Today’s rifle was designed by a Swiss inventor named Hans Stamm while working for the Zeller et Cie company in Appenzell Switzerland. The company originally made embroidering machinery, but turned to military rifle parts subcontracting to bring in additional revenue in the early 1890s. Stamm had shown a good aptitude and interest for this work, and when the company decided to lean into the small arms business he was put in charge of its new weapons division.
There, Stamm spent several years developing a self-loading rifle for the Swiss military. It was not something specifically requested by the government, but rather an opportunistic risk by the company. Stamm’s resulting gun, the Model 1902, was expensive to produce, but quite elegant in design. It is a long-stroke gas pistol system with a rotating bolt, which was made from the ground up but could easily be adapted as a conversion of existing straight-pull bolt action rifles like the Swiss G96.
Unfortunately, the Swiss military declined the rifle, and Zeller was unable to find any other interested clients among the European states. By 1906, tired of dumping money into what is clearly a losing proposition, Zeller shuts down its weapons division. Stamm leaves the company, but he is not done with small arms design – we will see several more of his designs in future videos!
Many thanks to the Swiss Shooting Museum in Bern for giving me access to this visually one of a kind rifle to film for you! The museum is free to the public, and definitely worth visiting if you are in Bern – although it is closed for renovation until autumn 2025:
https://www.schuetzenmuseum.ch/en/
The problem with the rifle —- grumpy generals who think the troops will waste ammunition.
Semi-auto rifles were not just about more rounds fired faster. They turned battlefield tactics on their heads. No more having lines of soldiers facing each other, taking one shot, then charging with bayonets. The old-school generals, who were old and grew up with this sort of tactics, just did not understand the change that was about to happen.
You gotta wonder the effect on World War I if rifles like this were adopted.
Main killing force during Great War artillery https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-world-war-one-weaponry/ gives In 1914-15 German statistics estimated that 49 casualties were caused by artillery to every 22 by infantry, by 1916-18 this was at 85 by artillery for every 6 by infantry. Faster-firing rifle might slightly change proportions, but I bet artillery would remain still dominant due to greater range. Swiss do leverage demand for artillery fuses which required precision in making http://www.switzerland1914-1918.net/blog/switzerland-and-the-manufacture-of-artillery-shells-during-the-first-world-war and sell them to both sides of conflict, thus giving incentive to respect their neutral status.
Bart,
Let us stop and consider something, namely that experience has pointed towards the overall ineffectiveness of the individual weapon within the grand scheme of things operational/tactical.
There isn’t really all that much difference between the tactical effect of a bolt-action magazine rifle and a semi-automatic of the same caliber. All the issues and deficiencies of the overly-powerful cartridge are still there, and the tactical role isn’t all that different. You don’t see much actual tactical effect with the swap; you only see that once you start adding in decent support MG weaponry and some indirect assets like the 60mm infantry mortar or 40mm grenade launcher. Until then, pure bolt-action vs. semi-auto rifles? No real difference on the battlefield, despite what the cognoscenti want you to believe when they spin their tales of wonder.
Now, if they’d developed and issued a carbine-size weapon firing an intermediate cartridge, like the SKS? That would have been a major game changer for the combatants of WWI. The fact that such a weapon didn’t turn up for actual fielding until after WWII is something of a testimony to the issues of “installed base” and “unable to see reality clearly”.
Honestly, something like the SKS should have been the general-issue individual weapon for most combatants in WWI, supported by good machine guns and light artillery. Unfortunately, none of the responsible parties could bear to part with the legacy ideas of the past, and here we are. I doubt highly that the provision of semi-auto full-size infantry rifles would have changed much of anything; you have the evidence of the ineffectuality of the German G41/43 family of “Garand-alikes”, and the Soviet variations on the them in their service. Tactically, they made little improvement that I can see; in the end, the better option was what the Germans did, building a better LMG that could actually dominate the battlefield more-or-less by itself.
Do remember that the Allies generally had to roll up with support weapons of whatever flavor they could get, in order to deal with German defenses centered on the MG34/42 family and provided with enough ammo. You either ran the Germans out of ammo with your dead bodies, or you blew them up with something completely out of context, like a tank or a fighter-bomber. You were not likely to enjoy taking those positions on with just your small arms, no matter how cool your semi-auto rifle was. The improvement in firepower just wasn’t enough; it was there, but it was completely outclassed by what a trained German MG team could do with their tools.
Which is precisely why they rolled up so many feckless Soviet conscripts on the Eastern Front, whenever their leadership chose to throw men against machineguns without proper supporting elements.
So speaking of of an “intermediate cartridge” in WW I, what do you think about the advocates of the idea that American lever action rifles should have used in the war?
Ballistic-wise, the Winchester .30-30 cartridge dominated the North American big game market for most of the 20th Century for a damn good reason: It was all you needed for man-size game. The Soviet 7.62X39 was a near-twin to it, when you get down to it all.
Something in that class was what the infantry individual weapon should have been chambered in; lever-action? Not as they were then designed; too much of the mechanism is exposed as the action is worked. The Model 94 was nice as a game carbine, but as an individual weapon, would have sucked serious ass. Something like it, light and handy, with a decent box magazine?
Oh, right… The SKS. The weapon that should have been on general issue for WWI, before everyone got the education of the trenches that said “Yeah, you really need full-auto for these things…”, and they would have probably had the AK-47 in the pipeline for WWII.
Of course, with that level of prescience and awareness, they’d have likely never blundered into either war. The sheer volume of wishful thinking and outright fantasy that went on during the first half of the 20th Century is astounding, when you look at it. Not to mention the denial… “Oh, we never took shots like that in combat, never used the volley sights… Let’s buy a rifle with all that same capability for the next war…”
The decision to delete the volley sights was a telling one; they knew that they weren’t using them, that that mode of fire wasn’t being utilized, but they never carried out the calculation past that point. So, there they were, going into WWII with horse-killing volley rifles right alongside their replacements, the MG and mortar systems…
Sheer nuttiness on a near-Biblical scale.
I guess history needed…YOU! Wisdom after the fact is as common at toadstools in a springtime cow pasture
Oddly enough, Mr. Tyrsegg, I have actual personal experience with this sort of military incompetence.
In 1993, under the early days of the first Clinton administration, I was a staff NCO assigned to a Corps headquarters. While there, my boss, a Lieutenant Colonel, and I came to a conclusion that the data we had in our planning factors manual was out of date and inaccurate. That data related to route clearance, a crucially important mission for our Engineer branch.
What I discovered was that we were incredibly backwards, in the US Army. We were still doing route clearance the same way we’d done it in WWII, with men walking along roads with mine detectors, followed by dump trucks with improvised sandbag armor. We did that in Korea, we did that in Vietnam; the only difference being the improvements in mine detectors.
For whatever reason, the entire field of mine-protected vehicles was left wide open; the Rhodesians and the South Africans experienced the same problems, and I suppose because they didn’t have the endless pool of draftee manpower, they concentrated their minds wonderfully and invented the entirety of the MRAP and armored route clearance vehicle field, which was fully developed and fielded by the early 1990s. All you had to do was buy it from Denel, or whoever it was that owned them at the time.
Now, I became an advocate for doing just that, along with a few others. All I had done was raise my eyes above the metaphoric parapet, look around at the world, and recognize the realities of how modern war is fought.
The arguments over the utility of mine-protected vehicles went on throughout the following decade. The typical response of the “authorities” was the one I got, personally, when I got a little too far out of my lane: “We don’t want to develop that capability (armored route clearance), because if we have it, then someone will expect us to do it…” I was also told, and I quote nearly verbatim here, that “…the US Army will never be so stupid as to get involved in a war like that…” in reference to the inevitability of the mine/IED threat in rear areas and the necessity to be able to clear and secure our communications routes.
The selfsame assholes that told me that had the salutary lessons of Bosnia and Kosovo to enlighten them; that did not take. It wasn’t until 2005 that the US Army really began to field anything like really effective MRAP or armored route-clearance equipment. Until then, it was the same-old, same-old… A young combat engineer with a mine detector, out looking for potential threats.
We also told them that the idea of a cab-forward chassis on the FMTV program was mind-boggling stupid because that put the crew compartment above the first element in the vehicle that was most likely to detonate something… Unlike, say, the SAMIL line of armored logistics vehicles that was possessed of a conventional layout and easily-replaced running gear, in case of a mine strike. We pointed that out, and we were told “These are not combat vehicles; they do not need anything like that… They’re logistics assets, not combat assets, and armor would be too heavy/expensive…”
Cue the same set of assholes that told us that getting awards for churning out half-ass uparmor kits during the early 2000s, when they could have and should have already been on the shelf dating back to when they were told of the issues during the FMTV development process during the 1990s. The whole issue was hand-waved away, and we went into Iraq and Afghanistan woefully ill-equipped to deal with a threat that was not only easily extrapolated, but one which internal members of the organization had warned them about a decade earlier.
Everyone involved in making those warnings? Experienced severely truncated careers; we were all sidelined, and left watching as the assholes running the show when we gave the warnings went on to fame, glory, and promotions once they implemented what we’d suggested.
So, basically Mr. Tyrsegg? I do know what the hell it looks like, and I do know what to call it: Incompetence. You can look through the records of that era, as I have, and see clearly where prescient men of no particular intelligence read the realities and suggested the things I’ve said should have been done, only to be roundly ignored by those in authority, who only after having the lessons they should have taken from experience rubbed into their noses in the form of blood, wasted lives, and dead soldiers who should have been served better by their leadership… Who were generally far more concerned with playing dress-up with new uniforms and the accoutrements going on them. Such men should be driven from the ranks, and humiliated as they deserve; they are not soldiers, and if they want to play dress-up with live men, the arts await their efforts. Military practice should be a science, as much of one as we make it, and not some fancy-dress refuge from reality.
You bring up a good point of lever action rifles in combat having exposed mechanisms, just begging to get gunked up. I know that the base technology was there at the time, though not widely used, so what about a striker fired lever-action rifle? This would eliminate the issue of too much of the mechanism exposed to dirt.
I don’t get the current craze over “tactical lever action rifles”. All I have seen pictures of still use an exposed hammer. I know this style is supposed to get around local bans on semi-auto rifles. But are they actually going to be practical for real combat or are the owners just wanting to look cool at the shooting range?
I don’t see anything innovative in the current batch of tactical lever action rifles. Adding striker fire, allowing for a more enclosed receiver, would seem to be a step in a better direction to deal with stupid laws.
As said elsewere, the Americans, before WWI, had close to the perfect round for infantry use. The .30 Remington (a spitzer, rimless, 30-30).
A “.264 Remington”, that mantained the same pressure (unlike the real .25 Rem) could have been even better, with a lighter, faster, bullet and a flatter trajectory, but the .30 Rem would have worked just fine.
In the case of the U.S. Army, you can thank that brilliant logician, Douglas MacArthur. He turned thumbs down on the M1 Garand in .276 (yes, the 7 x 57 Mauser “clone” round) because of the “installed base” of .30-06.
On the plus side, we went into WW2 with our rifles, SAWs (BAR), and MMGs (M1917/M1919s, both water-cooled and air-cooled) all using the same cartridge, which certainly helped when fighting a war on multiple fronts worldwide.
And we did have what was pretty much the most powerful infantry rifle around, with the longest “reach” and the greatest hitting power at all ranges. (Yes, .30-06 is on average more powerful than 7.9 x 57, and way more powerful than 0.303in, 6.5 or 7.7 Arisaka, or etc.)
What we didn’t have was a rifle that was practical for sustained rapid fire at more usual engagement ranges (100 to 200 meters). For that we needed something with about the ballistics of the .257 Roberts sporting cartridge (110 grain at 2,650 F/S for 1,700 FPE), and detachable box magazine loading.
The M1 Carbine came so close to being the ideal weapon. It failed because Army Ordnance wanted a replacement for the .45 Colt automatic (dream on), using a cartridge that was basically a European-concept pistol round; rifle-sized bore with low rifle velocity (under 2,000 F/S).
As it turned out, they came up with (1) the world’s first true PDW which was also (2) in its M2 form, for many years the world’s best and least aggravating SMG.
What it wasn’t was a replacement for the M1911A1. In really close quarters, the pistol is still the final arbiter of who wins, and overall the old .45 is still the hands-down winner. (Just powerful enough, makes just a big enough hole, and doesn’t embarrass you by having a stoppage at just the wrong moment.)
If the Carbine had been a bit larger, a pound or so heavier, and chambered for something like the “.30 Kurz” that showed up in the 1960s as a rechamber/rebarrel job for it (.30-06 or .308 case shortened to 1.29in with a 120-grain FMJSP), they might have gotten the point before the Germans did.
The tactical doctrines would have still been off-kilter (“the MG does the killing, the riflemen are there to support it” is the only way that really works well), but they’d have been a bit closer to acknowledging the way battles were and are actually fought, as opposed to theories about “marksmanship tradition”.
Today, the combination of M4 and M249, with M7 coming along, and all the “taking back the infantry half-kilometer” s#!t, tells me that they still “don’t get it”.
clear ether
eon
Um…so the Grand in .30-06 lost the Amis the war? You lot get night delusional when history failed to incarnate your wet dream du jour
I’d ask you to speak English but I’ve always had the impression that you prefer not to.
If you had bothered to read what I actually wrote, you would notice that I said we had a rifle that outperformed everyone else’s, but our tactical doctrines didn’t allow us to take full advantage of it. BTW, this was the conclusion of the SALVO study done by the Infantry School at Fort Knox in 1946-47.
If the Garand had been left in the original .276 caliber, or in something like the aforementioned .30 Remington, we’d probably have gotten better results.
If we’d had an actual honest-to-Ghu general purpose machine gun (say, a belt-fed Johnson M1941 with its quick-change barrel) and built our idea of squad firepower around it, we’d have been on a par with the Germans, who like it or not were a considerably more dangerous adversary in infantry combat than any of their “associates”, and yes, I’m including the Japanese. The latter’s tactics were adequate for sorting out Chinese warlords, but when faced with U.S. and Commonwealth troops they fell back on the idea of “dying for the Emperor”. General Patton had a thing or two to say about that, some of it even printable.
It all comes down to tactics. And we seem to be institutionally devoted to making the same mistakes over and over again.
If that’s the way you intend to fight, the best rifle in the world won’t help you.
clear ether
eon
Hell, I’d have been happy if they’d just adopted the BREN or ZB26 instead of the BAR.
The BAR is exactly what it says on the tin: An “Automatic Rifle”, meant to provide fire on the move. As such, it ain’t at all appropriate to providing supporting fires for the infantry squad or platoon.
Ideally, they would have taken the BREN and developed a decent belt-feed kit for it. The Soviets proved that concept out with the RP-46; if you could have had the BREN with that equivalent in a nice GPMG package, along with something like the SKS in terms of handiness and intermediate cartridge, I think that that might not have been a war-winning combination (no small arm was going to do that…), but it would have certainly been a “casualty-reducer” for the war.
Sure as hell would have been far more appropriate for how we fought wars between about 1930 and 2010. Not so sure about the entire transitional field between “then” and “now” in terms of combat reality. The drone revolution is still playing out, and I don’t know what effects that will have on small arms realities and necessities…
@Eon,
please re read the sections of “Hatcher’s Notebook” that cover the serious shortcomings of the .30-06, compared to .303 Mk7, and 8mm Lebel, Balle D.
also, take note that Hatcher’s 180 grain “M1” loading was so unpopular with the army that it was dropped for a 150 grain loading, and the Garand was also tuned for the 150 grain loading, with as piss poor ballistics as the original 150grain 06 loading.
Shoot once and charge was obsolete by the close of America’s War Between the States, by the Battle of Sadowa in Europe as well in 1866. This was long before semi-autos.
No mention at all of the disconnector. But this rifle is built like a Swiss watch. Gorgeous.
I suspect that it might be turned down by Swiss military at accuracy ground. Observe that Schmidt-Rubin https://www.guns.com/news/2018/05/09/running-like-a-swiss-watch-a-look-at-the-k11-and-schmidt-rubin-1889-videos has a free-floating barrel and they were willing to accept serious changes in 1889/96, which despite looking similar to baseline 1889, dramatically differs mechanically (see lugs of bolt), allowing to use ballistically superior Gewehrpatrone 11. This can not be definitely proved or denied without seeing testing report, but I found this plausible, considering that really accurate gas-operated rifles were developed decades later.
Hi Daweo, I suspect was that it was more that Stamm presented a weapon that only worked reliably with Steel jacketed bullets which the Swiss were interested in but were not about to adopt. Accuracy was not noted as an issue in the limited summary information in the Swiss archives.
This suggest Stamm used different cartridge during development. What might be reason for that? Were not Swiss military cartridge available to civilian back then, but commercial (without paper) was?
Hi Daweo, Not a matter of availability. The report by the rifle commission of 1910 states that Stamm used steel jacketed ammunition ‘…from the start, probably because he realised that our paper-wrapped ammunition was unsuitable for automatic rifles’.
There was no organisational reluctance towards auto rifles by the Swiss. Between 1894 and 1910 The Swiss seriously tested systems presented by: Raschein, Mannlicher, Toricelli, Cei-Rigotti, de Faletan, Bang and Stamm. They asked for rifles from DWM but they reluctant to send examples of the Mauser rifle for testing because, it was speculated, they knew it didn’t work very well. In all of my reading of the original test reports on dozens of automatic weapons from 1894 to 1920 the fear of using too much ammunition is barely mentioned, if at all. What stymied the automatic rifles of this period were that they were expensive (+/- 30% more) and harder to produce than the existing bolt action rifles. Testing showed that most of them were unreliable because they were by their nature more sensitive to ammunition variance – and ammunition was not nearly as consistent as it would become. It’s not clear from the documents but Stamm may have failed because his rifle worked best with steel-jacketed ammunition and the Swiss were still using paper wrapped steel capped lead bullets. By 1912 Stamm was working for the Adolph Saurer company and had abandoned auto weapons altogether -offering the Swiss a new straight-pull rifle which they rejected because it offered no great improvements on the existing service rifles.
There was no organisational reluctance towards auto rifles by the Swiss. Between 1894 and 1910 the records show that the Swiss seriously tested systems presented by: Raschein, Mannlicher, Toricelli, Cei-Rigotti, de Faletan, Bang and Stamm. They asked for rifles from DWM who were reluctant to send examples of the Mauser rifle for testing because, it was speculated, they knew it didn’t work very well. In all of my reading of the original test reports on dozens of automatic weapons from 1894 to 1920 the fear of using too much ammunition is barely mentioned, if at all. What stymied the automatic rifles of this period were that they were expensive (+/- 30% more) and were harder to produce than the existing bolt action rifles. They were harder to service and disassemble as well while testing showed that most of them were unreliable because they were by their nature more sensitive to ammunition variance – and ammunition was not nearly as consistent as it would become. It’s not clear from the documents but Stamm may have failed because his rifle worked best with steel-jacketed ammunition and the Swiss were still using paper wrapped steel capped lead bullets. By 1912 Stamm was working for the Adolph Saurer company and had abandoned auto weapons altogether -offering the Swiss a new straight-pull rifle which they rejected because it offered no great improvements on the existing service rifles.
Thanks for the info PouDuCiel. It probably didn’t help that the Swiss already had a very good rifle. Improving machine guns and artillery was probably a smarter move.
One has to remember that the decision-makers had experience of the earlier generations wherein the infantry’s primary contribution to battle was volley fire. The reason they stuck with the mentality of those days stems from the fact that few of them were ever down on the line to observe the effects of the technical changes that had come along, and they were still thinking in terms of the rifle enabling the “organic machine gun” effect of volley fire in company and battalion massed formations. The idea that the machinegun could produce those fires from one weapon, under cover, and by itself? Not something they could wrap their heads around. As well, the development and widespread utilization of indirect artillery fire? Yet another factor.
If you think of small arms procurement in general as being performed for the conditions of the last war directly experienced by the decision-making people, you’d not be too far off. All down the years, ringing into the 1960s in just about every nation…
Hi Kirk,Again, from reading the archives the Swiss were extremely keen on both the MG and the automatic rifle as a concept. A report from as early as 1888 said that the Maxim system was ‘the future of firearms’ because it was a huge force multiplier and allowed for exactly the sort of usage you note in your post. It wasn’t just the Swiss. As early as 1896 the British trade magazine ‘Arms and Explosives’ stated that it was ‘taken for granted’ that the next developments in military rifles would be 1) Further reduction of calibre and increase in velocity 2) The adoption of an automatic rifle. 6mm was regarded as the smallest workable caliber not because of concerns about lethality but because that was the limit of mass produced barrel manufacturing precision at the time. The main concern about the auto rifle was that it was complicated and expensive and, ironically, not strong enough for the rigours of ‘modern war. We have to get away from the idea that all armies of the time were full of obstructive old fashioned grognards.
Everywere there were studies like that, and everywere they clashed with the existing old-school mentality (whose advocates usually didn’t write much).
In Switzerland the new ideas had even more leverage than elsewhere, due to the “David vs. Goliath” mentality. The problem the defence desision-makers there had to constantly find solutions to was “how do we make so that one of us counts as much as ten of them?” because that was the ratio with every of their neighbours. And YET they still adopted a bolt action rifle in 1931.
You missed pointing out the bronze or brass gas rings on the end of the gas piston. That’s a feature that you don’t very often see on gas operated firearms.
It looks very well made.
I stand corrected about striker fired lever action rifles. The new rifle coming out from Bond Arms has some sort of internal firing mechanism.
https://www.bondarms.com/Bond-Arms-Lever-Action-Coming-Soon-P8583.aspx
If you fear dirt ingress through hammer-related cavity in lever-action fire-arm you do not need to delete hammer completely, as it is possible to conceal hammer inside or in other words to use internal hammer. Example of such weapon are
19th century: Savage Model 99
20th century: Winchester Model 88
21th century: Henry Model Supreme https://www.henryusa.com/rifles/lever-action-supreme-rifle/
Yes, just like an AR, AK, and pretty much every rifle currently used by organizations where lives depend on reliability under field conditions.