Semi-Autos: A History

We’re all generally familiar with the various firearms platforms, but it’s the semi-automatic that seems to get the most attention. That’s both because it’s understandably popular and because a lot of gun control bills revolve around its existence. The idea seems to be that semi-autos are a modern marvel and not a platform with decades—or centuries—of use behind it. Here’s the thing, though: semi-autos have been around for quite some time. We’re going to tell you all about them.

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Semi-automatic firearms aren’t full auto. Each trigger pull fires a single shot. These guns use self-loading actions, automatically feeding the next round into the chamber after firing. This allows continuous shooting without manually ejecting brass or loading a new round.

At first glance, a revolver might seem semi-automatic, but it’s not. Revolvers rely on a cylinder with multiple chambers that must be manually loaded and unloaded. They don’t eject spent brass like a semi-auto, and their operation is fundamentally different.

A revolver requires manual force to function, whereas a semi-auto operates on its own mechanism, keeping rounds ready until the magazine runs empty. That’s a concise overview, but it captures the key differences.

Odds are good that most people’s brains jump to Glock or the AR-15 when considering what the first semi-automatic gun to hit the market was. However, the semi-auto’s history reaches back significantly farther in history than the mid-to-late 20^th century. An inventor named James Puckle created a repeating gun—one he named after himself, of course—in 1718. The Puckle gun wasn’t a semi-auto like we know it today because it required rotating the chambers manually using a hand crank. Even so, the Puckle gun laid the foundation for today’s semi-autos. The Puckle gun is also a stellar example of how our Founding Fathers did indeed know about repeating firearms, not just muskets, when they wrote the Constitution in 1787.

Over time, the repeating platform saw significant improvements. A major breakthrough came in 1884 when Paul Marie Eugene Vieille invented smokeless powder, revolutionizing ammunition and expanding firearms technology. However, in 1885, Ferdinand von Mannlicher introduced the Mannlicher Model 85, which set semi-autos in motion but was ultimately doomed. Mannlicher relied on black powder, and given the limited global connectivity of the 19th century, expecting him to have access to smokeless powder would be a stretch—he was Austrian, while Vieille was in France. Despite its failure, the Mannlicher 85 sparked a wave of more successful designs.

You could say the Puckle gun was the first semi-auto of sorts because it’s the first repeating firearm to be labeled as a machine gun, but you wouldn’t be wrong if you gave that honor to the Mannlicher 85 rifle. The way technology advances causes some blurring of lines when it comes to who did what first. There are the failures and the successes. As a general rule, a success wouldn’t ever happen if the failures didn’t pave the way first.

If we’re measuring by level of success, the first truly successful semi-auto handgun was the Mauser C96, a gun commonly referred to as the Broomhandle. It was a trio of brothers that came up with the Broomhandle—Friedrich, Fidel, and Josef Feederle—while they were working for Mauser. The Mauser C96 went into production in 1896 and enjoyed incredible popularity. If you’re noticing a trend with labeling models with the last two digits of their production year, you’d be right. Of course, the Mauser C96 wasn’t the only semi-auto handgun of that decade.

The 1893 Borchardt preceded the Mauser C96 and helped spur that manufacturer into taking on the idea presented by the Feederle brothers. Hugo Borchardt created the gun in 1893, and by 189,4 it was being tested by the United States military. The 1893 Borchardt—also known as the Borchardt C93—failed to gain traction. Its design was bulky and awkward, making it unwieldy in use. To make matters worse, it reportedly produced significant felt recoil, likely due to its chambering in 7.65x25mm Borchardt. The story of this semi-automatic pistol is important, though, largely due to this next part. After the 1893 Borchardt failed, DWM—the manufacturer behind its production—enlisted Georg Luger to fix it. Luger did some work on the design, and the Luger Parabellum was born.

Yes, we’re all familiar with the fame of John Browning and his ties to quite a few firearms designs that remain beloved to this day. It was the late 1800s when John Moses Browning turned his sights to improving the semi-auto platform. That led to the release of the FN Browning M1900, a semi-automatic pistol chambered in 32 ACP. The M1900 was preceded by a handful of prototypes that Browning patented and fine-tuned, so it wasn’t his first semi-auto design. It was the one, however, that sold like wildfire.

Time passed, designs came and went, and the 1911 hit the gun world in the year of its name. Considering Browning’s 1911 remains in production today, you could say the rest is semi-auto history.

READ MORE HERE: Choosing Between Semi-Automatic and Revolvers

If we take the history of firearms in its entirety and include the steps it took to get to the current place in time, semi-autos have been around for centuries. One could easily state they’re 300 years old and not be technically incorrect. There are so many steps in inventing anything that there’s really no one moment in history you can point to as the first (not if you’re being realistic). Even the men whose names grace the history books for this or that moment could have been preceded by others whose names we’ll never know.

What we do know is that semi-autos aren’t new and aren’t a 20^th-century invention. Repeating firearms came into being decades before the U.S. Constitution was even written. And that in itself is pretty cool.

Learn more about the Puckle gun from Forgotten Weapons here.

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