Whitney Wolverine: Atomic Age Design in a .22 Rimfire

the history of firearms design is really littered with the wreckage of good projects well-intentioned that simply didn't go anywhere successfully and today we're taking a look at one of them thanks for tuning in to another video on forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company where we are taking a look at a pair of Whitney Wolverine pistols now these are distinctive in large part because of their looks and they are just the epitome of the 1950s space-age aesthetic swoopy lines all aluminum manufacture really very cool guns the design was the product of one Robert Hill burgerbob hilberg Hilbert was a was a pretty distinguished firearms designer in his time he was in the military and then went to work at a succession of companies he worked for Colt initially he had actually approached Colt looking to sell a submachine gun design Colt looked at it and decided you know we don't really want to build this but you look like a talented guy and we'd like to hire you and that kind of took him completely by surprise and he ended up accepting the offer and worked at Colt for several years during world war ii he then moved into the aircraft industry he worked for Pratt & Whitney after the war he went to work for Republic aviation and then he got hired by the high-standard company so even even when he was working in the aircraft industry he was still interested in firearms he did some design work on 20 millimeter cannon feeding systems for aerial guns he is is an underappreciated name but really quite a talented designer now high standard he did all the development on the t 152 which was the product improved version of the browning 1919 intended for use in tanks actually have a separate video on that gun if you're interested in it when high standard did that project they were hired to make a small number of prototypes for the military to basically do the development work not necessarily to actually manufacture the guns in huge quantity so rather than try and set up a specific production line to do those they actually subcontracted most of the machining work to a company called Delmar Johnson tool Hilbert was working closely with more Johnson because they were manufacturing the gun that he was designing and after that project finished he actually ended up being hired by Delmar Johnson they'd been hoping to get a actually get a large contract to make the guns for the government and they thought that having hilberg on staff would help out with that now we're gonna leave the the machineguns aside because Bob hilberg had been tinkering with an idea for a handgun for some time he had initially called this the tribe mattock and it was a little tip-up barrel pistol that could be interchanged between 22:32 and 380 caliber he had noted that all three of these cartridges are almost exactly the same in length and thus and this isn't the only firearm that was ever conceived that has that sort of caliber interchangeability at any rate the the traumatic kind of morphed into what was first called the lightning and then the wolverine and then just the Whitney pistol and came into this form now as it was originally drawn up by hilberg the the traumatic looks kind of like this it also kind of looks like a vector cp1 it's definitely got those kind of futuristic retro futuristic now maybe swoopy lines to it and very cool-looking so to get back to the meat of our story here hilberg starts discussing this pistol idea with his new his new associates at Bellmore johnson tool and they decided that they couldn't want to get into the firearms manufacturing business and they think it would be a good idea to design and build this pistol of hill berg's so in 1955 they set up a subsidiary company to do firearms manufacturing on a commercial scale it's called Hilson which is a combination of hilberg and johnson it was primarily there were like six major officers of dellmore johnson who are stockholders in it but the two guys really running the show were johnson and bob hilberg and in 1956 they actually start production on their pistol now the deal with this remember this is pre internet age and they decide they want to find a company to do all of their marketing and distribution for them and they find that in a company called JL Galef and son and they they write up a contract which would prove really proved to be a big part of the undoing of this pistol and the contract stipulates that Calif will have exclusive worldwide distribution rights to the pistol and it will take care of all the marketing they have to order 10,000 guns in the first year and they have an option for I think it was three additional years after that they couldn't maintain their exclusive distributorship if they ordered ten thousand pistols each year in exchange the Hilson company which by the way would end up fairly quickly being renamed the Whitney firearm Whitney firearms Incorporated just to kind of grab the historical branding of the Whitney name based on Eli Whitney huge huge element in both firearms manufacturer in the American industrial revolution at any rate they they sell these pistols to gala for $16.53 apiece which is pretty cheap they had gone through and done a bunch of costing estimates and planning and figured this would be a price that was low enough to attract a company like Gail F to do their distribution but high enough that they could be US make a sustainable nice little profit on it so they go into this production starts in 1956 and it slowly ramps up until in July and August it hits its peak of about three hundred and thirty guns per week which is it's pretty decent production the problem is they're not making enough money on this pistol they underestimated the actual cost shocking how that might happen not that that happens all the time in start-up manufacturing and especially in the firearms industry but unfortunately they figured that they were like three dollars short of where they needed to be to actually make the manufacturing economically sustainable so they had a plan they were gonna see if they could make a few changes and they figured as they increase their volume their cost would decrease and they'd be able to you know to do better well the problem is right about this time as they're delivering more and more pistols in this 10,000 unit order to galya galya from back to them and says you know what we're actually having some trouble selling these so go ahead and like slow down your deliveries we don't need all that many right now and that was a huge problem for whitney because of course they've got nowhere else to go they have made they've obligated themselves to only sell the guns to Galya they can't change the price they can't sell to anybody else and now they've just been told the one thing that might have saved it like being able to manufacture more of them and get a better volume price on a lot of the work they were doing now you can't do that either this put them into a serious financial crimp and ultimately it would lead to the company's bankruptcy the last of the ten thousand pistols were delivered in May of 1957 and that same year Hilson and well Hilson hilberg and johnson looked at this situation and realized they have no way out of this and so they they started looking for someone it could either default on the whole thing on all of the debt that they had taken on to get the company started or they could sell the whole company and they ended up finding a buyer in the name of a guy named Charles Lowe who bought the entire company all of his assets all of its patent rights for $100,000 and that conveniently repaid the hundred thousand dollar initial debt that they had taken on to start the company but it left them was something like eighty thousand dollars in additional accumulated debt that they had spent actually you know manufacturing those first ten thousand pistols and it's really pretty impressive especially today to consider that in light of this they could have probably figured out some way to walk away from from that debt but instead hilberg and the officers of Elmore Johnson Toole who are financially involved in the company they actually they went back to work at Belmar Johnson doing what they had been doing and over the course of several years they managed despite some significant financial hardship to pay back all of the debts that they had accumulated on the Whitney Wolverine pistol design hilberg was also particularly concerned about the employees that he had brought on he had really legitimately thought that this was a fantastic opportunity that it would lead to a much bigger company they would have a wider product line and it'd be a great opportunity and he had brought in people that he knew and genuinely cared about and it really hurt him to see those people basically end up fired after a year when the company went under and so he he put in not a trivial amount of effort trying to find new jobs for all of his employees and actually did pretty well at it and a lot of the employees of the Whitney company would go on to have relatively distinguished careers of their own elsewhere in the industry so that's a really cool side note on what is otherwise kind of a depressing project to get back to our story Lowe and his lawyers figured that technically speaking he had not purchased Whitney firearms incorporated he had actually purchased that company's physical assets their pistols their tooling their building and he had purchased their intellectual assets the patent rights and then he created a new firm the Whitney firearms company which started making the same gun but he figured because of this because he didn't technically buy the old company he was not bound by this exclusive distributorship contract with Alif and so he was gonna start selling pistols directly himself and that was that was his plan to make this whole endeavor profitable the problem was as soon as he started doing that in February of 1958 the gay love company sued him saying that basically no you are bound by this distributorship contract and you can't sell pistols only we can sell pistols this lawsuit would drag on for four years it wouldn't ultimately be resolved until January of 1962 and at that point it was done by private agreement never actually did go to a final court ruling and this really put a crimp on Lowe's ability and inclination to sell guns because if he kept selling a lot of pistols and then ultimately lost the lawsuit all of his profit he would have to turn over to Galya so for a while he kept building pistols and just kind of putting them in storage and ultimately he wouldn't make all that many in total Lowe only manufactured 2578 whitney pistols add that to the ten thousand and change that had been manufactured by the original company and you have a grand total of thirteen thousand three hundred and seventy one of these manufactured in total and lo after those twenty five hundred sixty-eight low shut down operations it wasn't profitable and the guns were bought out wholesale by a couple of big distributors who you know bought five to seven hundred and fifty each and then the guns would spend the next couple of years trickling out onto the commercial market generally at a lower price than what they did initially been set at by Galef so that kind of in a nutshell is the story of the Whitney pistol so let's go ahead and take a closer look at these and some of the mechanical details and how they work and then we'll come back and talk about why this pistol failed in the way it did yeah this is totally a Buck Rogers pistol right here so what we have is twenty two caliber semi-automatic has a heel magazine release has a ten round magazine there's some cool mechanical features to this that we'll take a look at in just a moment it does have a magazine safety so it can only be fired with the magazine inserted hammer firing gun our hammer right there and then this is not actually a slide it is a tubular shroud with the working bits on the inside so pretty cool there the whole lower assembly is a single aluminum casting as is the back strap and these two little cocking piece ears and this was kind of one of the the more futuristic elements of the gun aside from its looks where its use of aluminum that was a rare thing at this time now the standard guns like this one had this it looks like it's blue but of course it's aluminum so it's an anodized finish with these brown plastic grips however the gun has become a bit more distinctive for the nickel plated version now the nickel version of this gun really took those buck rogers looks and crank them up an extra notch it looks even cooler in nickel now most of the nickel ones will actually have kind of creamy white or ivory white grip panels this one is a bit of an exception this is here at an auction and the container states that this pistol was given to him directly by Bob hilberg so and it's not quite in the right serial range for a commercial nickel-plated pistol so this is probably one that he'll Berg himself had nickeled as an experiment and they used the standard grips on it but I'm getting ahead of myself since we're talking about the nickeled finished guns let me mention that only 500 of the 13,000 of these made only 500 were actually nickeled and they will fall into the serial number range of 32,000 546 through thirty three thousand ninety-nine so this one comes a couple hundred before because it does have this special circumstance of coming directly from hilberg that is understandable there what one should be aware that there are absolutely fake nickel Wolverines out there because they do bring a significant premium so if you are presented with a nickel plated or a nickel finish Witney Wolverine and the serial number is outside of that three two five four six two three three nine nine range you should be very suspicious of it now when we look at markings on the left side you'll see Whitney they originally the first couple thousand guns also said Wolverine because that was the name that they had chosen for the pistol allegedly I can't prove this but it seems as reasonable as anything else allegedly because Bob Hilbert was a really big fan of the Michigan Wolverines and the name sounded cool to Gale off' so like why not what more reason do you need to pick that as the name the problem was they didn't look into it all that deeply and it turned out that Wolverine was actually a trademark name of the Lymon company for a line of scopes that they had well the board of corporate officers of Elmore Johnson tool were good friends with some of the corporate officers of Lyman and they came to a very you know amenable gentleman's agreement to avoid any sort of lawsuit that Whitney would simply stop using the name Wolverine and blamin would let the whole matter drop so the first couple thousand guns say Wolverine the rest of them they left that off now this will apply slightly differently to the boxes which we'll get to in a moment on the other side we have Whitney firearms incorporated New Haven Connecticut this would change later to the Whitney firearms company after it was purchased by Lowe and the serial numbers are an interesting thing so they made a total of thirteen thousand three hundred and seventy one of the is this a serial serial number 29,000 which raises an obvious and immediate question well they actually the first gun that they produced commercially was serial number 100,000 and one because they were anticipating fairly high sales and they wanted to make them look even higher the problem was after they got a couple thousand in they realized that like they weren't selling that fast and this hundred thousand serial number looked kind of goofy and so they made a change and they dropped the stereo number back to 23,000 so the first couple thousand are in the 100's hundred thousands and then they dropped to twenty three thousand and pretty much run straight on from there to about thirty seven thousand you'll notice that is also too many numbers well there were actually some gaps in the serial number of range but basically what you will run into is about a hundred to maybe a hundred and three thousand and then twenty-three through thirty seven so twenty nine thousand here is kind of mid to mid late production mid production when they made this jump to serial number twenty three thousand they did it in conjunction with another change and that was changing the actual alloy specification of the aluminum that they were using the problem was they had started with a number to 18 alloy and it was a really good alloy it was very strong but it was also a little expensive and one of the things they decided to try and do well they were looking for ways to cut costs because this is during that period when Gail F has told them to stop shipping so many guns how do we how do we try and make this a profitable arrangement and it just happens that as part of the molding process or the casting process for these raw frames they would periodically pour plastic into the mold just to check on its condition you know we'll make a plastic example to see if anything's getting particularly worn and they had one of these plastic you know check you know quality control frames sitting around at the shop and someone got the thought of for kicks let's go ahead and assemble a gun like let's finish this plastic frame and a gun on it and they discovered that it actually worked and so then they put a couple of thousand rounds through it and discovered it still actually worked there that the stresses were all taken up in in the top half of the gun the steel slide and everything or the steel shroud and they weren't willing to go so far as to actually make a plastic frame that probably would have been a commercially bad idea but what it did make them realize is that they could get away with a much weaker aluminum alloy so they changed alloys to three Ella a number 380 alloy and the finish wasn't quite as nice but they figured that was an acceptable trade-off because they were able to reduce their cost by not a trivial amount and it is at that change that they also changed the serial number blocks one of the really cool design aspects of this pistol is the rear sight not normally something you'd get excited about it's just this very simple piece of flat sheet steel bent and a half circle and slid into the top of the shroud there the barrel shroud now hilberg had been trained to figure out what sort of rear sight he could put on this gun he wasn't a huge fan he needed something that was adjustable so he couldn't just cast it into the the top of the assembly here he wasn't really excited by the idea of dovetailing something in because it would almost certainly be a steel sight dovetailed into this aluminum piece of forging and so that would wear quickly and have potential problems and he actually mentioned this problem to a friend of his by the name of Harry Seyfried who is also a firearms designer and Harry thought about it and apparently in the space of about an afternoon came up with this idea scribbled it down on some paper and and suggested it to hilberg and it looked really the cut out there that you see actually creates a shadow that gives you a nice crisp sight picture like you can see there let's see if we can get the front sight in focus so there's the front sight and then it'll come back to the rear sight here in a moment that is a really simple way to get a really nice crisp sight picture and hilberg asked cifra if he could use this and secret basically said sure why not they never bothered the patented cult would end up actually using something like this in the 1970s on a different gun but just a really innovative simple easy solution this is adjustable for windage you can tap it back and forth but because it's not really a dovetail it's just tension on these two little grooves it doesn't cause any undue wear and it doesn't become loose over time to disassemble the Whitney we're going to start at the muzzle we have a threaded muzzle nut here you push down the little plunger and unscrewed this you do have to make sure that the hammer is cocked and you have to take the magazine out then you can actually pull the whole internal frame or internal bolt assembly out of the gun a little stiff it's a little stiff at times because it's actually pushing down on the hammer here so once you've got this out this is all aluminum you can set this aside so this is really the mechanical heart of the pistol this is actually steel unlike the rest of that frame which is aluminum the way it works is that this nut at the front holds the barrel in place and then this the rest of this steel assembly slides back and forth when you fire so we've got a breech block here barrel up in front and that's all retained within this steel tube now up at the very front of the assembly we have a washer and a little key in this case those stuck in the frame and kind of fell out separately when I disassembled it that happens from time to time but when you reassemble it you need to put them back in like this and this simply locks the barrel in the proper orientation in the frame so once it's out you can take those two pieces out the next thing is a another key here that locks the firing pin in place prevents it from coming out this is held in place by the top of the aluminum frame so when the guns out of the frame we can tap that out don't lose that remember this isn't military pistol you don't have to worry about you know disassembling this while being subjected to mortar fire or anything once the keyway is out then the firing pin can come out it's a rimfire pistol and so that's your firing pin once the firing pin is out we can then unscrew this rear set of cocking ears this is another aluminum piece and this is something that you need to be careful with because probably the most common way to break these pistols is to squeeze on these two and these wings can actually snap off and if you break something like this good luck finding a replacement today so be gentle with these when you're using when you're cycling this don't squeeze together just pull backwards next up we have a cross pin here which holds the breech block in place immanuel actually suggests that the firing pin makes a good tool for pushing that out and you kind of also want to hold a little bit of tension on the barrel so that it's not pushing on the breech block pop that guy out and then the breech block will come out the back of the gun this one's nice and tight no and we can then bring the barrel out the back as well I'm gonna use a plastic punch here just to push on barrel there we go so there's our barrel recoil spring and the empty slide we can take out the last couple little pieces here as well the ejector just slips out it's got that little bend in it that slips right in there and we can pretty much do the same thing with the extractor which is going to pop out like that it's got a little spring-loaded plunger there that holds it in place so you can push it in like so and take it out there you go there are all of the working pieces of a Whitney Wolverine it seems like a lot of pieces and for a military pistol this would be an unacceptable sort of disassembly but once you've taken apart something like a Ruger standard model this isn't so bad one of the elements that hilberg put a lot of development into was actually the recoil spring the recoil spring that he designed for this is quite round wire and it's not quite flat wire either he didn't want the corners on flat wire but he also wanted the spring to be able to compress nice and evenly like a flat wire spring so this is actually round wire where the top and bottom surfaces have been ground flat it was a fairly expensive thing to do especially in context of the rest of the pistol but it makes for a really nice mainspring for these guns I also want to point out a couple interesting elements of the magazine design for one thing the magazine is tapered narrow at the top and wide at the bottom to make it a little bit a little bit easier to insert so there's a nice big hole at the bottom of the pistol that's easy to get the magazine into and then it just kind of expands and locks itself in as you insert it and then the magazine is also slightly tapered to be narrow at the front and wider at the back and the idea here is that your cartridges would actually alternate pushing to the left and pushing to the right and what that meant is that the rims would be offset from each other so here and then there and then here and then there and so on which meant that you didn't need the curve that is often seen in 22 caliber magazines because the body of the cartridge is actually straight the curve only comes when the rim of one round sits on top of the body or the rim of the round below it so by staggering them left and right he was able to keep the stack of cartridges relatively flat that is a really cool magazine design he also put a little hole in here that's the right size that you can stick it in empty 22 casing in to use as handle to help pull the follower down if you need to and then the magazine is is marked where you have 10 rounds and five rounds capacity just a quick look at the Whitney boxes here I mentioned that early on they picked the name Wolverine but then dropped it it was only like the first 2,000 guns that had the name Wolverine on them however they had ordered a whole bunch of boxes so Wolverine remained on the boxes for a much longer time because they went ahead and just used what they had ordered before making a new one so this is the first version of the box inside you have actually a pretty nice set of parts list exploded diagram disassembly and operating instructions little note about reassembly and then they actually used corrugated cardboard cut in the shape of the Whitney pistol to set the gun in the box later on this would be replaced by a slightly different form they first replaced the cardboard with this molded plastic in the shape of the pistol and then they replace the actual box design once they ran out of the first ones with one that just says Whitney and no longer says Wolverine it's generally agreed that the Whitney pistol is a pretty good pistol by itself the problems with it that led to this being a commercial failure were largely problems of marketing when hilberg and Johnson when they sign this distributorship with gala they had been anticipating the guns would be sold primarily over the counter that they would send out samples to gun shops and distributors and people could go into a gun shop and look at a Whitney and pick it up and handle it and recognize how light it was and how great handling was and buy it there and take it home this is the 1950s that's how you know even to this day that's how a lot of people buy guns rather than over the internet what they found instead was that bailiff was actually marketing these guns almost entirely mail-order now prior this was prior to 1968 so that was easy to do there were no licenses or anything involved you could write away for a pistol send a couple dollars pay for the rest of it cash on delivery and they just ship you a gun to your house the problem was it's harder to market a gun that way because all people had to go on was a little advertising blurb and a picture they couldn't handle it they couldn't feel the guns actual physical characteristics and on top of that gay live didn't actually do all that much marketing the best thing they ever had happen was an article in guns magazine which was quite positive but they didn't run very many advertisements they ran a few a couple ads a year in some of the major magazines but not the sort of advertising campaign that would have been required to get a brand new pistol like this noticed and actually appealing to people the price on the gun was not was maybe competitive but not or was comparable not super competitive so the Whitney Wolverine was sold for 3995 in the standard blued configuration and an extra five dollars so 4495 nickeled and you could compare that to well the Ruger standard model what the gun that's still on the market today and it's I believe mark for iteration those were a little cheaper those were thirty seven fifty so a couple dollars less you could get a Ruger which by the way was sold largely over the counter so he could go into the shop handle one and go oh yes this was a nice pistol and walk home with it you could get the Colt sportsman and huntsman pistols were a little bit more expensive at forty six dollars and change then you also had high standard pistols that were competitively priced and this was in many ways a golden age of surplus firearms there are a ton of surplus pistols out there that you could get for as little as well just under ten dollars so the Whitney had a lot of competition and Gail if didn't do enough to meet that competition the Whitney pistol has become really fairly popular with collectors it's this cool example of a very unique looking very reminiscent of the 1950's Atomic Age pistol relatively inexpensive manufactured in the US designed by an American actually really legitimately mechanically a good pistol and of course out of production since 1962 and thus relatively unavailable collectible etc it's unfortunate for Bob hilberg that people didn't have that attitude when the guns were originally for sale but such as life what's interesting is there was actually an attempt to bring back the Whitney in 2002 the Olympic firearms company pride best known for its ar-15s talked to hilberg and they decided that they wanted well all the patents were expired at that point so there was nothing to stop them but they actually talked to hilberg about this project and got his blessing on it they wanted to reintroduce the Whitney and Hilbert suggestion they actually replaced the aluminum lower with a polymer lower to make it a bit more modern and a bit more cost-effective those were introduced in 2002 and even those failed to do very well by 2017 I believe those had gone out of production you can find them occasionally on the civilian on the second-hand market now but the reproduction Whitney's were also not that popular of a gun I think there is an element to this that people wanted the historical version and even if the new version had the same sort of handling hey just wasn't the same so I think future collectors will find anyone who has a Whitney now in 10 or 20 years is going to wish that they also had one of the polymer Olympic ones just because by that point it will have achieved some of the same you know cult status as the originals and it's a nice piece to add to a collection of someone who has an original Whitney but at any rate I think that pretty well covers the whole story of the the the traumatic turn lightning turn Wolverine turned just Whitney if you would like either of these two examples they are both coming up for sale here at Rock Island in their May of 2019 premiere auction so you can take a look at their catalog to get the details price estimates it online all that sort of stuff and also check out everything else they have in that auction thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 826,382

Rating: 4.954277 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, 22, rimfire, 22lr, whitney wolverine, hillson, hillberg, hillburg, bob hillberg, robert hillberg, nickel, aluminum, space age pistol, pistol, ruger, high standard, plinker, commercial, atomic age, space age, art deco, fancy pistol, failure, olympic, olympic arms, whitney, wolverine, eli whitney, trimatic, bellmore johnson tool

Id: 0Blm6-H_j84

Length: 33min 20sec (2000 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Sgt_Stinger]

I know that making replicas of guns without the technical package is extremely hard, but this seems like a great candidate to be made in polymer at a low cost. I wonder if the market would want it though.

[u/poindexterg]

I like it when there’s a crazy history with the firearm that Ian can go over. This one was pretty entertaining.

[u/Ceraunius]

Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.

[u/mclovinmak]

This reminds of the LifeSizePotato video on this gun from years ago! If these 2 guys collab one day, I’d be a happy camper.

[u/Darthwilhelm]

Looks like something out of Fallout.

[u/YOUREABOT]

Space pistol!

[u/tshiar]

In case anyone's interested, here's Rock Island's write up about the wolverine with diagrams of the Tri-matic predecessor: https://www.rockislandauction.com/blog/rise-and-fall-of-the-whitney-wolverine/

[u/delwin23]

I never knew the soft pellet guns I had as a kid were based on something other than someone's vaguely space age shaped imagination.

[u/nightingaleblade]

If one of these misfired I guess you could call it a space jam.