Mauser

The Oberndorf works opened as a royal Wuerttemberg rifle factory in 1811 and took the Mauser name after the 1871 rifle designed by Wilhelm and Paul Mauser was adopted by the new German empire. Paul Mauser’s 1898 action went on to become the most widely copied bolt mechanism ever made, licensed, cloned and adapted by at least a dozen states. The plant was dismantled in 1945 and rebuilt as a machine-tool maker; the name survives as a sporting-rifle brand, sharing Oberndorf with firms founded by its own former engineers.