame, it's the same overall
length), and offered that up for military trials. And this one would really take off, this is
the pistol that the German military would adopt. The Navy first in 1904, and then the
German Army in 1908, making it the P08 Luger, which is what most
people recognise the gun as today. You'll see they didn't sacrifice any of the ballistic
power of the cartridge in this necking up process. It's got a heavier bullet, still traveling quite fast. And, of course,
this is the 9mm Parabellum that we still have today. Now in 1903 the Bergmann Mars would come
out. We saw the Bergmann Simplex a minute ago, that was the blowback concealed civilian type
offering that would come after the turn of the century from Bergmann. This was his continuation (or rather
his engineer Louis Schmeisser's continuation), of work on locked-breech pistols. The Bergmann
Mars was actually, finally, a fairly modern gun in this realm from Bergmann. He had an 1897
version that was really awkward and funky-looking, simplified it down to the Bergmann Mars.
Developed a new cartridge for it, the 9mm Bergmann, which is a pretty legitimate cartridge,
135 grains at [1,050] feet per second. Ballistically, it's not quite as good as the 9mm
Parabellum, but not really anything to sneer at. And this would definitely ... attract some military
attention. The Spanish military adopted it in 1905, although it took them a couple years to
actually get production pistols into their hands. But, this would go on to have a reasonably long service.
The Danes would adopt a slightly updated version in 1910, and it would be a successfully
commercially marketed pistol as well. Next up, the 9x20mm Browning cartridge. This is
one that a lot of people aren't that familiar with today, but it did see a fair amount of use. Something
like 6 or 7 different countries adopted this pistol. ... The pistol that went along with it, I
should say, was the FN Model of 1903. And this is kind of an updated and
scaled up version of the Browning 1900. Also it's an upscaled version of the 1903 Browning
that was made in the US, the Colt Pocket Hammerless. But this was a version made for military
service, so that 9x20 Browning Long cartridge, it is a semi-rimmed cartridge and
again, like the 9mm Bergmann, it's not really that bad of a cartridge,
slightly less powerful than the 9mm Luger. But in this case that was done because this
was a blowback pistol, it has a nice heavy slide, a nice heavy spring, which allows it to
function reliably and safely with this cartridge. And it was quite popular, the Belgians
adopted it ... with many others. The most ... numerous ... military
version of this was the Swedish one, they adopted it in 1907 and you can find
a lot of those still on the market today. They have typically been re-chambered for .380 because
that 9mm Browning Long really fell out of popularity. Part of ... the reason for that is probably that
this was another semi-rimmed cartridge, which makes it just a little more difficult to work
with in pistol design than a true rimless round. So that did not have that going for it. Now ... we need to throw in the Grandpa
Nambu here because it does fit in our time line. This was the the first pistol design indigenous
to Japan, designed by Kijiro Nambu, and again he developed his own cartridge to go along
with it. Which was the 8mm Nambu cartridge, a little bottle-necked round and even by the standards of
this time period, this was a rather underpowered cartridge. 102 grains, 950 feet per second, just not
that impressive for a locked-breech pistol. What he should have done probably was either
make the pistol cartridge a little more potent, or simplify the gun. This was a locked-breech
gun and for this cartridge it really didn't need to be. You could get a more powerful cartridge in the
9x20 Browning and still have a blowback pistol. But this cartridge would go on to serve the Japanese
military all the way through the end of World War Two. So it's an important note in history
and I wanted to add it in here. Last, but not least, we have the .455 Webley self-loading. This was not a particularly successful
cartridge. It was first introduced in 1904 with this absolutely massive Webley pistol,
which did not successfully pass military testing. Webley would go on to continue to iterate on
the pistol and eventually it would be adopted in 1913 by the British Navy, but never
manufactured in particularly large numbers. This was basically a rimless version
of the .455 Webley revolver cartridge. The big rim on that revolver cartridge was a major handicap
in getting the ... cartridge to work in semi-auto pistols, so they ... developed a rimless
self-loading version of it. Not a whole lot we need to say about this
one because it really is right on the border between a successful gun and
an experimental only gun, so. That pretty much covers all of our pistols up to 1904,
or at least our new cartridges that were successful, so let's go ahead and take a look
at them in context with each other. So once again we can split this chart into two
pieces with the compact, commercial, civilian, blowback style pistols at the far left end of the spectrum, and then everything else being service pistols. We only have two of the blowback well, there're more than two blowback but only two of the compact civilian carry style
of guns here. The 8mm Simplex and the .32 ACP. You can see the .32 is actually the more ballistically potent
of the two cartridges, not by a huge margin, but substantial. And now if we take a look at the other
end of the spectrum, we'll see that we have a whole bunch of service pistols. But
if you leave out a couple at the bottom, namely the .455 Webley, and the Nambu, and the
Mannlicher, everything else is pretty darn similar. Now, yes, the 9mm Parabellum is at the
top of the heap, but not by a whole lot, just a couple of percentage points. I do also
want to point out that this is muzzle energy which is not necessarily the only thing
to be considered. For example, you can see the .455 Webley is kind
of down there at the bottom, however it does have by far the heaviest bullet
of the group, and muzzle energy (it's mass times velocity squared), really does
put an emphasis on velocity over bullet mass, which is not necessarily, strictly speaking,
what you would want to be concerned with. The US and the British governments both
put a much higher importance on bullet weight and bullet diameter, and that was reflected
in what they would ultimately adopt. So take the chart with a grain of salt. So the clear winner for pocket pistols is
the Browning 1900, really no contest there. And this really has as much to do
with the gun as it does with the cartridge. That .32 ACP cartridge semi-rimmed
is a little bit anachronistic today, it's not the best cartridge Browning
could have made for this gun. But the gun itself was such an
excellent design for the time period that it completely overwhelmed any
actual problems with the cartridge. And that cartridge would go on to be
phenomenally popular even to this day, largely because of the success of the 1900 pistol. Now if we turn to the military sidearm side of things, once again we have a pretty obvious winner
from this time period. And that is the Luger. The Luger in 9mm Parabellum was the
best Luger, and 7.65 is pretty close runner-up. Obviously the gun itself was successful,
they were a bit expensive, but they were ergonomic, they were very comfortable to
shoot, they were accurate, they were reliable. They were really excellent pistols for the time. There weren't
... any competitors that could quite match the Luger. So congratulations to DWM, congratulations to Georg Luger for designing the piece, did a fantastic job. And it's really no surprise that this would turn
out to be the most popular pistol from this era. Now we do have some nice runners-up here.
The Bergmann Mars was a strong contender, the FN 1903 was a strong contender,
the Colt 1900 was a strong contender. None of them quite matched the Luger. Although
the Browning designs would kind of make their own comeback in a few years time.
It would just take them a little while to catch up. So keep in mind ... the FN here and the Bergmann
Mars were adopted by major military powers, the Colt of course would be, but
not in this current guise. Now on that subject, we do have a couple of stragglers. There are a few cartridges that are relevant
to this discussion that didn't show up by 1904. These are cartridges that came
into being really between 1905 and 1910. So I just want to touch on a couple here.
Let's go ahead and start with the .45 ACP. This is what Colt would put its work
on that 1900 pistol into eventually. The US military was not satisfied with a
.38 calibre pistol. They wanted .45 calibre. And Colt would of course scale up the
pistol, the Browning tilting barrel ... design, to meet the .45 ACP cartridge (which by the way Browning
also designed, he put together that cartridge as well). This would become obviously a standard
cartridge, still used extensively today. It would be adopted by the US in 1911, of
course. First pistol using it was in 1905. So still a pretty darn early cartridge. The Colt 1905
itself would be a reasonably successful pistol in the commercial market, but
was not adopted by any military. Nobody, military wise, would adopt this cartridge and
gun until it reached the 1911 stage of development, which is really a much more refined version
than the 1905 here. This one has no manual safety of any kind, the grip's not quite as as comfortable,
and the operating mechanism isn't quite as durable. Another one that we're gonna take a look
at, again from Browning, is the .25 ACP. This was introduced in 1906 with
the so-called "Baby" Browning. What's interesting about this is the
.25 ACP is a pretty pathetic cartridge. Doesn't really offer any improvement over some of
the small calibre cartridges that were available way back before 1900. However what it does
have going for it is that it was introduced with a Browning style pistol, basically a scaled-down
Browning 1900 or 1903 Pocket Hammerless. And the Browning name itself would convince people
to buy this pistol even if the cartridge was kind of unimpressive and underwhelming. Now obviously
the Baby Browning was a very compact pistol, so it was an excellent piece for the
civilian small concealable market. But really the cartridge itself owes its existence
to the pistol, and not the other way around. And lastly, while we're talking about more
Browning cartridges, the .380 Automatic was also introduced in this time period, 1908 specifically.
It was introduced in the 1908 Pocket Hammerless. This is the same pistol that Colt had introduced
in 1903 in .32 calibre. They scaled it up to .380. The .380 cartridge here really is quite good.
Unlike most of Browning's other cartridges, with the exception of the .45, it is a rimless
pistol cartridge. It was a nice modern design, as you can see from the numbers ... it's a pretty
... ballistically effective cartridge for its size. And for these reasons and
more it remains popular today. What we've done here I think really only
scratches the surface of the development that was going on during this time period. It was
really a robust period of invention and development, and what we looked at today are really just the
highlights, the things that really did become popular globally and on a large scale. If you're interested
in these sorts of cartridges and these pistols, there is just so much more to research
and look into and learn about these. But I hope you enjoyed this overview,
hopefully getting some context on what was developed when
was interesting and educational. I do want to thank James D Julia Auctioneers for
being my source for ... all of these pistol pictures. And a fantastic reference database at
municion.org of cartridge pictures and information. Definitely check that out if you want that info. If you enjoy this please consider
checking out my page on Patreon, that's all I'll say about that for today.
Thanks for watching, I'll see you guys next time.
