Auto-Ordnance Corporation

John T. Thompson set the company up in August 1916 to develop an automatic rifle, having found the Blish principle in a patent search and believing it would let a rifle work without a gas system. It would not, at rifle pressures. What the company produced instead was a pistol-calibre weapon, and the Thompson submachine gun kept it alive through a market that never quite materialised. The assets passed to Numrich Arms in the 1950s and the name is now a Kahr brand.