Quote:
Originally Posted by BC38
Interesting trade mark. The "wings" on the letter A make it pretty obvious that it was intentionally made to closely resemble the S&W trade mark. Enough to be mistaken for it at a glance.
Looking at the gun in the link posted by 2152hq, and the photos posted by TomkinsSP it is pretty obvious these "copies" were meant to pass for the real thing...
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The gun makers of the Basque country of Northern Spain, centered around the city of Eibar, who had been producing arms since the late Middle Ages, took advantage of a quirk of early Spanish patent law: patents were only valid if the patent holder actually started production in Spain within a few (I think 3) years.
Since John M. Browning never produced his 1903 patent pistol in Spain, Eibar gun makers produced hundreds of thousands of Ruby pistols, a copy of the Browning design, for France, Italy, and Rumania during WW I.
The S&W and Colt copies produced in peacetime in the 1920s were not marketable in the North American and European markets, because of the patent issues, but mostly went to Latin America where Yanqui guns were much in demand and nobody asked questions.