The German self-loading pistol Mauser S96 was born at the very end of the 19th century. By this time, it was far from the first automatic. Moreover, from a technical point of view, the creation of the Federle brothers offered almost nothing new. Then how did it happen that the Teutonic creation literally captured the whole world in the coming decades, and most of the other competitors of the Mauser were forgotten not only by the arrows, but in fact by the history itself?
A popular maxim says: the best way to create is to steal from another! The brothers Joseph and Friedrich Federle, the famous German gunsmiths, who, among other things, created the legendary Mauser C96 self-loading pistol, thought about this. Such a statement is by no means an attempt to belittle the design genius of German gunsmiths, but only an indication that the automatic (in modern language - self-loading) Mauser pistol was by no means the first of its kind. Moreover, the product of the Federle brothers was not something really innovative. At the time of the end of the 19th century, there were already at least 4 well-to-do models of new generation pistols in Europe. The most popular was the Borchard pistol, which, like the Mauser, had a characteristic wooden stock and a powerful cartridge.
To be honest, the Federle brothers' C96 was directly inspired by Borchard's pistol, which was born in 1893. However, the true legend of the German arms business was born only two years later in 1895 in the workshops of the Mauser company. As a result, the pistol will be produced until 1961. Only officially in Germany, Russia and China over 950 thousand copies will be produced. Individual "Mauser" walk through the black market and hot spots of the Third World to this day.
In terms of technology, the Mauser C96 offered little innovation. The operation of the automation was based on the recoil mechanism of the short stroke of the barrel. The C96 has a revolving layout, which was very typical for pistols of the late 19th century. Even for its time, the weapon turned out to be not very ergonomic (the pistol is difficult to reload) and heavy. The Mauser weighs 1.25 kg without cartridges. The length of the pistol was 312 mm. However, there was one important "but" that brought the German creation to the Olympus of glory.
The fact is that the Federles made the Mauser not exactly like a pistol, but rather like a compact carbine. Therefore, in terms of their fire properties, the weapon was quite different from the overwhelming majority of competitors. The success of the C96 was largely ensured by specially designed cartridges for the pistol, equipped with a new type of nitroglycerin powder. If most of the pistols of that time worked at a distance of 30-50 meters, then the bullets fired from the C96 retained their lethality even at a distance of 1 thousand meters. The Teutonic kid was shooting with 7.62x25 mm Mauser ammunition.
True, already at 500 meters, the spread of bullets was such that it was barely possible to lay the shots into a 5x4 meter target. But at a distance of 100 meters "Mauser" was a real machine of destruction. An experienced shooter could lay shots in a circle with a radius of up to 30 cm. At the same time, shots from the C96 were comparable in lethality to some of the then carbines and rifles. Coupled with the presence of automatic fire, all this qualitatively distinguished the new Federle pistol against the background of most competitors and helped him gain recognition in most countries of the world.
If you want to know even more interesting things, then you should definitely read about The Makarov pistol: why modern models have a black handle, if in the USSR it was brown.