Le Petit Protector is a ring pistol, made in both 5 shot/5mm and 6 shot/4mm pinfire variations, as well as a smaller version holding 7 rounds of 2mm pinfire, called the “Femme Fatale”. They are mechanically quite simple, with a manually cocked hammer, manually indexed cylinder, and can be reloade...

One of many firearms developed for Remington by Joseph Rider was the Rider Magazine Pistol - a manually operated 5-shot repeater chambered for the .32 extra-short rimfire cartridge (the same round used by the Chicago Palm Protector). It used a tube magazine under the barrel and a simple but cleve...

The VP9 "Veterinary Pistol" (um...yeah) from Brugger & Thomet is a manually operated 9x19mm handgun with a quite effective suppressor built right onto the barrel. It is, in fact, a remarkably close copy of the British SOE Welrod pistol from World War II, right down to some pretty minor details.
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The 1880s and 1890s were a fertile period of experimentation with repeating handguns. One such example is this design by Marius Berger, manufactured in France by St Etienne in 1880 and 1881. It uses a ring trigger and a 4-stage cycle in which pulling the trigger sequentially:

1) Opens the bree...

Matt of M426 lets BotR test his .32 ACP Welrod pistol [desperately trying not to use trigger words that will set off the YouTube bots...] Even with the rubber wipes shot through, it's really quite quiet - not silent, but comfortable without hearing protection. Also, it's certainly acceptably accu...

Josef Schulhof was the the first and most prolific designer of manually operated pistols in Austria in the 1880s. For a brief few years, there was a lot of developmental work done in this field, comparable really only to the American Volcanic system. The Austrian pistols were more practical, an...

One of the very last, most common, and best looking of the Austrian manually operated pistols is the Bittner. Designed by Gustav Bittner in 1893 and going into production in 1896 (the known examples were proofed in 1897 and 1898), I think the Bittner is just about the most beautiful pistol I have...

Edwin Reiger was an Austrian designer who took the basic mechanism of the Passler & Seidl ring trigger manual pistol and added a sort of revolver magazine to it. Reiger used a drop-in 6-round clip very similar to the Blake rifle clip. Only two examples of these pistols are known to survive, and t...

Franz Passler and Ferdinand Seidl formed a partnership to make manually-operated pistols in Austria in the late 1880s, but the arrangement did not last. Their design was initially patented by Passler in Austria, and then jointly by both men in Germany. It is a rotating barrel design similar in fu...

Josef Schulhof was an Austrian who decided to leave his farm and work in firearms design. He moved to Vienna and received his first firearms patent in 1882. He would go on to design and manufacture a small line of manual repeating handguns through the mid and late 1880s, until his death in 1890. ...

Austria was a hotbed of early repeating handgun design, first with manually operated designs and shortly thereafter with self-loaders. One of the men contributing to this development in the 1880s was Josef Schulhof, a farmer-turned-gunsmith who had a number of patents and designs to his credit. H...

The “Pistol-Carbine” was a pattern offered by the Volcanic Arms Company combining a 16 inch rifle-length barrel with a pistol grip and detachable shoulder stock (it could also be had with an 8 inch barrel). This is the rarest major variations the Volcanic, with only about 300 examples made. This ...

The Venditti pistols are copies of the Volcanic made in southern Italy in the mid to late 1870s - well after the rocket ball style of ammunition had become obsolete. Pietro Venditti’s first patent was in 1872 for a two-barreled rocket-ball-firing pistol. He followed that with an 1875 patent for a...

The deep beginnings of the Volcanic go back to Walter Hunt's Volitional Repeater, which became the Jennings repeating rifle, which then became the Smith-Jennings repeating rifle when Horace Smith was brought in to improve it. Smith was able to make it more commercially viable than the Jennings ha...