Rare, Antique & Beautiful Firearms (defunct)

And now, The pistols of Carl J. Ehbets, a (mostly retired) Rare, Antique & Beautiful Firearms exclusive!

Ehbets was the German-born chief designer for the Colt Patent Firearm Company through portions of the 1880s and 90s. Along with William Mason, he helped to develop the Colt M1889 revolver with swing-out cylinder, as well as others. Much less well known, he also designed several automatic pistols, with at least one example of these having actually been assembled.

The bottom right illustration shows his interesting “gas-operated magazine gun”, a locked-breech piston-actuated design, with patent filed in 1894 and granted 1896, making it one of the earliest automatic pistol designs (which bears an outward resemblance to the Laumann and Bergmann-Schmeissers). To wit no prototype of this model was built.

The upper photograph and the lower left illustration depict what is generally referred to simply as the “Ehbets Pistol”, a complicated and in many ways bizarre early grip magazine design. The operation is difficult to categorize but essentially uses a modified M1895 Colt-Browning “potato digger” gas-lever action, although in this type the swinging gas lever thrusts the barrel forward as in a blow-forward design. Perhaps strangely, the 1897 patent sites having a fixed, integral breech block as a safety feature, in that there is no separate slide-breech which might break off of the firearm, flying backwards to injure the shooter. Several small moving parts, all actuated by the forward motion of the barrel, serve to hold cartridges down away from the barrel until it is completely forward, and then to further hold the already magazine spring-advanced cartridge sufficiently up for chambering. These along with active extraction and ejection were meant to ensure what was described as absolutely certain and secure operation  without malfunction. Very little of this firearm conforms to our standard ideas of how a pistol should be put together, right down to the trigger.

This design bears a strong resemblance to Browning’s “magazine pistol” prototype, and indeed Browning had shown his prototype to the Colt Patent engineers at around the same time that Ehbets’ design was finalized. However, Browning’s various automatic designs were favored by the Colt company. Ehbets conceded the apparent superiority of Browning’s designs, and the two ended up working closely together.

From patents no. 570388 and 580935.