Rudolf Schmidt (Colonel)

Rudolf Schmidt (born June 28, 1832 in Basel ; † July 27, 1898 ) was a Swiss colonel , director of the Federal Arms Factory and inventor of the Schmidt-Rubin rifle system, together with Eduard Rubin .

Colonel Rudolph Schmidt, ca.1885

Life

He attended the community school and the Realgymnasium in Basel, then a two-year college in Rolle, Canton Vaud, to learn French. In 1847 he started an apprenticeship in a Basel grocery store, which he successfully completed in 1851. Schmidt then spent some unhappy years in the textile industry and was hit by various personal blows. Over time, he turned to weapons technology, ballistics and shooting. In 1864, after completing the appropriate training, he was appointed "Federal First Class Weapons Inspector" and took over the supervision of weapons production at SIG in Neuhausen am Rheinfall . Following Schmidt's proposals, a federal assembly workshop was opened in Bern in 1871 , where the individual parts supplied by private industry were assembled into weapons. Schmidt wanted to continue and proposed a federal arms factory to the Federal Council , which was approved on April 24, 1875. This is how the Federal Arms Factory in Bern emerged from the assembly workshop .

From 1871 Schmidt developed the Ordonnanzrevolver 1872 in caliber 10.4 mm from the Belgian Chamelot-Delvigne army revolver model 1871, which was manufactured by Pirlot Frères in Liège , Belgium and assembled in the Swiss assembly workshop in Bern. The orderly revolver 1882 in caliber 7.5 mm was also a development by Rudolf Schmidt.

Schmidt later developed a new small-caliber infantry repeating rifle in 7.5 mm caliber with Eduard Rubin for the 7.5 mm GP90 cartridge developed by Rubin . The most prominent feature of this type of rifle is the straight-pull breech , which, similar to the Mannlicher system , enables reloading with a powerful but quick push-pull movement. The prototype was presented to the military department for testing in 1885 and introduced as an infantry rifle model 1889 (7.5 × 53.5 mm). 175,000 of this weapon had been produced by 1894. That year Schmidt had to resign from his position as director of the arms factory. The reason was his resistance to the new organization of the workforce. However, an investigation could not prove any errors. The entire “ Schmidt-Rubin ” family of weapons developed from his infantry rifle , which was not replaced by the Sturmgewehr 57 until 1957 .

Schmidt was also the author of various works on the development of weapons, his most important work being «The handguns, their creation and technical-historical development up to the present day», published in 1875.

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• Eugen Heer: Rudolf Schmidt: Officer, designer, shooter and author. In: ASMZ volume: 136 (1970), issue 6, page 455ff.
• Eugen Heer: The handguns from 1850 to the present , Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz 1971, ISBN 3-201-00967-9
• Albert Brunisholz, Carl Hildebrandt, 1850–1975, The History of War Material Administration 1977 publisher KMV, Bern.