John
Moses Browning, sometimes referred to as the “father of modern
firearms,” is born in Ogden, Utah. Many of the guns manufactured by
companies whose names evoke the history of the American West-Winchester,
Colt, Remington, and Savage-were actually based on John Browning’s
designs.
The son of a talented gunsmith, John Browning began
experimenting with his own gun designs as a young man. When he was 24
years old, he received his first patent, for a rifle that Winchester
manufactured as its Single Shot Model
1885. Impressed by the young man’s inventiveness, Winchester asked
Browning if he could design a lever-action-repeating shotgun. Browning
could and did, but his efforts convinced him that a pump-action
mechanism would work better, and he patented his first pump model
shotgun in 1888.
Fundamentally, all of Browning’s manually-operated
repeating rifle and shotgun designs were aimed at improving one thing:
the speed and reliability with which gun users could fire multiple
rounds-whether shooting at game birds or other people. Lever and pump
actions allowed the operator to fire a round, operate the lever or pump
to quickly eject the spent shell, insert a new cartridge, and then fire
again in seconds.
By the late 1880s, Browning had perfected the
manual repeating weapon; to make guns that fired any faster, he would
somehow have to eliminate the need for slow human beings to actually
work the mechanisms. But what force could replace that of the operator
moving a lever or pump? Browning discovered the answer during a local
shooting competition when he noticed that reeds between a man firing and
his target were violently blown aside by gases escaping from the gun
muzzle. He decided to try using the force of that escaping gas to
automatically work the repeating mechanism.
Browning began
experimenting with his idea in 1889. Three years later, he received a
patent for the first crude fully automatic weapon that captured the
gases at the muzzle and used them to power a mechanism that
automatically reloaded the next bullet. In subsequent years, Browning
refined his automatic weapon design. When U.S. soldiers went to Europe
during WWI, many of them carried Browning Automatic Rifles, as well as
Browning’s deadly machine guns.
During a career spanning more than
five decades, Browning’s guns went from being the classic weapons of the
American West to deadly tools of world war carnage. Amazingly, since
Browning’s death in 1926, there have been no further fundamental changes
in the modern firearm industry.