The History
The late 19th century was a heady time for gun designers. The new high-pressure, high-performance smokeless powders were making momentous changes in performance but required new designs to take full advantage. But the clean-burning powders also made other things possible, which is why it was in these years that we started seeing the first machine guns and the first semi-auto rifles and pistols. One of these was the Luger. In this installment we’ll be talking about the Luger’s predecessor. But first, the Luger.
I’ve always thought that the great classic German Luger, in its various forms, was one of the most graceful and beautiful handguns ever made. I have one, a P-08 made by Mauser-Werke in Oberndorf, Germany, in 1938. This is a place that I was pleased to actually visit once. Oberdorf, a lovely little town in the woods on the Neckar River in Bavaria, is better-known for being the site of Paul Mauser’s works, but the Mauser plant made Lugers, too, and that’s where mine came from.
It’s a beautiful piece, and I got it for a song because, somewhere along the way, someone took the notion to have it reblued, meaning it was worthless to collectors. So I got it for relative song because I wanted one to shoot. Now, the P-08 has its issues; even though mine has all matching numbers, even the magazine, it’s prone to jamming. But the grip angle is great; if you take the piece in your shooting hand and raise it to eye level, you’ll find your eyes are already right in line with what passes for the sights.
But the Luger had a progenitor, that wasn’t nearly as light, graceful and easy to handle. The ancestor of the Luger was everything but that. This would, of course, be C-93 Borchardt pistol, designed by one Hugo Borchardt, and as one of history’s first modern semi-automatic pistols – sort of – it deserves some discussion.
The Design
Hugo Borchardt’s pistol may have been the father of the Luger, but it had a rather surprising ancestor itself: The Maxim machine gun. Borchardt was already an accomplished designer by the time he started work in his pistol, having been involved with the development of some of the first detachable box magazines, as well as in tinkering with Maxim’s machine gun. He was also already involved in cartridge design, having based his bottlenecked 7.65x25mm Borchardt cartridge on the Gewehr 88 rifle’s 7.92×57mm Mauser round, which was one of the first modern, bottle-necked smokeless powder cartridges.
See, like its descendant, the Luger, the Borchardt design didn’t use the slide mounted on the frame design we’re more accustomed to seeing on new autoloading pistols. The Borchardt, instead, used a short-recoil operated, toggle-lock action inspired by Hiram Maxim’s 1886 machine gun, which used a broadly similar action. In the Borchardt pistol, on firing, the locked breech and the barrel moved backward a short distance before unlocking. The toggle then raised, hinged in the middle to fold upwards, ejecting the spent cartridge. Then a spring returned the bolt forward, picking up a fresh round from the magazine contained in the pistol’s grip, chambering it and relocking the action for the next shot.
The new gun shared some features with more modern sidearms, including the magazine in the pistol grip, the push button magazine release, and a slide safety mounted on the frame.
But the flaws remained, not least of which were the Borchardt’s size and weight. Borchardt had an assistant, though, a young fellow named Georg Luger, who went on to adapt the Borchardt design into his own much lighter, handier and sleeker pistol.
Even so, Hugo Borchardt’s design was ground breaking. The new gun was heavy and clunky, but it worked. Borchardt’s design could go on to become the world’s first mass-produced semi-auto pistol: The C-93 Borchardt.
The Guns
These were big, heavy guns, with an awkwardly straight grip angle; while old Hugo took all the design credit, the Borchardt pistols with their big, heavy post-grip spring housing and their long, almost eight-inch barrel gave the C-93 the distinct look of something designed in committee. The weight was considerable for a sidearm at 41 ounces, although it’s interesting to note that many, perhaps all of the Borchardt pistols were sold with a flat, plank-like shoulder stock that could be fitted to the gun to make it no longer an odd-looking pistol, but an odd-looking carbine. This was a feature that carried over, becoming an option with the various marks of the Luger.
The notion was far from new even then; from the 1850s on, one could buy a shoulder stock for example, Sam Colt’s heavy, powerful Walker and Dragoon revolvers, again making them a nasty little fast-firing carbine.
The C-93 Borchardt pistol was never made in substantial numbers, with about 3,100 copies made from 1893 to 1902. All were chambered for the same odd little round, the 7.65x25mm Borchardt cartridge, an odd little rimless bottlenecked affair that spat out an 85-grain full metal jacket slug at about 1,300 feet per second (fps). That’s fast, but the light bullet made for a pretty pipsqueak performance. And this, interestingly, at a time when just across the Atlantic, just a few years later, an American gunsmith and tinkerer named John Moses Browning was messing around with what would become one of the most widely-used, hardest-hitting and near-immortal auto pistol cartridges ever: The .45 Automatic Colt Pistol (ACP).
The Borchardt didn’t blow up a lot of skirts. A sidearm should be just that; something one can tote around in a belt or shoulder holster all day without closing out the day feeling as though one had been carrying a cinder block around. But the C-93 was the first, and as is so often the case with firsts, the refinements came later.
The Offspring
And, as mentioned, that design led to the Luger, still a carriage trade luxury piece. Mine is pretty much a safe queen now, but it’s still there. It even retains its Nazi-era proof markings, which makes one wonder who carried the thing around during the war in Europe, and that can give one a bit of a creepy feeling; it’s an uncomfortable variation of the “if this gun could talk” notion.
But without the Borchardt, the iconic Luger never would have happened. And that’s good enough to give old Hugo and his heavy, clunky design a tip of the hat.
