William John Whiting spent about 10 years trying to get the British military to adopt his automatic pistol, and finally achieved his goal in 1913 with a contract for pistols supplied to the British Royal Navy - only to have the expense of World War I wipe away all interest in self-loading pistols.

In my defense, I want to point out that the only reason I wanted to get one of these pistols was to see how much it actually resembled the Czech vz.61 Skorpion, wich is a very nice piece of machinery. And the answer is, the Armitage "Scarab" version is like the real Skorpion in basic profile only...

There are really no new ideas in firearms design today - some of the best and brightest engineers humanity has produced have spent the last 120+ years figuring out every possible mechanism for building self-loading firearms. What we have today in new guns are creative new ways to put together var...

BSA (Birmingham Small Arms) was the largest private arms maker in the UK during World War One, and when the war ended it of course saw its huge military contracts evaporate. One of BSA's efforts to develop new markets and product lines was to devise a series of self-loading pistols. These also in...

Last week, we talked a bit about obsolete firearms controls over at the ForgottenWeapons.com blog, and that discussion made me think of a fairly recent pistols with a fairly unique feature, the Browning BDM. Mechanically, the BDM is a pretty standard modern automatic pistol - it uses the ubiquito...

The CZ-52 really isn't a forgotten weapons yet, but it is a pretty interesting gun mechanically, and well worth taking a look at. About 200,000 of them were made in Czechoslovakia from 1952 to 1954, and they served as that country's standard military sidearm for several decades (which the rest of...

Early in the production of the C96 Mauser, the company tried a variety of different configurations of the pistol, to see what would be popular and sell well. Most of these were abandoned by about 1902, when the design was more or less standardized to the version were are familiar with today. One ...

When we think about roller-delayed blowback firearms, we generally think of H&K rifles - but H&K also made a miniature version of the system for the P9 pistol in the late 1960s. The P9 was made as a single-stack design in both 9mm and .45ACP, along with a target version (with adjustable sights) a...

I recently had the chance to hit the range with a VP-70Z, the semiauto civilian version of H&K's 1970 machine pistol. It is notable both for being one of the few production machine pistols around (and it would only fire automatically when its optional buttstock was attached), but also for being t...

The Semmerling LM4 has pretty much no historical significance, but it does have a pretty unusual operating system. It is a .45ACP backup pistol developed by a fellow named Philip R. Lichtman in the 1970s. It was a pretty compact pistol, intended as a last-ditch backup weapon while still being in ...

We had the chance to dig into a Roth Steyr 1907 selfloading pistol recently, and put together a video on it. The pistol is quite unusual, with a fixed internal magazine, rotating barrel locking system, and quasi-double action trigger mechanism (actually quite similar to modern striker-fire pistol...

In the first years of the 20th century, the US military was looking for a new standard sidearm in a .45-caliber cartridge, and set up a series of trials to choose one. The entrants to the 1907 pistol trials included many of the prominent semiauto pistols of the day, like the Parabellum (aka Luger...

This particular 1902-made example of the C96 Mauser incorporates several experimental features of the design that would never go into mass production. It was an effort to make a version of the C96 that would be more suitable for civilian carry - something a bit lighter and more compact than the m...

We previously got to take a look at a Hino-Komuro, a Japanese blow-forward automatic pistol dating from 1908 - and today we have another blow-forward from 1908. Andreas Schwarzlose (best known for his 1907 and 07/12 machine guns) designed this pistol for military and civilian use, and it saw mino...

I've been promising this range video for a while now, and here it is. We took all three configurations of the C96 Broomhandle Mauser - a pistol, a carbine, and a machine pistol - out to the range for some comparisons.

We have another video to post today - this time about the Steyr 1912 handgun, aka the Steyr-Hahn.

The Hino-Komuro pistol (sometimes spelled Komura) was developed by a young Japanese inventor named Kumazo Hino, and financed by Tomijiro Komuro in the first decade of the 20th century. The gun uses a virtually unique blow-forward mechanism, which makes it very interesting to study. The rear of th...

Today we have a video for you on a German "Jager" pistol, so named because it was made by the Jager company. Jager was a well-respected maker of high quality sporting arms, having been established in 1901 in Suhl, Germany. With the onset of World War One, Kaiser Wilhelm decreed that all arms manu...

The Radium was the predecessor to the much more well-known (and more successful) Ruby pistol made by Gabilonda y Urresti, which was sold to the French Army by the hundreds of thousands during World War One. The Radium was very unusual in its magazine design, which featured a spring loaded sliding...

The "Hermit Kingdom" of North Korea has a number of somewhat unusual military firearms that are not quite direct copies of anything else, but we very rarely get to see example of them up close. The Type 70 was intended for high-ranking officers, replacing the Type 64 (which was a copy of the Brow...

The Fiala Model 1920 was a manually-operated repeating pistol in .22LR caliber that was marketed with the backing of famed polar explorer Anthony Fiala. The guns came as a set of one frame, three barrels (3", 7.5", and 20") and a removable shoulder stock. This allowed the owner to set the gun up ...

Today's item is an example of the smallest centerfire pistol ever made - a 2.7mm Kolibri semiauto. About a thousand of these were made between 1910 and 1914, firing a 3-grain projectile at about 650 fps (for a total of 3 ftlb of muzzle energy). It may be insanely impractical, but it's a great pi...

The Mars pistol was designed by Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax in England in 1898, and only 81 were produced by the time manufacturing ended in 1907. These pistols were chambered for several different cartridges, all of them tremendously powerful for the day (and really not equaled by another self-load...

During the late 1920s, it looked like the German Army was going to replace the P08 Luger with a less expensive sidearm, and several major German companies developed prototype guns to meet this anticipated need. The replacement ended up being postponed for nearly a decade (the P38 would be the eve...