John Moses Browning

• Born: January 21, 1855
• Birthplace: Ogden, Utah
• Died: November 26, 1926
• Place of death: Liège, Belgium

American engineer

Browning is history’s most successful, prolific, and influential firearms inventor. His groundbreaking inventions established the basic functioning principles used in a wide spectrum of popular and seminal sporting rifles, shotguns, automatic pistols, and machine guns. These principles underlie almost all firearm designs produced and used to this day.

Primary field: Military technology and weaponry

Primary inventions: Colt .45 automatic pistol; single-shot rifle; gas-operated machine gun

Early Life

John Moses Browning was born in Ogden, Utah, to Jonathan Browning, a self-taught gunsmith and gunmaker from Tennessee. At age twenty-nine, Jonathan had moved to Illinois and converted to the Mormon Church. As a skilled gunsmith and “mechanic,” Jonathan was an important contributor to the Mormons’ self-sufficiency during their colonization of Utah. Jonathan was also polygamous, fathering twenty-two children with three wives. The eldest child with his second wife was John Moses Browning.

Jonathan was a talented gunmaker and inventor. He designed and built an unusual yet accurate and reliable breach-loading black-powder rifle called the “Harmonica rifle.” In addition to gun construction and repair, Jonathan also tinkered with diverse and hopefully money-making projects including tool repair, brick making, and operating a tannery. Besides providing for a large family, dilettantism with projects, and inattention to business details, Jonathan proved to be an indifferent businessman. He did, however, pass on to his sons his tool skills and an understanding of firearms principles. John Moses, for example, constructed his first firearm at age thirteen. During his adolescent years, John did many of the shop’s gun and tool repairs while Jonathan tinkered with his current fancy. As a result, at Jonathan’s death John was the heir apparent to the family business.

Jonathan died in 1879, the year that John received his first patent. Family tradition claims that this was the upshot of a challenge by Jonathan that John should design a better breach-loading rifle than one then being repaired in the shop. The result was patent number 220,271 for a single-shot rifle that was strong, easy to use, reliable, and accurate. With Jonathan’s shop, a patent, his own life savings, and his younger brothers as a workforce, John founded J. M. Browning and Brothers and began to produce the single-shot rifle.

Life’s Work

As owner and manager of this new “factory,” John discovered that it was difficult to maintain both quality and a profitable production schedule. Browning saw that running a gun-making enterprise was tedious and time-consuming. Browning was saved from these frustrations by the general manager of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, Thomas Gray Bennett. After seeing one of the single-shot rifles, Bennett traveled in 1883 to Ogden to purchase production rights. As with most of his later designs, Browning sold the rights for a lump sum rather than for royalties, a deal that spared him from production work and made the purchasing company responsible for raising capital, running production, and assuring quality—which relieved Browning from the niggling details that interfered with inventing. Fortuitously, Browning had also just completed a design for a lever-action repeating rifle that was a considerable improvement over the existing Winchester action. Bennett’s purchase of this new rifle, manufactured as the Winchester 1886 lever-action repeating rifle, established a relationship in which Browning became the primary designer of Winchester rifles.

Browning’s inventions coincided with a revolutionary period in the evolution of firearm designs. The American Civil War had seen the new technology of fixed ammunition become popular, and firearms using fixed ammunition became increasingly common during the 1870’s. Fixed ammunition is the combination of a bullet, gunpowder, some kind of primer, and a container as a single unit. Firearms operate by the burning of gunpowder that generates gases that propel the bullet. During this period, most of the fixed ammunition came with a metal case, usually made of brass. Brass was used because it is a soft and flexible metal that can easily stretch under the stress of heat and pressure from the gases generated by the burning gunpowder. The expanded brass forms a tight seal at the breach that prevents gas from spewing back into the shooter’s face. This tight seal also results in increased pressures that allow less powder to give smaller projectiles better velocity, accuracy, and impact. Before the creation of fixed ammunition, loading required loose powder to be poured into the barrel through the muzzle, after which the ball or bullet was then seated with a ramrod. The breach was sealed to ensure no leakage of gas, but the end result was a loading and firing process that was slow, cumbersome, and prone to misfires. With reliable fixed ammunition, weapons could be conveniently loaded at the breach, and their spent cases could be rapidly ejected. Thus, fixed ammunition made repeating firearms feasible.

As long as muzzle-loading was the norm, firearm design remained generally stagnant. Once fixed ammunition was introduced, inventors designed systems like the lever action for rapid reloading, followed eventually by actions that were actuated and powered by the same gases used to propel bullets. A significant factor in this firearm development was the introduction in the 1880’s of nitrocellulose-based gunpowder called “smokeless powder.” Smokeless powder’s different burning characteristics—most noticeably a longer and more consistent burn time—enabled designers to create firearms whose actions would be powered by the gases produced as the bullet passed down the barrel. Browning’s great fortune was to be born during this time of change, so that he could invent systems like lever actions, pump actions, recoil actions, and gas-operated actions that could harness these new technologies. As a result, he designed 128 separate patents for actions that established the basic principles used in sporting and military firearms used across the world.

While Browning was a hard worker and designer, he did not work alone. His younger brother Matthew and his son John eventually added to some of John’s designs both as designers and especially as testers. This was necessary because of John’s method of designing. When an idea occurred to him, he immediately roughed out a working model to test. He did not make drawings and plans until he had a working prototype. Field testing of his designs was therefore of considerable importance. Browning created many outstanding designs, but they were optimized for function and not for mass production. Thus, when a company like Winchester purchased a Browning design, they often had to take out patents of their own for modifications to Browning’s designs that would facilitate production processes.

Browning designed these operating systems as inspiration struck him, and when he had a working model in hand he would then approach a company to sell them manufacturing rights. Through that method, he eventually came to work with most of America’s big arms companies. For a period of twenty years, he sold his creations to Winchester, during which time all of Winchester’s new products were Browning designs. Ultimately, to protect its market share and to prevent competitors from getting new Browning actions, Winchester purchased but never produced thirty-four different Browning designs. When, however, in 1902 Winchester refused to buy Browning’s new design for an automatic shotgun, Browning severed the relationship and sold the rights for this and other shotgun designs to Remington Arms. In a similar fashion, Browning sold his designs for automatic pistols to Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company and the European company Fabrique Nationale (FN), located in Herstal, Belgium. Browning sold his machine gun designs to Colt. During his life, Browning’s patents came so rapidly that at one point he was applying for a new patent about every three months. Nevertheless, few of his designs are thought of as Brownings by users because the production companies sold weapons by their company brand names. Such famous firearms as the Winchester 94 lever-action rifle, the Colt .45 automatic pistol, and the Remington Model 11 shotgun are all Browning designs.

Impact

Browning was an independent inventor who grasped the firearm fundamentals taught by his father and had an intricate knowledge of the inner workings of mechanisms. When these skills were combined with a close attention to firearm principles and an inventive mind, the result was a plethora of firearms inventions. These inventions were focused on practicality and reliability and resulted in some of the best-known firearm designs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Browning’s designs included rugged and reliable lever-action rifles and shotguns, pump rifles and shotguns, automatic shotguns, recoil-operated automatic pistols, and machine guns. Among the best-known of Browning’s designs is the Winchester 94 lever-action rifle, once touted as America’s most popular hunting rifle. Among shotguns, the Remington Model 11 shotgun and superposed shotguns are seen as some of the best shotguns ever created. The Colt .45 automatic pistol, adopted by the U.S. Army, was used until 1985, while the .50-caliber M2 heavy machine gun that was adopted in 1921 and modified in 1932 is still in use. Military aircraft flying from the 1930’s through the 1960’s used Browning-designed .30- and .50-caliber machine guns and 37mm machine cannons. Because so many of these designs were seminal in nature, most firearms designs to this day derive from the principles identified and harnessed by John Moses Browning.

Bibliography

Browning, John, and Curt Gentry. John M. Browning: American Gunmaker. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964. Biography written by a historian and John Moses Browning’s eldest son that offers family reminiscences and details of Browning’s personal life combined with an academic understanding of how Browning’s inventions shaped the world of small arms. This work also provides a comprehensive list of Browning’s important designs.

Iannamico, Frank. Hard Rain: History of the Browning Machine Guns. Harmony, Maine: Moose Lake, 2002. A good introduction to the variety of models and modifications of Browning’s .30- and .50-caliber machine guns.

Miller, David. The History of Browning Firearms. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2006. A nicely illustrated introduction to the most significant and popular of Browning’s firearm designs. Chapters organized by firearm types provide an understanding of the sheer number and diversity of Browning’s designs.