In honor of Glock’s 30th anniversary in America in 2016, the Cody Firearms Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West mounted the exhibit Glock Makes History: the Birth of the Polymer Handgun Market. It was housed in the Firearms Museum’s Coors Theater, where visitors found a timeline of Glock firearms, embellished Glocks, and prop guns used for movie and television—including those from the television series Longmire. The exhibition ran until the Cody Firearms Museum’s complete renovation in 2019.
While Glocks are common today, the history of the company is fairly recent. Despite its infancy, Glock’s contribution to firearms history is no less significant than manufacturers in business for hundreds of years. German manufacturer Heckler & Koch made the first polymer pistol called the Volkspistole (VP/70) in 1970. Designers developed the Glock more than a decade later. Its design became the first commercially successful polymer-framed handgun on the market.
Gaston Glock, an Austrian engineer, was not initially a firearms designer, but was an expert with polymers. In 1963, he formed GLOCK KG, a company that produced and sold parts, both plastic and steel—particularly curtain rods, as well as knives for the Austrian military. His earliest employees hailed from the camera industry, making them experts in producing polymer components. Glock’s first pistol took a year to produce from design and concept to production; he applied for an Austrian patent in April 1981 for the pistol known as the Glock 17—a move that would make him a legend in the firearms world.
In the early 1980s, Glock and a team of firearms researchers developed the first Glock handgun with a polymer frame and an internal safety system. By 1983, he supplied 30,000 Glock 17s to the Austrian military, and by 1986, the company received its first United States law enforcement contract and now has more than 60 percent of the U.S. law enforcement contracts. Today, almost every handgun manufacturer lays claim to a polymer handgun, demonstrating the undeniable impact that Glock had in bringing that industry to America.
Glock Makes History was generously sponsored in part by GLOCK, Inc. and the Gretchen Swanson Family Foundation.
Since 1917, the award-winning Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, has devoted itself to sharing the story of the authentic American West. The Center is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. For additional information, visit centerofthewest.org or the Center’s Facebook page.
