The Idea of the Thing!
There used to be a class of pistols called “vest-pocket pistols.” Some of these things, like the .25 ACP Baby Browning, were truly tiny. They have their counterparts today, like the Ruger LCP, a .380 ACP pocket pistol that is a tad bigger than a Baby Browning, but not by much. They shoot all right; my wife has one for a CCW piece, and she can break clay pigeons with it out to 10 yards or so, which is good enough for a gun like that. It doesn’t work so well in my gorilloid hands, but in her dainty little hands, it works, although even for her, a two-handed hold is tricky; there’s just not enough there, there.
The Ruger LCP and even the Baby Browning can look almost cannon-like compared to one other oddball pistol out of history, though. Many years ago, in the years before the Great War, someone decided to take the concept of a vest-pocket pistol to an uncomfortable extreme. Someone decided to make the smallest semi-automatic pistol ever made, and chamber it for the smallest centerfire cartridge ever made. The designer was an Austrian watchmaker, which is really appropriate when you think about it, named Franz Pfannl, and the gun was the Kolibri, German for “hummingbird.”
One could hardly come up with a better name for a pistol that gave an entirely new meaning to the term “pipsqueak.” This wasn’t a vest-pocket pistol. This was a watch-fob pistol. (If you don’t know what a watch fob is, get off my lawn.)
The Cartridge
This is, more or less, a .10 caliber cartridge. Most examples are centerfire, but their tiny size would preclude handloading, so one would have to content oneself with factory ammo, if you could find any. I’ve seen it referred to as a 2mm, a 2.7mm, and a 3mm cartridge, although 2.7mm seems to be the most common. The ammo came in two sorts, one with a jacketed bullet, the other with a lead bullet; it was this latter load that usually carried the 3mm handle.
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In his benchmark book, Cartridges of the World, John C. Barnes (Note: CotW is now edited by W. Todd Woodward, but Barnes wrote these words) wrote about the Kolibri cartridge:
The tiny 2.7mm Kolibri jacketed bullet is of .105- to .108-inch diameter and weighs about 3 grains. Actual ballistics are unknown, but muzzle velocity is estimated to be 650 to 700 fps. This would develop an energy of only 3 ft-lbs. When you consider that the .25 Automatic develops 73 ft-lbs at the muzzle, you can see what a pipsqueak this cartridge is.
Three grains is a tiny bullet indeed, but one should remember that, pipsqueak or no, this could still cause a serious injury. Even a Red Ryder BB gun, remember, will put an eye out, and there’s little doubt that even the tiny Kolibri could do likewise. And that brings up the standard caution: Never point any gun at anything you do not intend to shoot.
Hitting a small, moving target, though, like an eye, with a gun as small as this, that’s another story. And the guns were tiny indeed.
The Pistols
There are two known variations of the pistols chambered for this tiny cartridge: A single-shot and, amazingly, a semi-auto. In a 2022 article about Franz Pfannl’s guns, Popular Mechanics described them thusly:
The world’s smallest production pistol is the Kolibri (German for “hummingbird”), designed by an Austrian watchmaker by the name of Franz Pfannl. About a thousand of these tiny pistols were made between about 1910 and the beginning of World War I in 1914, when production had to stop as the economy turned to a war footing.
The Kolibri is in all ways a standard firearm, but smaller. It uses the same simple blowback mechanism as many modern .22, .25, and .32 caliber pistols, but is chambered for a proprietary (and now rare) 2.7mm centerfire cartridge. This cartridge fired a minuscule 3-grain bullet at 650 feet per second, giving it less muzzle energy than a typical airlift pellet.
The semi-auto was a testament to a watchmaker’s steady hand, but it worked; a semi-auto blowback design, simple but functional, with a six-shot magazine in the grip. The Kolibri was a pretty standard setup for what was then a pretty new thing, a semi-auto pistol, except, of course, for its Lilliputian size. The gun actually went into production. About a thousand were made between 1910 and 1914, when production stopped, thanks to a certain event called the Great War, which forced Austria’s economy onto a wartime footing and edged out novelties like pistols that could be stored in a tobacco tin.
After the Great War ended, there was no room in Austria’s economy for novelties like thumbnail-sized firearms, so the Kolibri, the “Hummingbird,” was never revived. And that’s where things remain today, with the surviving examples in collections, and no ammo available even if you could find one in shooting trim.
Why?
So, the question remains, why would someone design and build something like this? Well, why not? If one is out to make a point, one shoots for the margins: The biggest, the smallest, the loudest, the brightest. Franz Pfannl was shooting for the smallest, and he set a new standard, which is still in place today.
But a more apt point about the “why” of all this is the “what is it good for?” The honest answer is “not much.”
More, from Cartridges of the World, in the original words of John C. Barnes:
The 2.7mm Kolibri could not be considered a humane cartridge for hunting anything. However, it might do to dispatch a trapped mouse or eliminate an overly aggressive cockroach.
That’s colorful, but probably accurate.
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Sometimes someone will set out to make something just to prove that they can do it. That may be the best epithet for the Kolibri pistols, in fact: Just to prove it could be done, that one could make a semi-auto pistol so tiny, so underpowered, as to be essentially useless, unless hostile insects are the current threat. These guns still draw the attention of collectors; again, shoot for the margins, and you’ll attract collectors, who can be an odd lot; trust me, just get me started on pre-64 Winchesters and Belgian Brownings, and I can go on at length.
To everyone else, though, the Kolibri pistols' place in shooting history is the same as their size: Extremely small.
