John Moses Browning, often called the “father of modern firearms,” was born in Ogden, Utah, on January 23, 1855. He was the son of a talented gunsmith, Jonathan Browning. As was typical in the Mormon church community at the time, Jonathan Browning practiced polygamy, marrying three wives. He had 22 children, including John Moses, and also helped raise two stepdaughters with his wife Elizabeth Caroline Clark.
Browning started working in his father’s Ogden shop at just seven years old. There he learned basic engineering and manufacturing skills. His father also encouraged him to try out new ideas, thereby fostering his creativity. While still apprenticing under his father, Browning built his first rifle…a single-shot, falling block action design. In 1878, he teamed up with his younger brother to found the John Moses and Matthew Sandefur Browning Company, later known as Browning Arms Company. There, the brothers produced their own designs and other non-military firearms. By 1882, their half-brothers Jonathan, Thomas, William, and George had joined the business. Many legendary guns associated with the American West…like those from Winchester, Colt, Remington, and Savage…were actually based on Browning’s designs.
At 24, Browning earned his first patent for a rifle that Winchester produced as the Single Shot Model 1885. Impressed by his ingenuity, Winchester asked Browning to create a lever-action repeating shotgun. He did, but he soon realized a pump-action design would be more effective, leading to his first pump-action shotgun patent in 1888. At their core, all of Browning’s manually-operated repeating rifle and shotgun designs focused on one goal…making it faster and more reliable for shooters to fire multiple rounds, whether aiming at game birds or people. Lever and pump actions let the user fire a shot, work the lever or pump to eject the spent shell, load a fresh cartridge, and fire again in just seconds.
By the late 1880s, Browning had mastered the manual repeating firearm, but to make guns fire even faster, he needed to remove the slow process of humans operating the mechanisms. What could replace the effort of pulling a lever or pump? The answer came to him at a local shooting competition, where he noticed “reeds between a shooter and the target being blown violently aside by gases escaping from the muzzle.” Browing had the idea of harnessing that escaping gas to automatically operate the repeating mechanism. He started working on his idea in 1889, and by 1892 he had a patent for the first rough version of a fully automatic weapon. It worked by capturing gases at the muzzle to power a mechanism that reloaded the next bullet automatically.
I am amazed at the mind of this man. Over the years, he improved the design, and by the time US soldiers headed to Europe in World War I, many were armed with Browning Automatic Rifles and his powerful machine guns. Over a career lasting more than fifty years, Browning’s firearms evolved from iconic weapons of the American West to lethal instruments of world war. Remarkably, since his death in 1926, the modern firearm industry has seen no major fundamental changes. No improvements could be made, it seems.
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