Founded in 1963, Glock started out as a manufacturer of curtain rods before branching out into the arms industry in the 1970s, manufacturing machine gun belts, practice hand grenades, plastic magazines, field knives, and entrenching tools for the Austrian Army. When, in the early 1980s, the Austrian Army requested a pistol model, Glock responded with the first polymer made handgun, the Glock 17 , a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. (The 17 was so-named because it was Gaston Glock's seventeenth patent.) The Austrian Army adopted the Glock 17 in 1982 with the Norwegian Army adopting the model two years later. One year later, Glock Inc. was established in the US in Smyrna, Georgia. In the next few years, Glock expanded its 9 mm product line, developing the select-fire Glock 18 in 1986 and the Glock 17L and Glock 19 in 1988. In 1990 Glock became the first manufacturer to offer models chambered for the .40 S&W cartridge, the Glock 22 and the Glock 23, beating Smith & Wesson to the marketplace with pistols for their own cartridge.
