The Austrian pistol manufacturer Gaston Glock, with an existence worthy of a thriller, died at the age of 94 after revolutionizing weaponry with his small plastic calibers. “In memory of Gaston Glock, 07/19/1929 – 12/27/23. Perfection continues,” Glock GmbH wrote on its website on Wednesday. websiteaccompanying the tribute with a portrait of the businessman and a black headband.
Discreet as his invention was famous, the father of the semi-automatic “Glock” studied mechanical engineering in Vienna, before founding a knife factory with his first wife, Helga, in 1963. In his spare time, he was already making prototypes of pistols… always with the left hand, in order to ward off fate.
In 1982, he won a tender from the Austrian army to design a firearm made largely of non-metallic materials. It is cheaper, lighter, easier to disassemble, fires more bullets than its competitors and the company Glock GmbH, headquartered in Deutsch-Wagram (north-east), is launching on the world market.
“In Glock we Trust”
“We can really compare Gaston Glock to Steve Jobs when he took the first Apple product out of his garage,” Fritz Ofner, director of one of the very rare investigations into the billionaire (“Weapon of Choice”), told AFP in 2018. “). In the United States, around 80% of police officers – who say among themselves “In Glock we Trust” – are now equipped with one. The FBI also cherishes it. A commercial success driven by Hollywood and pop culture stars.
Bruce Willis extols the merits of the “low-cost gun” in Die Hard 2, Tommy Lee Jones in US Marshals. We draw it in the James Bond films. On the music side, “at the end of the 1990s, Glock was the most cited brand in the American top 50,” according to Ofner, for whom “this new weapon encountered a new genre,” rap.
Sold in millions of copies, this minimalist “black jewel” ensures the fortune of its Austrian designer and Glock GmbH, which has become a multinational present in aviation, wood, health and energy, employs nearly 2,000 people in Austria, Slovakia and the United States.