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compared with regular Springfield or Enfield rounds. Because the latter flew faster than sound, they made a “sharp, menacing noise” as they passed an enemy soldier. Pedersen bullets, conversely, did not create an air wave, leading many officers to believe that they would not instill fear in the enemy. Lastly, the Pedersen bullet’s underpoweredness was cited as an issue. Despite its inventor’s last-ditch attempts to boost its performance by increasing the charge to 4.7 grains of powder and stretching the casing’s length from .78 inches to .93 inches, the bullets would kill only if the target was closer than 350 yards—and even at that extreme range, one would have to strike a vulnerable organ, multiple times probably, to be lethal. Unfortunately, owing to the heat buildup caused by the rapid-firing, Pedersen simply could not enlarge his cartridges any more, and the boards’ reports collectively rang the device’s death knell.33

Taken together, all these criticisms added up to a single conclusion: the war experience had forged a common progressive and diehard desire to possess a light, full-powered, rapid-fire, semiautomatic rifle combining the best attributes of the standard Springfield and its Pedersen-enabled variant.34 Importantly, it was no longer assumed that riflemen should hand-load their weapons with single cartridges by default while keeping clips in reserve. To appease the army’s marksmen, however, Ordnance emphasized that the accuracy of any future arm must be “comparable with that of the present service rifle” and have a wind-adjustable rear sight graduated out to one thousand yards.35

In 1921 the department began testing several experimental semiautomatic rifles that it hoped might serve as the Springfield’s replacement, including one conceived by the aptly named SØren Hansen Bang of Denmark, another by General T. E. Liu of China, a recoil-operated version submitted by a Swiss named Rychiger, and a French gas-operated one named the St. Etienne. (Perhaps inspired by President Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for a League of Nations, Ordnance had become rather more internationalist since the days of Crozier, recently retired, and the “American” Mauser.) None of them quite fit the bill.36

Pedersen then returned to the fray with a brilliant idea: instead of making the cartridges bigger, why not make both gun and ammunition smaller? Aside from tradition—the fondness for the good old .30—there was no overriding reason, as far as he could see, not to reduce yet again the caliber size. To do that one would need an entirely new semiautomatic weapon. By designing a new rifle and cartridge together, Pedersen could short-circuit the ponderous Ordnance procurement system that insisted on building weapons around an existing cartridge, a process that invariably resulted in unending compromises and adjustments.

After many furious sessions with his slide rule and ballistic charts, Pedersen emerged with a novel concept for a .276-caliber, 125-grain bullet that was half an inch shorter than the service standard (2.84 inches to 3.34 inches) and powered by 32 grains of fine-grained Du Pont No. 25—or 64 percent as much needed for the .30-06. Ideal for semiautomatic use, it produced just 60 percent as much heat as the .30-06, halved its recoil, and weighed 20 percent less. As an added bonus, a half-inch reduction in cartridge size enabled the designer to shorten the magazine and bolt by the same amount, plus the receiver behind the bolt, thereby shrinking the entire firing mechanism by no less than an inch. That cut, in turn, shaved half a pound of metal from the total weight of the rifle.

At the beginning of 1924, Ordnance, having been impressed by Pedersen’s blueprints for the new cartridge, provided him with a large office in the New Experimental Department Building at Springfield and a salary of $10,000, along with a royalty of a dollar per rifle if it was adopted. Remembered one of his friends, Pedersen, not one of nature’s gregarious souls, discouraged visitors, to protect not only his privacy but also his possible patent.37 He had