The Auto-Ordnance Corporation was an American firearms company founded in 1916 by John T. Thompson and operated from 1916 to 1944. Known for producing the Thompson submachine gun, the Auto-Ordnance Corporation was created by Thompson as a means for him to privately develop small arms.
History[]
After retiring from the United States Army in 1914, Gen. John T. Thompson used his spare time to develop and study automatic weapons; he finds a patent by a man named John Blish and negotiates with him to seek rights to the patent, while also seeking to finance his new developments in automatic small arms.[1]
Come 1916, with the financial backing of Thomas Fortune Ryan,[2] Thompson founds the Auto-Ordnance Corporation and names Theodore Eickhoff (1885 – 1971)[3] chief designer of the company. Eickhoff is tasked by Thompson to design an self-loading rifle for the company while Thompson returned to active duty in the military.[1]
While designing this new rifle, Eickhoff discovered a fatal flaw with Blish's system. He later reported his findings to Thompson, who enthusiastically suggested that a submachine gun be developed instead of a self-loading rifle; Thompson reportedly got up from his desk and started spraying the room with imaginary bullets using an imaginary submachine gun that he fired from the hip.[1]
With that in mind, work on the new submachine gun begins, with Oscar Payne being hired to design the new submachine gun. Designed for use in World War I, Payne designed a number of different iterations of the weapon, known as the Persuader and the Annihilator. Before the weapon could be finished, however, the armistice was signed and development on the submachine gun slowed down tremendously.[1]
The weapon was fully developed by 1921, named the Thompson and marketing began. Sales are slow, however, and Auto-Ordnance begins to lose money. Soon after, the Thompson begins to gain some amount of infamy for its use in gun crime in the 1920s. Come 1928, Ryan passed away[3] and by 1939, Auto-Ordnance had racked up substantial debts.[4] Come 1938, sales of the Thompson begin to pick up.
The company was bought out by another investor, Russell Maguire, in 1939, while the company was suffering from massive debts unpaid to Ryan. Maguire, along with the help of Marcellus Thompson (John T. Thompson's son) and Thomas Kane, attempted to retake the company; they were successful, but were told that Maguire was to own a majority stake in the company, to which they reluctantly sold much of their stock to him.[1]
After Thompson Sr. died, production of the submachine gun began to pick up, eventually reaching some 1.75 million by World War II's climax. In 1944, the low-cost M3 submachine gun is introduced and Thompson production ceases. After Thompson production ceased, Maguire would liquidate the company and absorb it into his family of companies, with the former factories used to produce other items.[1]
The "Auto-Ordnance" name is currently used by another company owned by Kahr Firearms; other than the name the new company bears no relation to the original Auto-Ordnance Corporation.
Products[]
An unknown .30-06 Thompson (possibly Auto-Ordnance/BSA?) prototype
Auto-Ordnance was known for the production of the Thompson submachine gun. Various projects such as the Thompson Autorifle and even a .30-06 caliber variant of the SMG were developed.
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/13things/7421.html
- ↑ https://www.auto-ordnance.com/history-of-an-icon/
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/73319885/theodore-h-eickhoff Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; name "eickhoff" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ https://bportlibrary.org/hc/bridgeport-at-war/auto-ordnance-corporation/