The Sidearm: Handguns from the Queen Anne Pistol to the Beretta M9

Start with the turn-off pistol, in which the barrel is unscrewed to load the chamber. It is named for the reign of Queen Anne, which began in 1702, and it was made small enough to be carried and concealed. The page records that it was possibly first made in England, so its origin is stated as uncertain.

Samuel Colt designed this .36 caliber, six-round cap and ball revolver between 1847 and 1850 and introduced it in 1851. About 215,000 were made in the United States and about 42,000 more at the Colt London Armory, and it stayed in production until 1873.

Lieutenant Frederick Beaumont patented a mechanism in 1855 that let this London-made Adams revolver fire either single action or double action. The British Army adopted it in 1856, and it stayed in service until the Enfield Mark I replaced it in 1881.

The Peacemaker took over from the Navy in 1873, the same year the United States Army adopted it as its standard sidearm. Its single-action mechanism required the hammer to be cocked by hand before each shot, and it was first chambered for the .45 Colt cartridge.

The Webley was a British top-break revolver whose barrel hinged downward and ejected all six spent cases at once, which made reloading faster. The Mark I was adopted in 1887, and the Mark VI of 1915 was the version most widely issued in the trenches of the First World War.

Leon Nagant designed this seven-shot revolver for Imperial Russia, and the army adopted it in 1895. Its gas-seal cylinder moves each cartridge forward as it fires, closing the gap to the barrel. It was later issued to Red Army officers and to NKVD personnel.

Adopted by the German military in 1908 as the Pistole 08, the Luger used a toggle-lock action with a jointed arm that rises to cycle the mechanism. It was developed alongside the 9mm Parabellum cartridge, which became one of the most widely used handgun and submachine gun rounds in the world.

Fedor Tokarev adapted a simplified version of a John Browning design, and the Soviet armed forces adopted it in 1931. It was chambered for the 7.62x25mm Tokarev cartridge, and about 1.7 million were made in the Soviet Union between 1930 and 1955.

Begun by John Browning and finished by the FN engineer Dieudonne Saive, the Hi-Power entered production in 1935. Its double-column magazine held thirteen rounds, about double that of most single-stack service pistols of the time, and it ended up in use on both sides of the Second World War.

Nikolay Makarov designed this straight-blowback, single-action pistol to replace the heavier Tokarev, and the Soviet armed forces and police adopted it in December 1951. More than five million have been produced, and it was the standard Warsaw Pact military sidearm through the Cold War.

Gaston Glock won a contract for a new Austrian military sidearm in 1982 with this 9mm pistol. Its polymer frame reduced weight, its striker-fired mechanism had few parts, and its standard magazine holds seventeen rounds.

The United States military adopted this Italian-designed Beretta 92FS as its standard sidearm in 1985, replacing the M1911 and its .45 ACP cartridge with a higher-capacity 9mm design more in line with the standard NATO pistol cartridge.