When was the mauser invented

His brother Wilhelm was four years older. The factory was built in an Augustine cloister, chosen because it was very stoutly built and ideal for arms production. Together with his brother Paul Mauser — Wilhelm Mauser designed the Mauser Model rifle, the first of a successful line of Mauser rifles and pistols. The rifle was adopted as the Gewehr 71 or Infanterie-Gewehr 71 and was the first metal cartridge weapon of the German Empire. Following the death of his brother Wilhelm, January 13 , Paul Mauser takes over sole leadership of the expanding company.

The world war 1 is marked 7. My father in law trained under some former Mauser machinists. He said they still got sad when they talked about the machinery being dismantled and put on a train. Good God! Time limit exceeded. Leave a Comment Your discussions, feedback and comments are welcome here as long as they are relevant and insightful. Please be respectful of others. We reserve the right to edit as appropriate, delete profane, harassing, abusive and spam comments or posts, and block repeat offenders.

All comments are held for moderation and will appear after approval. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Home » News » History of Mauser Firearms The company which would later become known as Mauser was started on July 31st in when Friedrich I of Wurttemberg founded a weapons factory in the small hamlet of Oberndorf deep within the Black Forest of Germany.

Previous Post Next Post. Photos Works. Main Photo. Peter Mauser. School period Add photo. Career Add photo. Achievements Add photo. Membership Add photo. That first article of the contract demonstrates graphically the extent to which Norris bound the impoverished Mauser brothers. For all this he was to pay them 80, francs over a period of fourteen years.

If he personally decided to continue the contract that long! Even then there was a hook in the contract. The French encouraged him to believe they might buy the system. Buried in the contract, therefore, we find the following:. In any event, it is understood that in case Mr.

Norris should cease to pay completely the annual sum stipulated above, he shall retain meanwhile as indemnity for his trouble the French patent. During our Civil War the firm of E. In January he obtained one order for 5, carbines. When the hammer was thumbed back, the breechblock could be rolled back on its axis pin to expose the chamber for loading. The breech piece or block was split. Several design improvements came later. With the drying up of the American market for military arms, Remington sent Samuel Norris and his brother John to Europe to canvass new markets.

Their success was phenomenal. No European nation had either our machinery or our knowledge. Then—even as now—war and the threat of war hung like a pall over the entire continent.

Every nation felt itself menaced. All sought means of improved defense. The doors of all the chancelleries of Europe were ready to be opened by arms salesmen. And the brothers Norris were super salesmen. They walked with the mighty. They dined with kings. They became wealthy and powerful. And they had a strangle hold on the Mausers. While Norris recognized the inherent value of the new Mauser rifle, his primary interest was in converting the Chassepot.

He took Remington into partnership on the rifle deal knowing that that they would bury the new bolt rifle in order to push their own rolling block rifle. Samuel Remington resolutely refused to face the fact that the bolt action was the coming military rifle; and the bankruptcy of his firm in stemmed in no small measure from that determination.

It is to the credit of Samuel Norris that he tried to convince Remington that a change was coming. When Norris was finally convinced that he had saturated the small European Nations with rolling-block Remingtons, that Samuel Remington would not push the bolt action, and that with the danger of approaching war France was against a change, Samuel Norris decided to save his yearly few thousand francs.

He cut the Mausers adrift. It is an irony of Fate that the one country where the Mauser never did make money was the one where Norris controlled the patents—France.

In , when the Mauser had proven itself a terrible weapon in the Boer War and in Cuba, when its name was a by-word in American newspapers, Samuel Norris sat down to write for posterity an account of his connection with the now famous rifle.

The little Bristol Phoenix and the New York Times carried his account, an engrossing summary which is as remarkable for what it leaves out as for what it tells.

Of the era in which the brothers Mauser worked and nearly starved , Samuel Norris wrote:. The English Government were about the first to decide, and they adopted the Snyder [Snider] as a transformation, really an American invention. Soon they began to transform their Enfields, the caliber of which was. Again this system was mainly American, the invention of a Mr. Peabody of Boston. The Germans had years before been the pioneers in breechloaders in their needle gun. Its caliber was. When the trigger was pulled the needle in the bolt shot forward, striking and igniting the fulminate, and the explosion followed.

It had no effective gas check, hence the range was very small, and the gas came back into the face of the firer. However, the superiority of even this mechanism over muzzle-loaders was shown in the war between Prussia and Austria, and this hastened the efforts of Austria to get a breech-loading system.

He came with a staff of some seventy officers. After the inspection he was invited to fire the arm. I was present and remember well the brilliant gathering on the green in front of the targets. This arm and the cartridges had been made in Vienna to conform to the ideas of the commission as to caliber, form of bullet, and charge of powder. American metallic cartridge machinery was unknown in Austria at that time, hence the cartridges used for this trial, which were rim fire, were very imperfect.

The very first one used by the Emperor failed to ignite; all others were successfully fired. This failure, with which the arm had nothing to do, proved fatal in Austria. All the newspapers attacked the Government for considering the arm, echoing the wishes of the hundreds in Vienna at that moment who were interested in other arms. It was even cabled to Providence that an accident had occurred to the Remington in the hands of the Emperor—a wicked misrepresentation.

So fiercely was the Government assailed that the adoption of the Remington was abandoned, and trials of all systems were stopped. A few months later they took up the Wendel [Werndl] arm, an Austrian invention, destitute of merit, and adopted it. The Caliber was about. As Mr. Norris points out, the ammunition and the rifle were made in Austria and probably neither was up to the Remington-made standard.

Certainly, no arm should be condemned because of the failure of a single cartridge to fire. To judge from the news accounts of the Vienna press, the system was rejected because a soldier was killed when a section of the split breechpiece was blown out. Indeed such a report was brought back to the United States by Lt.

Norton and figured in an official Congressional Report made on munitions at the Paris Universal Exhibition in When Austria adopted the Werndl, it is noteworthy that the special cartridge designed for it had an outside center fire primer specially constructed to prevent escape of gas to the rear from the charge. The breechblock of the rifle itself was rotated up and to the left; and was so mounted and constructed that accidents such as that ascribed to the split-breech Remington could not conceivably happen.

The danger of weak cartridge heads and blown out blocks appears to have been almost an obsession with the engineers at Steyr Armory, where the Werndl was designed. This was the famous Remington Single Shot with which the Norris brothers blanketed much of the military world of that day. This new design was so staunch that even today specimens of the original rifles are in use in odd corners of the world—particularly in the Balkans and in South America; while in Sweden the design is currently manufactured as a shotgun lock mechanism.

No stronger single shot rifle has ever been made. Army and Navy Journal , but machine tool manufacture delayed actual production until the following Spring. Indeed, in his own article Norris tells us indirectly of the new solid breechblock. He continues:. At the moment this order was received in America an improvement had been made in that arm and much valuable time was lost in their delivery in Paris. For the purpose of preventing the escape of gas at the rear, what was called the tete mobile made of rubber was fixed on the end of this bolt.

This entered the chamber, the explosion compressed it, and theoretically it was expected that it would prevent all gas and the debris from the burnt silk case coming out at the rear. This was not wholly realized. The debris did pass into and around the bolt, clogging the spring and the easy and proper movement of the bolt in the shoe in which it moved.

After six or eight shots I have seen that the bolt could not be moved unless lubricated with water. These finally went to France during the Franco-Prussian War. Greek Captain Alexandros Fountouclis, though unmentioned in the Norris narrative, was a prime mover in the Greek contract. He toured Europe testing rifle systems for the Hellenic Government and finally decided on the Remington. The placing of the order brought severe repercussions from Greece, and the original order was violently opposed in some circles.

The Norris narrative compresses into a few paragraphs a running fire account of the amazing range of travel and contacts of the next few years. The diligence, ingenuity and shrewdness of the Yankee brothers was perhaps without parallel in its day. In his own account, Norris constantly glides over the hardships and hairbreadth escapes.

No one reading this later day account of his would ever fathom the strange depths of his Puritanic early-New England philosophy; no one could hope to catch even a glimer of the tortuous mental and ethical processes which made him and many of his Yankee peers wealthy and respected men. And no one could hope to assay the courage, the fortitude and the gruelling effort he poured into his activities.

My brother, Mr. John Norris, devoted himself for some time to this effort, and finally, the Minister of War, Gen. Rassloff, advised me to follow his commission to America, as the decision would be made there, but he would not give any assurance that the decision would await my arrival.

However, I went. It resulted in a contract for 30, Remingtons, which was followed by other contracts. This was in Almost simultaneously my brother made a contract with the Swedish Government for a large quantity of Remington mechanisms, they proposing to complete the arm in Sweden.

This they did. The Remington was decided on by them for Cuba and orders were given. Then followed trials at Madrid, and the Remington became the adopted arm of that Government. I made three contracts in behalf of the Messrs. Remington, viz. It was an event to get either to or from Madrid, journeys which I made several times, and at considerable risk, when I passed through the Carlist lines having in my luggage abundant evidence of my dealings with the Spanish Government.

However, I never had any serious trouble. The last order they tried to cut short by 30, arms, for they had more arms than were needed. When I heard of this, being in St. Petersburg, I went directly to Madrid and was most fairly treated by Gen. He had to refer the matter to several commissions, and finally I got a favorable decision from the Council of State and these arms were delivered and paid for.

In fact, while these contracts amounted to several millions of dollars, all was paid with a good degree of promptness. My relations with all Spanish officials were always pleasant. The caliber of the Spanish arms was. It resulted in a contract being executed in the smoking room of Buckingham Palace for 60, arms. Several other contracts followed, all the guns ordered being manufactured at Ilion.