“The greatest firearms inventor the world has ever known.”
—Plaque in front of the Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre Herstal, near Liège, Belgium
John M. Browning’s son Lt. Val Browning with the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, 1918
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, pulled a Browning pistol from his coat and shot twice, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg. Before the nineteen-year-old was able to turn the gun on himself, a group of bystanders standing nearby on the Sarajevo street tackled him and grabbed the gun. The scene was mayhem. Franz Ferdinand’s bloody undershirt and Princip’s gun would end up in the hands of a Jesuit priest named Anton Puntigam, a close friend, who had performed the blood-soaked last rites on the archduke and his wife. Puntigam later gave the gun that “killed 8.5 million people” to the Jesuits for preservation. It is now on permanent display at the Museum of Military History in Vienna.
The repercussions of this event, well-known and massive, would embroil millions and change the world forever. Yet we would be remiss not to point out that even a bumbling assassin with a half-baked plan needed only two shots from an FN Browning Model 1910 to plunge the world into conflict. The Browning pistol, after all, was one of the most reliable and sturdy handguns ever produced. What makes the gun even more amazing is that it was one of about a dozen game-changing inventions concocted by its inventor, John Browning.
In one way or another, Browning’s ideas played a part in nearly every conflict in the twentieth century as he invented and conceptualized the modern gun. The rest would merely be tinkering and streamlining his foundational ideas. Browning brought his creations to a host of gun manufacturers around the world, and those gunmakers who didn’t work with him would copy him. By the end of his career, the man from Utah had a say in virtually every category of firearms in existence: rifles, pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and cannons.
Unlike many other great American gunmakers, Browning was himself the son of a gunsmith. His father, Jonathan, was born in the frontier town of Brushy Fork in Bledsoe Creek, Tennessee, the year Thomas Jefferson was sworn in for a second term as president. His family traced its roots to Captain John Browning, a soldier and explorer who had ventured to North America in 1622 and become head of one of the first families established in Virginia. Growing up in a deeply rural area, the elder Browning did not benefit from any formal schooling and, like his successful contemporary Sam Colt, experienced a childhood without much parental interference. He became fascinated by firearms at an early age and was a self-taught gunsmith by nineteen.
Like many young men of his time and place, Jonathan Browning moved with the currents of American destiny—which is to say westward. His first stop was Quincy, Mississippi, where he began taking advantage of some of the technological innovations filtering down from the Northeast’s gunmakers. For example, he tested new percussion caps and attempted to invent his own multi-shot rifle. His version relied on a rectangular bar—something like a harmonica—that held five or six chambered balls with a design that featured a hammer underneath the lock, swinging upward. Although fairly popular among locals, like many of Jonathan Browning’s early stabs at repeating guns, it remained cumbersome to load and was never patented.
During this period, Mormon missionaries entered Browning’s shop and began converting him to the faith founded by Joseph Smith in upstate New York in the 1820s. It wasn’t long before Jonathan, swayed by the group’s sense of community, packed up his wife, two kids, and belongings and moved to the Mormon community in nearby Nauvoo, Illinois. There he immersed himself in the church and made himself a valuable member of the community by repairing and making guns. When Browning asked Brigham Young if he could join his coreligionists headed to fight in the brewing Mexican-American conflict, the leader of the Latter-Day Saints told him, “I need you here.” Soon enough, Browning would trek to the newly minted Mormon community of Ogden, Utah Territory, in 1852.
Jonathan took the then-Mormon tradition of polygamy seriously, marrying twice more. He was no less negligent in his duty to be fruitful and multiply, siring twenty-two children. Among them was John Moses Browning, born on January 23, 1855. John often stood out as a precocious and friendly boy. In his teens, John and three of his brothers worked as “jobbers,” repairing all types of items for the family business. An industrious child, John took on various jobs, including working as a tanner. By the time he had finished school at fifteen, not an uncommon age at the time, Browning had already begun constructing makeshift guns assembled from discarded parts left by the colorful pioneer characters who passed through his father’s blacksmith shop.
“A man might come in with an old gun, hoping to raise a little money on it,” said one of his younger brothers years later. “Pappy would take one look and shake his head. There was nothing more discouraging than Pappy looking solemn and shaking his head. ‘That’s a dead mule’ was one of his favorite expressions. The man may have hoped to get a couple of dollars for that gun but dead mule would jolt him down a dollar at least. Finally, Pappy would say, ‘Well, maybe I can use the hammer sometime.’ If you want four bits for it, pitch it on the junk pile yonder.”1
John created many of his early firearms from these “dead mules,” as it became obvious early on that the boy had a gift. He made particularly impressive use of his father’s lathe (the family would claim theirs was the largest west of the Mississippi), a tool that rotated on its axis to perform various fabrications like cutting, sanding, knurling, and drilling. It was from this tool that many of Browning’s inventions sprung, including his first rifle.
At some point in his early twenties, John got his hands on a breech-loading rifle and immediately went about trying to improve the design. In 1879, the year he turned twenty-four, John married, his father passed away, and he won the first of his 130 lifetime patents. This one, a design for a single-shot breech-loading rifle, still sits in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It’s the gun that launched his career.
“You can’t get anywhere without coming to Ogden,” claimed the city’s chamber of commerce in the late 1800s. For those headed west, this was often true. In Ogden the transcontinental railroad tracks from the east would join tracks being laid from the west. By 1869, the first locomotive steamed into Ogden, and the citizens of the city welcomed the train with a ceremony that evening with banners that read “Hail to the Highway of the Nations! Utah Bids You Welcome.” Many thousands of newcomers moved through the frontier hub. Many needed guns. Browning and his brothers met that demand as skillful and popular assemblers of rifles in the center of the railroad town. Using heavy, reliable Remington barrels, they ended up producing around five hundred firearms from 1880 to 1883, constructing them to comport with government-issue .45–70 rounds and Sharps .32–40 rounds. A number of their customers took their guns into the heart of West, where the Browning reputation grew.
By 1883, western arms dealers from major eastern manufacturers were already crisscrossing the frontier, selling their guns and replacement parts to gunsmiths and general stores. As the legend goes, one of these men, a Winchester agent named Andrew McAusland, would, during his travels, come across a rifle stamped “BROWNING BROS. OGDEN, UTAH U.S.A.” with the serial number 463.2
Two things about the robust rifle immediately caught the man’s attention. First was the serial number, which, though not too large, was large enough to indicate there was budding competition in the Utah railroad town. Second, and more concerning to McAusland, was the impressive durability of the rifle, which had obviously seen heavy use but still functioned flawlessly.3 So concerned was McAusland, in fact, that he sent the rifle back to his bosses at Winchester. Within weeks the company’s vice president, T. G. Bennett, got on a train in New Haven and made his way to Ogden, which he would describe as a “vast plain of wind and rocks completely indescribable in its unattractiveness,” to purchase the rights to the gun.
A mechanical engineer himself, Bennett was initially skeptical that these brothers, most of whom were barely shaving, could have designed and produced such a potent weapon. Conversely, it did not escape John Browning’s attention that an executive from one of the largest gun manufacturers in the country was beckoning. So the budding capitalist asked for $10,000 for his gun, but accepted the tidy sum of $8,000 for the right to manufacture his design.
While Winchester had been one of the dominant producers of repeating rifles, at the time they had no single-shot rifles to offer. This one would certainly do. What really excited Bennett, however, were the other ideas that came pouring out of John. When Bennett asked the inventor if he could design a lever-action repeating shotgun, Browning, never one to lack self-confidence, explained that he could and would, but that he had even better things in mind. “Yes, I’ve thought a good deal about a lever shotgun,” Browning answered. “I think it would sell. But a slide-action gun would be easier to operate and better looking. I think I have one worked out now that’s pretty good.”
Browning patented his first pump model shotgun in 1887.
This would be the start of a twenty-year collaboration between the gun designer and Winchester. “When back in New Haven I had a gun of each model made up in the finest finish and sent them to the brothers. For many years and many new models, amounting to thousands of dollars, the mutual word or a handshake was sufficient to seal a bargain between the brothers and Winchester,” Bennett would later recall. Browning’s association with Winchester continued until 1902 and included single-shot rifles, lever-action and pump-action shotguns, and lever-action rifles.
Winchester engineers often made minor improvements to Browning’s first design, calling it the Winchester Model 1885 Single Shot Rifle. The company sold the “High Wall,” a big receiver that covered most of the breech block from the side and was intended for large, powerful cartridges, and the “Low Wall” version, which was intended for less powerful cartridges like the .22 as well as the pistol cartridges of the day.4 “It can be furnished with or without set triggers,” Winchester boasted, “with barrels of all ordinary lengths and weights, and for all standard cartridges; also with rifle and shotgun butt, plain or fancy wood, or with pistol grip.” The company made 140,000 of these guns from 1885 to 1920. (Winchester would reintroduce the gun in 2005.) Browning’s Winchester Model 1894, the first repeating rifle to use smokeless powder, went on to become one of the most popular and notable ever produced, remaining in continuous production from its inception until 2006, with sales of more than 7 million guns.
Winchester Model 1886 Lever-Action Rifle
Browning was just getting started. In a two-year span from 1885 to 1887, the wunderkind invented eleven new guns for Winchester in a wide range of styles. Within a few years the company became the leading manufacturer of sporting firearms, most of its designs having sprung from Browning’s fertile imagination. The gunsmith soon began making trips to Winchester’s Connecticut factory, learning both the limits and possibilities of the impressive machinery used to build his guns. One Winchester executive noted that by the end of his first visit, “there was probably no machine in this plant that he could not operate.” Browning was particularly taken with William Mason, one of the company’s top mechanics, who would modify Browning’s designs to make them compatible with mass production. Years later, when Browning had a falling-out with Winchester, the company claimed Mason as the true designer of their most popular early rifles. (Considering the slew of inventions Browning hatched after his break with the company, this claim seems highly unlikely.)
What make this early success even more remarkable are Browning’s remote western origins, his numerous personal setbacks—his second and third sons died before their first birthdays during this time—and his faith, which generated rigid hostility on the East Coast. Although there would be some debate over the depth of Browning’s Mormonism—it was a topic he rarely talked about in public—there is no evidence that he was anything but a fully engaged member of his community. In 1887, at the age of thirty-two, in the midst of his burgeoning career, John “set apart” in the Mormon tradition and spent two years in Georgia proselytizing.
When John returned to Utah in 1889, the Browning brothers opened a spacious shop in Ogden, where they printed catalogs and sold everything new westerners needed to survive on the way to California or Oregon, from fishing tackle to tents to knives. But what made the shop famous were the guns. The Browning brothers purportedly owned the longest gun racks in the West. And while the brothers ran the shop, John spent most of his time inventing new models, winning two patents within two years of returning from his missionary work.
• • •
An important aspect of Browning’s career to remember is that many of his greatest innovations were being created concurrently rather than sequentially. The semiautomatic shotgun, the semiautomatic handgun, and the machine gun were all percolating in his mind by 1898.
Many of these new guns, however, would not be made with Winchester. Throughout their fruitful relationship, the company bought almost every idea Browning came up with—around forty in all. Often the company purchased his designs simply to prevent them from falling into the hands of the competition. The problem with this arrangement was that Browning was increasingly annoyed that he was losing out on royalties elsewhere as Winchester shelved his ideas. His models were so successful—a conservative estimate put around two-thirds of the sporting rifles sold to Americans during this time with Winchester had been patented by Browning—the realization of his designs and the resulting royalties would have been a far more enriching and, from his perspective, fairer means of compensation.
In 1902, Browning decided to personally take a prototype automatic shotgun to show Bennett. “I want to get some action on those automatic shotguns,” he told his brothers. “Those fellows down there are stalling, and we’re letting the best thing I have ever made die in its sleep.”5 Browning—who had, according to his company’s biography, spent more time testing this shotgun than any of his other creations—considered the gun his most innovative accomplishment to that point. It’s unsurprising, then, that he demanded both production of the gun and royalty payments from Winchester. Bennett demurred, perhaps fearing such a precedent would be bad for the bottom line. Angered, Browning left Winchester, breaking a nearly twenty-year relationship.
Winchester’s loss turned out to be a boon for competing firms. Browning not only worked with almost all of the other major firearms manufacturers but also struck out on his own with the Auto-5, the first mass-produced semiautomatic shotgun. The gun—with 12-, 16-, and 20-gauge models, still the standard today—ended up being leased to a number of manufacturers and was in continuous production until 1998, making it one of the most popular weapons in American history.
Yet it was Browning’s invention of the first genuine automatic weapon that fundamentally changed the gun. As family lore has it, John formulated the idea of an automatic rifle while watching his brothers and family friends target shooting at the family’s range in 1886. After witnessing the gas from one of the guns bend the grass blades, an event he had probably seen thousands of times, he blurted out to his brothers that “it might even be possible to make a fully automatic gun, one that would keep firing as long as you had ammunition.” As Maxim had seen the recoil of a gun as a way to propel the next cartridge, Browning saw the wasted gas and immediately went about building a rifle that would harness it.
The next day Browning took a four-inch-square piece of five-pound iron, drilled a hole in the center to allow the bullet to pass, and placed it one inch from the muzzle. When he pulled the trigger the iron went flying across his workspace. Next he constructed a bowl-shaped steel cap with another hole in the center, but this time he connected the metal to a spring-loaded operating lever at the lock of the rifle. When the gas blew the cap, it pulled the loading lever forward, and the spring sent the lever rearward to the locked position. Another shot repeated this cycle—and so on and so on as long as he had ammunition. The energy for Browning’s guns would be drawn from the breech using gas rather than blowback or recoil energy.
Browning wrote to Colt, a company founded only a few decades earlier on the exhilarating prospect of shooting five or six bullets without having to reload, that he had conceived of an automatic gas-powered machine gun that could not only be fired indefinitely but could be made cheaply enough to put in the hands of average men. Browning penned this historic dispatch with the nonchalance of a man selling office paper:
Dear Sirs:
We have just completed our new automatic machine gun & thought we would write to you to see if you are interested in that kind of a gun. We have been at work on this gun for some time & have got it in good shape. We made a small one first which shot a 44 W. C. F. chge at the rate of about 16 times per second & weight about 8 #. The one we have just completed shoots the 45 Gov’t chge about 6 times per second fc with the mount weighs about 40 #. It is entirely automatic & can be made as cheaply as a common sporting rifle. If you are interested in this kind of gun we would be pleased to show you what it is & how it works as we are intending to take it down your way before long. Kindly let us hear from you in relation to it at once.
Yours Very Truly,
Browning Bros6
It took two years before the gun went into production, although by 1895 Browning and Colt Manufacturing quickly created prototypes that could handle various types of ammunition, including smokeless powder and popular rifle cartridges. Browning moved to Hartford for two years to supervise the manufacturing of the gun. In 1897 the Navy bought fifty Colt-made Browning machine guns, making them the first service in American history to acquire a genuine automatic machine gun. The gun saw naval action during the Spanish-American War, and the Marines brought a few along in the rescue of Europeans during the Boxer Rebellion. And just like that, the crank machine gun was rendered antiquated technology—although the Army, as is its wont to this day, kept buying less effective and expensive Gatlings for another ten years.
The American military establishment of the late 1800s and early 1900s had shown scant interest in technological advances. There was no perceptible military doctrine to utilize new weapons with effectiveness. As the century progressed, a number of American leaders would, in fact, worry about the new machine guns. They viewed their use as wasteful, undignified, and no way to fight a war. The rapid-fire gun, many thought, would strip men of their bravery and discipline. Moreover, many of the new semiautomatics were imperfect, sometimes jamming, and some leaders believed that they would cause more problems than they solved. When a number of American generals and tacticians began contemplating and forming doctrines built around rapid-fire warfare, there was big pushback from traditionalists both in the Army and out.
With some dismay, General John Pershing noted on a trip to the European front early in World War I that America’s allies in Europe had “all but given up the use of the rifle.” He sent a number of messages back to Washington warning that U.S. forces should remain focused on traditional weapons because “the rifle and bayonet remain the supreme weapons of the infantry soldier . . . [T]he ultimate success of the army depends on their proper use in open warfare.”7
America, of course, still needed rifles, as they remained the standard weapon of war. In 1915 the United States military was in possession of around 600,000 Model 1903 Springfield bolt-action rifles and another 160,000 antiquated Norwegian Krags they had purchased years earlier. Once it looked like America might enter the war, the United States started manufacturing the M1917 Enfield, the “American Enfield,” a knockoff of the British service rifle. This choice was made out of convenience and necessity, as a number of the American gun manufacturers were already contracted to produce weapons for their UK allies. The gun was altered to take American .30-06 Springfield ammunition. The Ordnance Department picked Winchester and Remington, and they made more than 2 million of these rifles from 1917 to 1918. More than half of these guns were manufactured at the Eddystone Rifle Works in Eddystone, Pennsylvania. (The factory is sometimes identified as an independent company, but it was actually a holding of Remington.) The Eddystone factory made 5,000 rifles a day during the war, employing as many as 10,000 people, though some of these employees were still fulfilling the contracts for arms and ammunition they had gotten from the British.8
The first modern war required modern weapons. In the summer of 1917 the future Army chief of staff and colonel Charles Pelot Summerall warned that artillery and rapid-fire guns were the only way to break the stalemate in Europe. That same summer a rapid-fire expert from the Army traveled to France to review the lines and wrote to Pershing that “the day of the rifleman is done. He was a good horse while he lasted, but his day is over.”
These men were often dismissed as scaremongers. So it is unsurprising that by the time the United States entered World War I American soldiers were armed with antiquated machine guns, too small, too slow, and too rickety. Due to this lack of preparedness, the 14,000 U.S. Expeditionary Corps troops who landed in Europe in the summer of 1917 to fight the Central Powers were initially forced to accept donated French- and English-made models that were, in most cases, no more formidable or reliable than 1895 Colt-Browning machine guns. Oftentimes the Americans were without the right ammunition.
After contentious debate in Washington over the future of the military, a decision was made to move forward with rearmament. A call was put out to gunmakers to help fix the problem. As it happened, John Browning had been working on two new military machine guns since 1910. Both were ready by the time the U.S. Army Ordnance Department called in February 1917. One was a water-cooled machine gun and the other a shoulder-fired automatic rifle known as the Browning Machine Rifle, nicknamed the “potato digger.” Browning’s first official exhibition of these guns on the outskirts of Washington, DC, drew more than three hundred people, including a number of senators, congressmen, and various dignitaries from Great Britain, France, and Belgium. All went away awestruck by the jaw-dropping exhibition.
Colonel George Morgan Chinn, in a report on the history of the machine gun prepared for the Navy Department Bureau of Ordnance, noted that those who watched were blown away (in a manner of speaking) by the firepower and speed of the weapons, animated by the prospect that “a hundred men advancing with these weapons firing full automatic would literally sweep an enemy out of the way.”9 This was far too optimistic in the age of trench warfare, yet the improvement over the weapons they now had was palpable even in a field neighboring America’s capital.
What excited military men most was the prospect of a gun offering “walking fire,” which, as it sounds, is a military tactic of suppressive fire by infantry while moving forward. Browning would deliver. For the first time an individual American soldier could pick up and carry an automatic rifle. The M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, called the BAR, could be carried while continuously firing twenty shots in 2.5 seconds. It could shoot nearly five hundred rounds per minute. In fact, after some modification, Browning himself took a new prototype for testing to the Springfield Armory and shot the gun at six hundred rounds per minute with not a single misfire or broken component in 40,000 shots fired. “The Colt gun is exceedingly simple in construction, and has not more than one hundred separate parts, a surprisingly small number, considering the type. It has been designed with great care and with due attention to the often conflicting requirements of lightness and strength, so that with a maximum weight of 10 pounds no part, with the single exception of the extractor, has been broken in the course of a number of very severe tests,” noted the final report.10 The weapon would be used by the American armed forces until the United States began phasing them out after the Korean War.
Browning, though always an astute businessman, saw his involvement in war as a patriotic duty. In the fall of 1917, the U.S. government negotiated a long-term contract with Browning. As his brother Matthew remembers the meeting, the government likely made an offer assuming there would be negotiations. “I supposed that John would ask for a little time to think things over and get my opinion,” his brother recalled later. “But without hesitating a second, he said, ‘Major, if that suits Uncle Sam, it’s all right with me.’ ”11 Now, a reader might be skeptical about this selfless portrayal of the gunmaker. Certainly Browning would not come out of the agreement any poorer. And, really, whom was he going to sell machine guns to if not to the military? But any delay in negotiations, though it might have made Browning richer, could have cost lives.
From the Allied perspective, Browning’s gun was a lifesaver. No one in America at the time had either the technological know-how or the infrastructure to pull it off. One of the guns used by U.S. forces was the M1911. The gun’s history went back to 1896, when Browning approached Colt’s Manufacturing Company (formerly Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company) about making four semiautomatic pistols to be sold in the United States. For the European markets, Browning would start a lifelong relationship with Fabrique Nationale, located in Liège, a city with easy access to iron, coal, and lumber that had been a leading gun center in Europe since the Middle Ages. In the coming years Browning quite often visited the firm, which employed one of his sons. The Belgians were immediately taken by the man they called “Le Maître” (“the Master”). “By reputation and appearance he astonished the people of Liège,” noted one contemporaneous account. “He was exceptionally tall and lean, and his head extraordinarily shiny. The features of his face, as sharp and immovable as those of a medal, seemed animated only by his regard.”
Browning’s patents evolved into the Model 1900, the Model 1903, the Model 1910, and the Colt Model 1911, which would possess numerous components that are still widely used in semiautomatic pistols—including, most recognizably, the detachable magazines that could be loaded in the butts of the guns. When the U.S. Army put the gun to its standard 6,000-shot test (allowing cooling every 100 rounds and cleaning every 1,000), it accomplished the task without a single failure of any kind. Its descendants would be the standard-issue sidearm of the United States armed forces from 1911 to 1986; in other words, American soldiers holstered the gun from before World War I nearly to the end of the Cold War. It would be widely embraced by American law enforcement and become a bestseller in the civilian marketplace. Colt produced more than 2.6 million military pistols based on the 1911 design and another 400,000 for civilians. All told, nearly 5 million were manufactured by various gunmakers. The design is still popular today.
The first Browning semiautomatic pistol appeared in Europe in 1899, and there would be more than 500,000 of them produced on the continent by the time Gavrilo Princip got his hands on one. The assassin’s pistol was a .38-caliber, which turned out to be a problem for the American military. First used by the United States during the Philippine insurrection in 1901, the Army had gripes about the stopping power of the new gun. In one such account, a man named Antonio Caspi attempted to escape from an American prison on the island of Samar. According to the Army, Caspi “was shot four times at close range in a hand-to-hand encounter by a .38 caliber Colt’s revolver loaded with U.S. Army regulation ammunition. He was finally stunned by a blow on the forehead from the butt-end of a Springfield carbine.”12 A West Point graduate named John T. Thompson, soon to invent the tommy gun, and Louis Anatole La Garde, a major in the Medical Corps, were tasked to study the inefficiencies of the .38 revolver round and figure out what caliber worked best. Thompson would shoot various calibers into animals and cadavers, while La Garde studied their medical effects. The test results, later deemed highly unscientific, were embraced by the Army. So Browning added a .45 pistol. He also added a grip frame that was made larger and sturdier, and the magazine capacity was increased from five to seven.
The 1911, like the Peacemaker or the Kentucky rifle, would take on legendary status. During World War I its reputation was buttressed by stories of American bravery. Most famous was the case of Alvin Cullum York, better known as Sergeant York, one of the most decorated American soldiers of the conflict. York famously received a Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German machine-gun nest, killing at least 25 enemy soldiers and capturing 132. York, a Tennessean whose blacksmith father still hunted with a flintlock rifle, tamed a wild streak by joining the Church of Christ in Christian Union in his late teens. A pacifist, York petitioned for conscientious objector status but was denied. “Don’t Want to Fight” was his stated reason.
York had excelled at sharpshooting contests in his home county, and once convinced that his destiny was to beat the Germans, he took to it with a single-minded gusto that few would match. In October 1918, York found himself in command of his unit after an ambush killed two of his commanding officers. He helped fight off more than a hundred Germans. After his Springfield rifle was exhausted of ammunition, York claimed to have repelled a German bayonet charge of six soldiers with nothing more than his 1911 pistol. “The American fired all of the rifle ammunition clips on the front of his belt and then three complete clips from his automatic pistol,” the affidavit read. “In days past he won many a turkey shoot in the Tennessee mountains and it is believed that he wasted no ammunition on this day.”13 An investigator found twenty-three .45 rounds fired from a Colt 1911 handgun on the site.
Other well-known guns would soon follow.
General John Pershing, who had quickly come around to seeing the usefulness of rapid-fire guns, asked Browning to build an even more dynamic machine gun to deal with armored combat vehicles: Could Browning get to work inventing a machine gun that fired .50-caliber rounds? “Well,” Browning is said to have answered, “the cartridge sounds pretty good, to start. As for the gun—you make up some cartridges, and we’ll do some shooting.”
His invention, completed in 1918, would go on to be nicknamed the “Ma Deuce.” It was too late to be used in World War I, but its progeny became part of the American armory for many decades as well. In tests, the gun fired 877 .50-caliber rounds without any malfunctions. When asked by the press how he had developed such an incredibly powerful gun, Browning replied, “One drop of genius in a barrel of sweat wrought this miracle.”
Both the .30- and .50-caliber guns evolved and were widely used as antiaircraft and defensive guns at the outbreak of World War II. “Students of warfare are in general agreement that the most far-reaching single military decision made in the 20th Century was when a small group of British officers, shortly before World War II, decided to mount ten caliber .303 Brownings on their Hurricane Fighters,” wrote the gun historian Colonel George Morgan Chinn. “This single act undoubtedly brought about the turning point of the war.”
• • •
“I wonder from time to time,” Browning is said to have confessed to one of his sons in his later years, “whether we are headed in the right direction. For instance, we are making guns that shoot farther, harder and calling it progress. If just getting farther and faster from your starting place is progress, I suppose the meaning we usually give the word is correct. But if we limit the meaning to movement toward a destination where the most pleasure and satisfaction are to be found, then this progress we’re bragging about is just crazy, blind racing past the things we are looking for—and haven’t the sense to recognize. And in the matter of guns that makes me crazier than most.”14
Browning may have been conflicted about his chosen vocation in ways that Hiram Maxim and others would never be, but move forward he did. Perpetually. Many of the great American gunmakers, including Sam Colt, argued that the success of their inventions helped diminish violence among men by heightening and then equalizing their power. While this may have been true for the average person on the western plains or the immigrant living in a bustling city, the twentieth century would awaken political and ideological forces that brought death on a massive scale, escalating the authority and importance of firearms.
In late 1926, Browning died—predictably, working on the designs for a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol at the bench of his son Val at the Fabrique Nationale offices. The gun he was working on would be finished by Belgian designers and finally put into production in 1935. Just as unsurprisingly, as with most of his guns, his 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol would be popular for decades to come. Browning had created the template for the twentieth century. From now on, American inventors took his ideas and ran with them.