History:
During the first aera of automatic pistols it was a disadvantage to need both hands for preparing it for the first shot. There were several ideas existing about an "one-hand handling", but none of them had success because of the strong recoil-spring of bigger pistols.
Witold Chylewski, a man from Poland living in Vienna, had the idea to concentrate just on a .25 ACP vestpocket pistol, thus getting a relative weak recoil spring and short recoil distance. In his construction the front end of the trigger guard was movable connected to the slide, cocking the pistol by pulling back the trigger guard with the trigger finger. A release- mechanism let the slide come forwards again at the end of the trigger movement and an additional pressure acted the trigger to fire the first shot.
Chylewski got several European patents between 1910 und 1918, representing is the brit. Pat 1023/1916.
In 1919 Chylewski and the company SIG in Neuhausen agreed, that SIG, paying a licence fee, will produce his "One Hand Pistol" first of all in an amount of 1000 pcs. In case the pistol succeeded, SIG got the exclusive rights for all the world except South- and North America.
But there were problems coming up with this pistol (see next model), so that between 1919 and 1921 (some resources also tell 1921 to 1923) only the agreed 1000 pcs. have been produced. Therefore this pistol is rather rare today.
Nevertheless these patents later on got into the hands of Bergmann and afterwards to the Lignose AG, both of them producing the Chylewski- construction with some simplifications as "one hand model" more successful than SIG.
SYSTEM: self-cocking pistol with mass system and internal hammer
CARTRIDGES : 6
CALIBRE : .25 ACP
BARREL LENGTH : 57 mm , 6 grooves right hand twisting
WEIGHT EMPTY : 370 g
TOTAL LENGTH : 117 mm
TOTAL HEIGHT : 78 mm
TOTAL WIDTH : 22 mm
TRIGGER : Single Action with add. loading trigger
SIGHT : groove and notch
SAFETY : safety-lever
FINISH : blued
GRIPS : wood
remark: the pictures were digitally resampled from a "reworked" model (see next model) following the original design.