Einhand: The One-Handed Autoloading Pistol

AutoLoader or Pocket Revolver?
31

The Czech Praga Model 1921 could be operated with
one hand but required good dexterity.

This is a story about the practical genius of Witold Chylewski, who patented a fully workable solution to the pocket autoloading pistol’s most obvious weakness in contrast to the pocket double-action revolver when used as a personal-defense weapon. Chylewski was awarded the first of two patents for his invention in 1914, on the eve of World War I. By this time, autoloaders had already usurped the revolver in a military role in the United States, Germany, Austria and Belgium. They were also winning a growing share of the police market outside America. Worldwide, civilian purchasers with a little more money to spend were buying small autoloading pocket pistols and even smaller vest pocket pistols for personal protection.

Autoloading pistols were attractive then for the same reason they are now. Compared to revolvers, they were slimmer and thus easier to carry and conceal. They generally offered more firepower and faster reloading than the typical five or six-shot revolver and required less skill than double-action revolvers to shoot well rapidly. The major strike against them, particularly when used in the civilian, concealed carry, role, was that they didn’t have the revolver’s combination of safety and instant readiness. To equal the revolver’s level of readiness, the autoloader would have to be carried with a round chambered, hammer or striker cocked, and the safety off, which invited accidental discharge. The Polish-born Chylewski clearly had the civilian personal defense market in mind when he conceived a mechanism by which a pocket autoloader could be carried in complete safety with an empty chamber and then loaded and cocked with one hand in an instant. It could even be done inside your pocket.

This page from the instruction manual illustrates the
Lignose 2A and 3A. The smaller gun had a six-round
magazine, and the larger gun had a nine-round magazine.

Operating the cocking piece to cock the hammer
and chamber a cartridge.

Auto Readiness

To achieve this, Chylewski turned the front of the triggerguard into a sliding cocking piece curved like a trigger so it could be easily operated by the index finger. The cocking piece was moved forward and backward along rails milled into the frame. It operated in one of two ways. The simple version of the triggerguard cocking piece described in his first patent engaged cutouts on the bottom of the slide to push it back the distance needed to cock the pistol’s concealed hammer and strip a .25 ACP cartridge from the magazine. Releasing finger pressure on the cocking piece allowed the recoil spring to drive the slide forward, along with the cocking piece, while chambering a round. The index finger then moved inside the triggerguard to depress the trigger and begin firing the pistol as a normal, single-action autoloader.

By comparison, his more complex cocking piece design patented in 1915 automatically released the slide once it moved rearward far enough to cock the hammer and strip a cartridge from the magazine. At that point, with the pistol loaded and cocked, the cocking piece could be released to return to its original position, or the shooter could depress it farther rearward into contact with the trigger immediately behind it to fire the pistol. This mechanism minimized the possibility of inducing jams through errors in the physical manipulation of the cocking piece. We all know how easy it is to induce a failure-to-feed malfunction when you don’t allow a slide to close with the full force of the recoil spring. In addition, the keep-pulling-to-fire feature really put the autoloader on the same footing as a revolver for the speed of the first shot. One might argue it made the autoloader panic-proof, too.

The Bergmann and Lignose pistols were hammer fired and often equipped
with a cocked hammer indicator pin that protruded from the rear of the frame.

A rare SIG-made model. They proved too easy to
accidentally fire when drawing back the cocking piece.

Setting Up

Chylewski had high hopes for his invention. At the end of World War I, he found a partner in the Societe Industrielle Suisse (SIG) in Neuhausen, Switzerland, who paid him for the rights to his second patent to build the Chylewski Selbstlade Pistole (Chylewski Self-loading Pistol) and to be its sole distributor in all markets except North and South America, which Chyelwski withheld for himself. The Chylewski patent pistol was SIG’s second handgun project in 25 years, which suggests they had pretty high expectations for it. It was not to be.

SIG made around 1,000 pistols from 1921 to 1922 but decided to drop the project because of a problem they discovered. In the process of withdrawing the cocking piece to make the gun ready to fire, it was distressingly easy for the cocking piece to hit the actual trigger unintentionally and fire the pistol. Imagine the liability lawsuit potential. SIG deactivated the finger cocking feature on their pistols and ceased production.

Chylewski parted ways with SIG with control of his patent rights and, I expect, some valuable lessons learned. The first company to actually have success building pistols off Chylewski’s patents used the first simpler and safer version. Exactly when the respected firm of Theodor Bergmann Waffenfabrik in Suhl, Germany, obtained the patent rights from Chylewski is a bit murky, but they had an ideal platform for it in their Browning Model 1903 inspired vest pocket, .25 ACP, six-shot magazine Model 2 and nine-shot magazine Model 3 pistols. When adapted to the Chylewski patent, they were renamed the Model 2A and Model 3A. In 1921, they were being advertised for sale as the Bergmann Einhand Pistole (Bergmann One-hand Pistol). In 1922, Bergmann was bought out by Lignose A.G. in Berlin, who continued to make the Model 2A and 3A. Initially Lignose marketed the pistols under the more prestigious Bergmann brand but eventually sold them under their own name and filed a final patent on their refined Einhand design in 1924.

This 1920s ad for the successful Lignose version of the Einhand
gives you an idea of how they saw their clientele and how the
pistol would be carried.

The box artwork for the short-lived SIG-made
Chylewski Self-Loading Pistol.

Production History

Though the Lignose Einhand pistols were advertised through the 1930s, researchers believe actual production may have ceased in 1928. There is evidence to suggest the total production of Bergmann and Lignose Einhand pistols was between 40,000 and 50,000. From 1921 through 1928, Colt produced about 86,500 Model 1908 .25 ACP vest pocket autoloaders, and if you look at the production up through 1939, the number goes up to 127,500 guns. Compared to that, the Einhand doesn’t look like a smashing commercial success, but I can think of at least three mitigating factors to consider. First, after World War I, Germany’s economy collapsed with hyperinflation and went into a severe depression, shrinking its domestic market. Second, the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 plunged industrial economies worldwide into a depression that lasted almost a decade, decimating the export market. Finally, I have to wonder how heavily the actions of the post-war Inter-Allied Military Control Commission weighed on the minds of German gunmakers in the 1920s. Deutsche Werke, a consortium of formally state-owned arsenals, produced around 400,000 Ortgies autoloading pistols in the four years following the armistice. That got the attention of the commission, who ordered them to get completely out of the business of making guns by the spring of 1922. In what can only be seen as punishment, the commission also ordered the disposal of their inventory, which they were forced to do at less than their manufacturing cost. To say the least, the post-war German business climate wasn’t ideal for gunmakers.

The last place you would expect to see the Einhand
concept applied … a full-size 9mm pistol like the
Chinese P77B.

Manufacturing quality was quite high.
Note the tight fit between parts.

Too Complex?

As clever and efficient as the Einhand pistols were, I’ve wondered why they weren’t widely copied. Initially, I think part of the explanation may be that Chylewski and Lignose maintained good oversight over their patents. We know Chylewski registered his in Austria, Germany, Britain and the United States at least. The latter was awarded in 1917 which would have provided him exclusivity of use into 1934. The final Einhand patent by Lignose protected their successful design through the 1930s in Germany.

From World War I through the beginning of WWII, arguably the heyday of the vest pocket autoloader, potential copycats might have shown restraint for fear of infringement lawsuits, but that doesn’t explain why the Einhand feature wasn’t picked up after the war, especially on inexpensive import pocket .25 ACP autos and their post-Gun Control Act of 1968 domestically assembled kin. I suspect that it came down to the additional cost. Perhaps a higher level of quality control was needed to make the post-war guns reliable enough to benefit from the feature. The Einhands were built at a time when skilled workers made guns, hand-fitting, polishing and adjusting every one as they deemed necessary to ensure a high-quality finished product that could smoothly chamber a cartridge without the full inertia of a spring-driven slide. Quality comes at a price, and it looks to me like manufacturers of post-WWII pocket autoloaders believed low cost was more important to consumers than fine workmanship and materials. That being said, I might still install an Einhand cocking lever on my Italian Titan .25 ACP just to see how much work it really takes to make it function.

The utility of the Chyslewski patents was also limited because it didn’t scale well. It was best suited to tiny, simple blowback operated, .25 ACP caliber guns. Larger caliber blowbacks required heavier recoil springs and, thus, more finger strength to pull back the cocking piece. Longer cartridges required greater rearward movement of the trigger guard cocking piece for chambering, which required greater finger reach.

A pair of Model 3A pistols, one bearing Bergmann grips and other
Lignose grips. The pistols were in production for about a year when
Lignose bought out Bergmann and took over their operations.

A Lignose Einhand 2A. Note the excellent, for the time, design of
the safety. The conical button was easy to sweep off. Brass cocking
pieces were used for a period, but most were steel.

Alternatives

While the Einhand was the most elegant approach to safe carry with an empty chamber and one-handed operation, it wasn’t the only game in town at the time. In Spain, the JO-LO-AR autoloaders accomplished this by the addition of a simple, fold-down, metal finger lever attached to the slide. The index and middle fingers of the shooting hand extended forward and drew back the slide by the vertical lever while the remaining three fingers anchored the pistol in the hand. One model was adopted by the Peruvian mounted policemen who wanted an autoloader they could operate with one hand while the other held the reins.

The Czech Praga Model 1921 was also capable of one-handed operation but depended far too much on manual dexterity. The slide of this vest-pocket .25 ACP had a carve-out above the muzzle to allow the shooter to draw it back to cock and chamber a round by reaching over the top of the pistol with the index finger.
Fritz Walther’s perfection of the single action/double action (SA/DA) firing mechanism in the Walther PP created a whole new class of autoloader in 1929, which was just as safe as the Einhand but faster to operate since it required only one finger movement to fire instead of two. Curiously, Hecker & Koch revisited parts of the Einhand concept in their squeeze-cocker H&K P7 pistols made from 1979 to 2008. These were single-action pistols designed to be carried uncocked with a round in the chamber. Depressing the front of the grip frame, which took place naturally when grasping the pistol, cocked the pistol. Unlike SA/DA autoloaders, which have a long, heavy initial trigger pull for the first double-action shot, every shot fired from the P7 benefited from the same short, light, single-action trigger pull.

The largest application of the Einhand concept is the P-77 pistol introduced in the People’s Republic of China around 1981 for military and police use and very likely still in use today. Essentially a pocket .32 autoloader (7.62x17mm), it has the automatic slide release function of Chylewski’s second patent as built by SIG, but without the dangerous keep-pulling-to-fire feature. The P77B is the most unlikely application of the Einhand concept. It is a full-size, 9x19mm pistol, which was briefly imported into the United States, with a cocking piece triggerguard feature similar to the Lignose patent. The finger strength to draw back the slide is reduced by the pistol’s gas retarded blowback system of operation that doesn’t require heavy recoil springs.
The lesson here … never say never.

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