Mauser Rifle

   Peter Paul Mauser (1838-1914) was born at Oberndorf am Neckar, Wurttemberg, Germany. Young Peter Paul had a good beginning to become a gunsmith. His father was a master gunsmith at the government arms factory, and at age twelve, Peter Paul went to work there. Young Mauser's first invention was a small breech-loading cannon. Together with his brother, William, he produced a bolt-action single shot metallic-cartridge rifle, which was adopted by the Prussian army in 1871. The next Mauser improvement was a repeating model of the 1871 rifle. Then, as smokeless powder appeared, he developed the charger-loading small-bore bolt action rifle, upon which most later infantry arms have been modeled. The dominant characteristic of this rifle is a box magazine holding a staggered column of cartridges loaded from a charger that does not enter the action, with a bolt handle at the rear of the bolt. More than wenty nations have adopted the Mauser rifle. In ordinary speech we use the word rifle for a shoulder weapon, but really a rifle is any gun with a rifled barrel, a barrel with a series of spiral grooves on its inner surface to make the bullet spin rapidly as it leaves the gun.