19th Century Semiautomatic Pistols Compendium

Georg Roth was the Austrian financier behind Wasa Theodorovic, who designed a very unusual series of long-recoil, locked-breech, single-action/double-action pistols chambered for the 8×21 mm. While Karel Krnka’s name is also associated with these guns, his involvement came several years later. The first pistols were true behemoths, similar in size to the large Gasser revolvers, with a shrouded, extended barrel, a cocking knob over an external hammer, an oversize trigger guard and an elongated grip. Feeding was through the top via a special charger/stripper clip with an internal, but separable magazine having a 10-shot capacity. Some of the earliest examples, reportedly 25, were evaluated by the Austrian military and marked with a “97” acceptance, including serial number 8 presented here.  As there were no forthcoming orders, Theodorovic continued his refinements, making changes to facilitate sideplate removal, shortening the grip, adding a decocker, including a Tambour grip safety, and even revising the lanyard ring to both rotate and swivel. In effect, nearly every gun in this series, which reached to just more than 100 pistols, was unique. While none was sufficiently attractive to be made in quantity, many of their features were implemented in the Model 1907 Roth-Steyr, a standard-issue pistol that figured prominently in World War I, and the Model 1901 Frommer that was grandfather to a host of well-known offspring