[Ron Wood]

Thanks for the link. That is a rather entertaining article and for the most part provides a highly condensed history of the Borchardt and Luger.

Three things of note:

The photograph of Borchardt has no provenance. For years gun historians have searched for images of the famous inventor to no avail. Then last year a very readable and reasonably accurate history of early firearms inventors was published. It is “The Evolution of Military Automatic Pistols/Self-loading Pistol Designs of Two World Wars and the Men who Invented Them” by Gordon Bruce. (It is published in paperback, inexpensive and I highly recommend it). In it, Mr. Bruce shows two photos of Hugo Borchardt, the one in this article and another showing him later in life. I was very excited by this long anticipated revelation and contacted Mr. Bruce about the origin of the photos. His reply was vague and consisted of that he had acquired the photos some 30 years ago from a Polish collector without authentication and the collector could no longer be contacted. No further information was provided nor was he able to expand on it in any way. So the photos are, at a minimum, of dubious validity and the visage of Herr Borchardt remains shrouded in mystery.

The second bit of whimsy is the notion that the redesign of the Borchardt pistol by Georg Luger went immediately to a coil mainspring design, ignoring the fact that from 1898 until the introduction of the New Model in 1906, the mainspring remained a laminated flat leaf spring similar to the Borchardt mainspring, simplified but still a leaf spring.

Thirdly, Borchardt and Luger were not bitter enemies. Their relationship was not the warmest, but they were in fact on fairly friendly terms.