Is an Automatic Revolver a Thing?
I remember as a very young lad, reading some silly Cold-War era spy novel in which the villain, in a confrontation with the hero, produced an “automatic revolver.” I remember thinking, “That’s stupid, there’s no such thing as an automatic revolver.”
Well, I was wrong.
A regular revolver works by using a connection between the hammer and the pawl that rotates the cylinder. When the hammer is drawn back, the pawl engages and rotates the cylinder so that a fresh round is under the hammer. A double-action revolver can also accomplish this via a long, rather heavy trigger pull.
But an automatic revolver? In such a case, the cylinder and barrel assembly is mounted as a slide on top of the lower frame. The gun’s recoil drives the slide assembly backwards, cocking the hammer and rotating the cylinder employing an angled trackway on the cylinder that engages some kind of stud or pawl on the frame.
The most famous of these is the Webley-Fosbery.
The Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver
In 1896, a magnificently mustachioed chap carrying the very British name of Colonel George Vincent Fosbery, VC, was awarded a patent for a “self-cocking revolver.” In 1901, the revolver design, having been picked up by the firearms firm of Webley, began manufacture. Colonel Fosbery had approached Colt, intending to adapt his design to the Single Action Army, but Colt wasn’t interested.
This may seem an odd innovation, but this was in the pre-1911 world, and most autoloading pistols were handicapped by low-powered cartridges along the lines of the .32 ACP and the 9mm Browning Short – the .380 ACP. Even today, we should note, the most powerful handguns are almost exclusively revolvers.
Foebery’s goal had been to come up with a piece that combined the rapid-fire capability of an auto with the stoutness and power of a revolver. His design worked – almost.
The DesignThe Webley-Fosbery worked in the manner described above. The slide/cylinder portion rode in grooves machined into the frame, and when the gun was fired, recoil pushed the slide back, engaging a cam pin that rotated the cylinder. The slide also cocked the single-action hammer, meaning that the piece had a good rate of fire while still retaining a decent single-action trigger pull. And, oddly for a revolver, the Webley-Fosbery had a manual safety on the left side of the frame that locked the trigger and the slide.
The first guns used the .455 British service pistol cartridge that was used in the regular Webley single-action service revolver. The .455 pieces held the more-or-less standard 6 rounds. Later, the .380 ACP was added, firing 8 rounds by using 8-round moon clips to hold the rimless cases.
6-inch barrels were standard, although the factory would accept orders for barrels from 4” to 7 ½”.
The History
The Webley works cranked out about 10 Webley-Fosbery revolvers per week, from 1901 to 1924; a total of 4200 guns were made. Production was halted during the Great War, when the factory was focused on the standard Webley. In an interesting side note, only about 200 .380-caliber pieces left the factory, and so those guns command fancy prices today if you can find one for sale.
While the Webley-Fosbery was popular among officers and pilots, it wasn’t so popular with ground troops. The mechanism had to be scrupulously clean to function reliably, and if you’re at all familiar with the state of warfare at the time, such as the Great War, that wasn’t always easily done. The gun was even submitted to the famous US pistol trials in 1907, the same service pistol trials that eventually gave rise to the immortal Colt-Browning 1911, but the War Department didn’t care for the bulk of the piece, or its fussiness about dirt and fouling. So Colonel Fosbery had met part of his goal. His gun had the power of the revolver, but was it stout? Not quite so much. The Webley-Fosbery required a lot of fussing to keep running properly, whereas your standard revolver was pretty dirt-tolerant, certainly more so than the general run of semi-autos available at the time.
In 1924, production stopped. Developments in automatic pistols, ranging from the Luger to the 1911, and the ability of newer guns being able to handle powerful rounds like the .45 ACP, made the Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver an obsolete design.See Also: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. XXV - How One Mormon Gunsmith Changed the World
But it ended up being not the last of its kind.
Another Automatic Revolver: The Mateba
In 1997, the Italian company Mateba, known in Italy as MA.TE.BA. Arms (Macchine Termo-Balistiche) introduced the Mateba Model 6 Unica, or the Mateba Autorevolver.
Mateba has been producing revolvers for some time, their signature idiosyncrasy being the position of the barrel, which aligns with the bottommost chamber in the cylinder rather than the top. This was touted as making recoil more linear and allowing for faster follow-up shots. I've never had the chance to test this theory personally.
I haven’t had the opportunity to test this theory for myself
Like the Webley-Fosbery, the Mateba has a slide carrying the cylinder and barrel on a frame with the trigger and pistol grip. On firing, the slide recoils about half an inch, cocking the hammer and rotating the cylinder.
The Mateba packed quite a bit more wallop than the Webley-Fosbery, being chambered for the .357 Magnum, the .41 Magnum, the .44 Magnum, and the gobsmackingly powerful .454 Casull. All versions had a 6-round cylinder.
Another curious development: The Mateba Grifone was a carbine version of the Mateba automatic revolver, with three barrel lengths: 20”, 18”, and 13”, which would be sadly illegal in the United States.
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Personally, I’ve always been skeptical of the idea of a revolving carbine of any kind. The cylinder gap in a revolver tends to spit hot gas and even lead/jacket shavings, and considering the location of one's non-firing hand when in operation, that seems likely to be annoying.
And now?
The automatic revolver was, originally, a stopgap. The Webley-Fosbery managed to thread the needle of providing a sidearm with the stopping power of a revolver, combined with the rate of fire of an autoloader. That stopgap was rendered moot by advances in cartridges, propellants, and pistol design; there’s a good argument to be made that the Maestro, John Moses Browning, had a big part in making this odd revolver obsolete with the advent of his immortal 1911. As evidence, I offer that the 1911 is still very much in use; in fact, there are probably more gun companies that produce some version of a 1911 than those that don’t. The Webley-Fosbery, on the other hand, is a rare collector’s piece.
The Mateba? I have no idea. It’s an oddity, but some people like oddities.
