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, and as they still predated the development of any practical self-loading pistols, there was a chance that they could have become commercially relevant. This did not actually happen, of course, as any advantages they offered over revolvers were still better in the crop of self-loaders that emerged in the late 1890s.

Schulhof’s first pistols were patented in 1884, and he experimented with a variety of locking system and magazine systems. This example is an 1887 type, with a spring-loaded rotating bolt and a 6-round rotary magazine. It was intended to be fired from an open bolt, rather like a double-action revolver - but it could be carried with the chamber loaded an a manual safety engaged.