The Werndl (note that this rifle’s pronunciation should be “verndle,” rhymes with the composer Wagner (Vagner!)) was principally the invention of Karel Holub (1830-1903) who associated with Josef Werndl, director of Gewehr Fabrikanten Werndl (Werndl Rifle Works), which would later become Öesterreich Waffenfabrik Gesellschaft [OEWG, Austria Arms Factory Company] in Steyr, Austria, later still to become Steyrwerks, and eventually just Steyr, to manufacture the rifle. 

 

   Steyr is as important to the history of European and world arms as is Remington, and produced just as many rifles in this period.  The Werndl is Steyr’s initial foray into small arms for national armies, and the Werndl rifle is the piece that got Steyr off the ground and made everything else possible.

 

  The man who would give his name to this improbable rifle, built in the hundreds of thousands, was himself the heir to a rich manufacturing family tradition. His father had been a successful toolmaker in the relatively small Upper Austrian village of Steyr who added gun parts manufacturing to the business.  He was successful enough to allow young Josef to travel extensively where he would be exposed to a variety of European business models and, critically, to current English and especially American manufacturing systems as well, gaining valuable experience and insights from time spent at Colt’s and Remington’s facilities.

 

   At the time of his return to Steyr (1853) and his sudden thrust into running a large manufacturing concern (his father died in 1855), the family business already employed some 500 skilled workmen.  A remarkably able administrator as well as promoter, Josef Werndl reorganized his company along modern industrial lines adopting the mass production techniques he had witnessed during his travels, with a focus on supplying small arms parts to the European trade on a mass produced scale.

 

   Werndl’s foreman and chief designer was also remarkably talented.  During his military service Karl Holub gained his initial experience being assigned to the Austrian arsenal in Vienna and thereafter was worked in one of the manufactories of Steyr which was already the hub of a significant industrial and manufacturing area.  In 1861 Holub went to work for Werndl and they jointly began development work on a modern cartridge breechloader. In 1863, at the height of the American Civil War, they together traveled to several arms manufacturers in the United States, including Colt's where Holub would acquire personal exposure to arms design and mass production. 

 

   Recognizing the value of the newly emerging metallic cartridge, Werndl set the creative and skilled Holub the task of designing a new breechloader while he and his brother incorporated a new business to handle small arms, as distinct from merely parts.  This company, Josef und Franz Werndl & Comp. Waffenfabrik und Sägemühle, was the predecessor to OEWG, eventually Steyr.    During 1866 Holub designed and refined what would become the company's breakthrough breechloader.  In the meantime, European events were transpiring that would offer Werndl the opportunity of a lifetime.

 

   As a result of the obvious superiority displayed by the breechloading Dreyse guns pitted against the Austrian muzzle-loading Lorenz rifles at the battle of Sadowa (an Austrian disaster during the Seven Weeks War of 1866), Austria decided to adopt a “small caliber,” metallic cartridge breech loader of its own.  A very great number of Lorenz rifles were supplied to the warring armies of the US Civil War (the Lorenz was the 3rd most used rifle of that war) but large stores remained in Austria.

 

   In 1867, Austria elected to convert the army's vast stores of M.1854 Lorenz rifled muskets into breechloaders by means of a lifting block breech system named for its designer, Vienna gunmaker Franz Wänzl.  The Wänzl rifle was adopted as the Infanterie-Gewehr M.1854/67 Wänzl chambered for a rimfire cartridge.

 

   The Austrians knew that their immediate fix, the Austrian Wänzl conversion of the Lorenz, was a stopgap measure at best, and they engaged in extensive trials to adopt a successor.  A number of state-of-the-art designs vied in the trials, including the Remington Rolling Block system, the Peabody and various European designs.  Although the Holub designed and Werndl promoted M.1867 Werndl was entered late, it was nevertheless in time to be considered.

 

   During initial trials at the Vienna Arsenal, the Remington was the clear front‑runner until submission of the Holub design.  Indeed, such was the borrowing of ideas and technology at the time that the Holub trials rifle was originally submitted for operation with a Remington rimfire cartridge.  In a marketing stroke clearly the equal of Sam Colt or Remington's, Werndl "patriotically" offered his new rifle to Austria free of all patent fees and claims.  Of course, Werndl’s company would be the only firm capable of actually producing the rifle in the numbers needed by Austria's huge army and reserves.  While possibly apocryphal, the Werndl adoption story is that when a decision could not be made, both rifles (the Remington and the Werndl) were submitted to Emperor Franz Joseph I, who, not surprisingly, chose the Holub.  (In 1874, after adoption of the improved M.1873 Werndl, Holub’s contributions were acknowledged with his being awarded of the Knight's Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph, an exceptional decoration for anyone not a military officer or otherwise of high social status.)  While the emperor certainly would have had a hand in the process for such an important decision, there were both economic and national reasons why adopting a local product for domestic manufacture would be hugely desirable.  The rifle need not be the very best possible rifle; it only needed to be good enough.  The new Werndl rifle was good enough, thus jump-starting one of the great arms manufacturing concerns of Europe. 

 

   Thus in 1867 the company secured an initial contract for 100,000 of the new rifles, soon followed by a subsequent order for 150,000 additional rifles. This necessitated substantial expansion of the Werndl company which soon grew to 6,000 employees.  In August of 1869 the firm “went public” as Österreichische Waffenfabrik AG (OEWG) headed by Werndl.   Note that M1867 Werndl rifles initially produced bear the name “WERNDL” across the top of the receiver ring.  Those produced after the reorganization of the company are receiver marked “OEWG” in lieu of the earlier “WERNDL”.  Please see the photos under MARKINGS, below.  Within a few years, OEWG was producing a variety of rifles on contract from nations around the world including Europe and South America, growing to an output of as high as 8,000 rifles per week during the late 1870s and 1880s.