Gas-operated

History

The first mention of using a gas piston in a single-shot breech-loading rifle comes from 1856, by the German Edward Lindner who patented his invention in the United States and Britain. In 1866, Englishman William Curtis filed the first patent on a gas-operated repeating rifle but subsequently failed to develop that idea further. Between 1883 and 1885, Hiram Maxim filed several patents on blowback-, recoil-, and gas-operation. In 1885, one year after Maxim's first gas-operated patent, a British inventor called Richard Paulson, who a year before had patented a straight blowback-operated rifle and pistol, again, one year after Maxim’s first blowback patent, patented a gas piston-operated rifle and pistol which he claimed could be used with sliding, rotating or falling bolts. He would also patent a gas-operated revolver in 1886. Paulson did construct models of his rifle and tried them in France shortly after filing his patent. Furthermore, according to A. W. F. Taylerson, a firearms historian, his patented revolver was probably workable. In 1887, an American inventor called Henry Pitcher patented a gas-operated conversion system that he claimed could be applied to any manually operated magazine rifle. In 1890 he would patent and submit an original gas-operated rifle for testing by the US government but it performed poorly and was ultimately never adopted despite being offered commercially for the civilian market. In the 1880s a gas piston-operated rifle and pistol were developed by the Clair Brothers of France who received a French patent and submitted prototypes for testing by the French army in 1888 although the true date of their invention is uncertain. They would also produce a semi-automatic shotgun in the early 1890s. In 1889, the Austro-Hungarian Adolf Odkolek von Újezd filed a patent for the first successful gas-operated machine gun.