Dear Friends,
I would like introducing another interesting category of documents from the Paul Mauser archive: the glass plates.
If you have the opportunity of reading the reference books of Jon Speed, like “The Mauser Archive” or the “Mauser Pistolen” you can see that Jon refers to these documents quite often.
One of the most astonishing parts of the archive is for sure the glass plate’s collection. The Mauser Company kept a glass plate’s archive until the end of the Second World War.
It certainly has been a long journey from the first successful attempts at primitive photography to the present. Long before mega pixel digital cameras the state-of-the-art was the glass plate negative. The first photographic processes have been discovered between 1826 and 1839, and Mauser quite soon started using this new technology to photograph his production…
This archive has an important historical value not only for the Mauser enthusiasts but also for the photography followers.
Often, we see glass plate photo in the books after his digitalization process therefore we do not appreciate the “old” document itself.
For this reason I have decided presenting one of these glass plates that will be interesting for the C96 enthusiast because shown the C96 assembling facility with the workers…
More images here:
http://www.paul-mauser-archive.com/glass%20plate.htm
You can see the different phase of analysis.
For the Parabellum enthusiast, it is interesting that together with the C96 and 1910 model glass plates, some plates of the Luger Swiss Model number 01 (!!) has been found… most probably these glass plates arrived in Oberndorf with Weiss in the 1930… An evidence that also DWM was using the same tecnology to keep trace of the most important gun...
I hope you enjoy.
Cheers,
Mauro
The glass plate in his original envelope... it has more that 100 years!
The glass plate extracted from his original envelope. A first analysis looking at the plate against the light.
The negative obtained scanning the plate with a good scanner...
C96 production factory. The negative is then reverted using a graphic software like Photoshop... Note the detail of the two C96 carbines around the clock and calendar visible at the end of the central corridor magnified on the top right for better analysis..
The analysis of the picture scanned in high resolution (1200 dot per inch) shown interesting details. It is possible reconnaising workers assembling C96 and stocks...