Designed by Austrian immigrant Joseph Joachim Reifgraber, this is a prototype gas-assisted short recoil pistol in a .38 rimmed revolver cartridge. While this version did not see any serial production, the Union Firearms Company of Toledo (Ohio) did market a slightly smaller model in .32 S&W (and ...

The Eibar region of Spain is known as the center of a lot of pistol production from WWI through the Spanish Civil War, typically pistols called Ruby clones. Well, the various small gunmakers there were looking to copy more than just the Ruby. They duplicated a number of American and European revo...

William Whiting was an engineer who spent his entire adult career with the Webley company, and was responsible for all of their in-house self-loading pistol designs. This work initially focused on a behemoth of a pistol, the Model 1904 intended for military contracts. The gun proved insufficientl...

The Little Tom pistols designed by Alois Tomiška are notable for two particular features: their unusual reloading system and for being the first commercial DAO automatic pistols. Made in both .25ACP and .32 ACP in the 1920s (the .25 versions are much more common than the .32s), these beat out the...

Smith & Wesson's first venture into the autoloading pistol market was done under the leadership of Joe Wesson, Daniel Wesson's son. He was quite the automatic pistol enthusiast, and made an agreement to license patents of Liege designer Charles Clement for adaptation into a pistol for the US mark...

Lugers! there are approximately a gazillion different recognized varieties, because the pistol became so popular and iconic. And yet...they all kinda look the same, don't they? (If you are a Luger collector, don't answer that!) A great many ( I daresay the significant majority) of the Luger varia...

The Italian military went into WWI having already adopted a semiautomatic sidearm - the Model 1910 Glisenti (and its somewhat simplified Brixia cousin). However, the 1910 Glisenti was a very complex design, and much too expensive to be practical for the needs of the global cataclysm that was the ...

In the 1920s Poland began looking for a new standard military pistol, and tested a variety of compact .380s. The representative from FN brought along an early iteration of the High Power (along with their other entry) even though it was much too large and heavy to meet the Polish requirements. Af...

The Ortgies is a pistol whose interested aspects are often overlooked on the assumption that it is just another identical .32 ACP blowback pistol. Well, it is that - but it is also more.

Mechanically, the Ortgies has a rather unusual grip safety mechanism that is quite different from what we e...

The Walther P38 was adopted by Germany in 1938 as a replacement for the P08 Luger - not really because the Luger was a bad pistol, but because it was an expensive pistol. Walther began development of its replacement in 1932 with two different development tracks - one was a scaled-up Model PP blow...

In the late 1920s, German Ordnance hinted at an interest in replacing the P.08 Luger pistols with a less expensive handgun design. This prompted a number of submissions from hopeful companies, including this design from the Simson company of Suhl. It is chambered for the 9x19 Parabellum cartridge...

Lazar Yovanovitch was a Serbian native of Yugoslavia, born in Belgrade. He left engineering school to design firearms, and developed a couple .22 and .380 caliber pistols. None were adopted by the Yugoslav military, but he did use his .380 in international competition at the 1933 ISSF 25m rapid f...

The Le Français was a staple of Manufrance production, being first designed in 1912 and produced until the late 1960s. This example is in .32ACP caliber, which was only made for the commercial market in the 1950s and 60s (after the cartridge was out of service with the French military and thus ci...

The Hamada was one of very few Japanese military weapons made by a private commercial firm. Designed and introduced in 1940, the basic Type Hamada pistol was a blowback .32ACP handgun similar in style to the Browning model 1910. About 5000 of them were manufactured during WWII, although most of t...

The Walther HP was the immediate predecessor to the P38 pistol that was adopted into widespread German service. The HP (Heeres Pistole, or Army Pistol) was offered for commercial sale and export by Walther. It was formally adopted by the Swedish army in 1939, but only a small number were shipped ...

Back before World War One, when Abercrombie & Fitch was still a true sporting goods company catering to the likes of Joseph Steinbeck and Theodore Roosevelt, they decided to offer Luger pistols for sale. This was simple enough, with guns ordered from DWM in Germany. It became harder after the war...

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 handgun using the same gas-operated, rotating bolt mechanism as the machine gun. It is a pretty massive steel beast 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 pistol’s name). Arnaiz conceived the idea of mounting a lever (palanca in Spanish) onto a p...

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 first automatic pistol to be used by the Japanese military, although it was a private-purchase sidearm for o...

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 Theodorovic, and turned it over to his engineer Karel Krnka to develop (I'...

When I heard about Hi-Point releasing a 10mm pistol (the JXP 10), I knew I needed to do something fun with it. Hi-Point is often derided - and often for good reasons - but fundamentally the Hi-Point design does exactly what it is advertised to. It is a functional and extremely inexpensive pistol....

The Type 64 is a dedicated suppressed pistol first introduced in 1965 and used in the Vietnam War. It uses a rimless version of the .32 ACP cartridge (7.65x17mm) in a 9-round Makarov like magazine. Despite outward similarity to the Makarov (especially the grip), the design is wholly unique intern...

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 long-recoil, rotating-bolt pistols culminating in the Frommer Stop, which was adopted by the ...

The Le Français pistol was designed by Etienne Mimard in 1912, and listed in the Manufrance catalog in 1914. It was a .25ACP (6.35mm Browning) civilian defensive pistol for pocket carry, and designed with elements specifically for that purpose. It had a long double action trigger instead of a man...