John Browning: Man and Gunmaker Read online

  John Browning: Man and Gunmaker

  James Barrington

  John Browning was the most influential gun designer who ever lived. After building his first firearm at the age of thirteen, he went on to create a series of radical blueprints for pistols, rifles and machine guns that changed the way wars were fought and streets were policed.

  His fingerprints are still on every gun manufactured today.

  But who was the man behind the weapons?

  How did he manage to revolutionise the way guns worked?

  And what drove him to keep innovating right through his life.

  ‘John Browning: Man and Gunmaker’ by the best-selling military thriller writer James Barrington is a readable, concise history to the man and his legacy.

  It is a must-read for gun collectors, enthusiasts and anyone interested in the history of firearms.

  James Barrington is a trained military pilot and the author of worldwide best-sellers such as ‘Manhunt’, ‘Payback’ and ‘Overkill’.

  James Barrington

  JOHN BROWNING

  Man and Gunmaker

  1. INTRODUCTION

  In any survey of the history of firearms development, it will quickly become apparent that the inventive genius of one man advanced the state of the art at a totally unprecedented and unsurpassed rate. Nobody, before or since, has had a greater — or even anything approaching an equal — influence on the development of firearms. He was the author of 128 separate patents covering virtually all types of weapon from pistols upwards, and was unique in that his designs constituted virtually the entire output of three major American arms manufacturers in the first half of the last century, and have spawned countless imitations all over the world.

  His name was John Moses Browning, whose name is probably most closely linked with the automatic pistols still produced in Belgium by Fabrique Nationale: in fact, in France the name ‘Browning’ has passed into the language and is used as a proper noun and a synonym for a pistol. But Browning was not just a designer of handguns. He also profoundly influenced the development of machine-guns, rifles and shotguns, and it is a measure of the enduring popularity of his designs that so many weapons covered by Browning patents are still manufactured today.

  This short book attempts to paint a picture of Browning the man, as well as describe his outstanding achievements in his chosen field. In fact, it could be said that John Browning didn’t choose to become a gunsmith. You could argue that his upbringing and his family, and to some extent his surroundings, chose his profession for him. And it really all started with his father.

  2. JONATHAN BROWNING — THE FATHER

  John Browning was the son of Jonathan Browning, a Mormon who had been part of the great Mormon Exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Utah in 1852. Jonathan had been born in 1805, and had trained at an early age as an apprentice gunsmith by the unusual device of simply arriving on the doorstep of a Nashville gunmaker named Samuel Porter and offering to work for him for nothing in exchange for lessons in gun barrel-making. Porter was so impressed with Jonathan’s work that he soon started paying him a wage of two dollars a week, in addition to providing bed and board, and when, after three months, Jonathan announced that he was returning to the Browning home at Brushy Fork, Tennessee, he offered him a share of the business if he would agree to stay.

  No doubt Jonathan was tempted, but remained adamant. The two men parted as firm friends, Porter supplying Jonathan with rifling and boring tools as well as a selection of mandrels — used for hand-forging gun barrels — of different sizes. Also included in his pack was a rifle made by Porter but carrying a barrel made entirely by Jonathan, and on which the older man had stamped ‘JONATHAN BROWNING 1824’.

  From this small and inauspicious beginning, Jonathan Browning established himself as a competent rural gunmaker, repairing damaged weapons and producing rifles to order, but his aspirations were higher. Following marriage and a family move from Brushy Fork to Quincy, Illinois, in 1834, he concentrated his considerable abilities on the problem of designing a simple but efficient repeating rifle.

  The problem he had was that in those days the propellant was black powder and the ignition source a percussion cap. To load a rifle, a suitable measure of black powder was poured down the barrel from the muzzle, usually from a powder flask, to be followed by a small piece of wadding or other material. Then the ball would follow, which would be rammed firmly into place to compress the powder charge. A percussion cap would be placed on the nipple below the hammer, and the weapon was then ready to fire. When the trigger was pulled, the falling hammer struck the percussion cap, which fired a spark down a tube and into the barrel, igniting the black powder and driving the ball down the barrel.

  Each barrel of a rifle was a single-shot weapon, and the only way a hunter could have a second shot immediately available was either to have a second weapon to hand, or use a double- or multiple-barrelled rifle, and it was that problem which Jonathan Browning set out to solve. What he did was to approach the problem using lateral thinking. Instead of adding another barrel, he decided to cut off the breech end of the barrel and then designed a kind of multi-chamber breech block.

  His endeavour succeeded, and the result was one of the simplest practical repeating weapons ever produced. Known as a Slide Gun, a Slide Repeating Rifle, or sometimes a Harmonica Rifle, its five-shot magazine was fabricated from a solid rectangular bar, each chamber having an integral nipple, and was passed through the breech from side to side. The magazine was moved on after each shot by a thumb-operated lever,which also forced the chamber forward into a gas-tight alignment with the barrel, while the hammer was positioned below the breech in front of the trigger guard. Larger capacity magazines, with capacities of 10 or 25 shots, were available to special order from Jonathan, and each rifle was supplied with at least one spare magazine, thus giving the owner a minimum of ten rapid shots if required.

  Crude though this may sound, the weapon was capable of sustained fire at a rate unequalled by any other weapon of the time, and as recently as 1952 an example of the weapon held in the Browning Family Collection was used to fire fifteen rounds without malfunction.

  In fact, Jonathan also invented a second type of repeating rifle at about the same time. This was a cylinder repeating rifle, similar in concept to the mechanism of a single-action revolver.

  The slide rifle which, like the cylinder repeater, was not patented by Jonathan Browning, was an immediate success in the area, producing far more orders than he could possibly fill, and would no doubt have become a much more popular weapon had Browning’s manufacturing capacity been equal to his design ability.

  It’s worthwhile contrasting this weapon, essentially knocked together by a self-taught gunsmith in a blacksmith’s shop, with the Colt Revolving Rifle, produced in 1855 by this fully-equipped and experienced manufacturer of firearms. The Colt weapon was a failure, because its design didn’t address the problem which Jonathan Browning’s prodigious talent had solved: the Colt couldn’t maintain a gas-tight seal between the barrel and the chamber, which led to misfires, gas leakage and indifferent performance.

  In 1840 Jonathan Browning, by then an established member of the community and a good friend of the young Abraham Lincoln, became deeply interested in religion and, in particular, the teachings of the Mormon Church. The direct result of this interest was the Browning family’s move, in 1842, to the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, which was being constructed on the instructions of Joseph Smith, the founder and Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

  The Mormons were not popular in the area, being subjected to frequent attacks by armed Illinois and Missouri gangs, and the violence reached a peak
in June 1844 when Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were assassinated at Carthage, Illinois. This action was the spur that led to the great Mormon Exodus under Brigham Young, which started in 1846 and continued for some years. Though Jonathan Browning was eager to head west with the pioneers, Young recognized his worth and insisted that he stay to provide the weapons so desperately needed by the Saints, and it wasn’t until 1852 that Jonathan was permitted to follow the trail from Nauvoo that led eventually through the Rocky Mountains to Utah and Ogden in the valley of the Great Salt Lake.

  The violence at Nauvoo and the long trek west had left their mark on Jonathan Browning, and he never again applied himself to the development of new weapons, contenting himself with repairing and refurbishing not only guns but any kind of mechanical contraption which required attention. The Browning gunsmith building in Nauvoo is now a museum open to the public.

  Jonathan Browning settled in Ogden in 1852 with his first wife and eleven surviving children, and embraced the Mormon practice of polygamy. In 1854 he married his second wife, Elisabeth Clark, a Mormon convert from Virginia, and she gave birth to John Moses Browning the following year. In all, Jonathan took three wives and had twenty-two children. John Browning was particularly close to his younger brother, Matt, and his younger half-brothers, Jonathan Edmund (known as Ed), Thomas Samuel (nicknamed Sam), Will and George, who was a son of Jonathan’s third wife.

  3. JOHN BROWNING — THE EARLY YEARS (1855–1870)

  John Moses Browning was born in Ogden, Utah, on January 23 1855, and his brother Matthew Sandifer Browning, John’s life-long friend, confidant and business partner, was born a little under five years later on October 27 1859. From the first, the workshop where his father spent his days fascinated John Browning, and he began working there at the age of six. Within a year, his knowledge was so extensive that he could identify every part of a firearm by both name and function.

  His mother educated him well, and by the time he was eight or nine he was not only able to read and write, but could also take orders from customers, recording their personal details and notes of the repair work they required on their weapons. He became so competent that he was often to be found there alone by customers requiring work on guns, and even at that young age he was frequently able not only to diagnose the problem, but also to estimate the length of time it would take his father Jonathan to fix it.

  He made his first gun at the age of ten. It was crude in the extreme, consisting of a sawn-off flintlock barrel attached to a roughly-shaped stock by twists of wire, and with a piece of tin around the priming pan. It was fired by thrusting a glowing stick into the powder in the priming pan, John holding and aiming the gun while Matt applied this rudimentary form of ignition.

  In John’s defence, it should be emphasized that he and Matt made the entire weapon in a single day when Jonathan was out, and that it did work. The latter fact was proven by the prairie chicken — a type of grouse — on the Browning breakfast table the following morning, ready for his father. When Jonathan finally thought to ask where the birds had come from, John explained about the gun, which Jonathan then asked to see. After studying it for a moment or two, he finally looked at John and suggested that he ought to be able to make a better one at his age — nearly eleven! After breakfast, John took the gun into the workshop and disassembled it. Neither John nor Jonathan ever mentioned the weapon again.

  A more convincing demonstration of John Browning’s precocious talent occurred when he was thirteen. A freight driver appeared at the Browning shop with a badly damaged single barrel percussion shotgun; a heavy crate on his wagon had fallen and crushed the middle of the gun, breaking the stock and bending or twisting virtually every other part of it except the barrel, which had suffered only scratches. As Jonathan explained, a repair was possible, but it would be a lengthy process, and would probably cost far more than the weapon was worth. The trader took little convincing, and settled for a reconditioned gun from the Browning stock, but on his way out of the shop he bequeathed the ruined gun to John.

  Ruined it may have been as far as the trader was concerned, but he was not looking at it through John’s eyes, nor with John’s gunsmithing experience behind him. Already the boy could weld, braze, drill and tap holes. He could fabricate the simpler parts of weapons and he could disassemble almost any type of gun. To John, the shotgun wasn’t a wreck, it was a challenge.

  In his own words, he said: ‘I decided to take the gun apart, piece by piece, down to the last small screw, even though parts were mashed and twisted together. And when I did, finally finishing long after supper that night, the pieces all spread out before me on the bench, I examined each piece and discovered that there wasn’t one that I couldn’t make myself, if I had too. If I had been in school that day, I would have missed a valuable lesson.’

  Having reduced the gun to its component parts, in his spare time over the next few weeks he repaired those parts he could, and fabricated new parts where the damage was beyond repair. The job had the tacit consent of the older Browning, despite Jonathan’s initial disapproval. John knew that, for his father had let him cut the wood for the new stock from his precious slab of walnut. And in completing the work, John moved subtly from childhood into manhood. Beforehand, he was just a boy who helped around the shop, an apprentice at best, but afterwards he was a gunsmith in his own right, and was accepted as such by Jonathan.

  Many stories have been told about John Moses Browning. Some are total invention, but most have at least a basis in fact. One of these recounts that while still a child John made each of his brothers a gun from parts salvaged from Jonathan’s junk pile. In fact, John Browning knocked together probably dozens of non-functioning weapons out of scrap wood and steel for Matt, but the construction of a real gun was rather more difficult. First of all, Jonathan’s approval had to be obtained and then a suitable barrel found. Every other part of the gun John could make, but not the barrel.

  And then a barrel almost fell into his hands. Matt, sweeping in the shop one day, discovered a burlap-wrapped object the size and shape of a gun barrel tucked away in a corner. When he unwrapped it, John found that it was a barrel, about .32 calibre, covered completely in beeswax, but what he didn’t know was who owned it. When Jonathan returned home, John broached the subject of the gun, suggesting that he make one for Matt’s birthday — he was going to be ten years old in about four months — and then showed his father the barrel Matt had found.

  Jonathan burst out laughing, and told John how the barrel had been acquired. A stranger had seen one of Jonathan’s slide rifles and came to the shop carrying the barrel to ask for one to be made for him. As he and Jonathan were discussing the deal, Jonathan’s wife Elisabeth stepped into the shop and asked her husband how the smallpox patients were — the town was suffering from something of an epidemic at the time. Jonathan replied that he’d just returned from seeing them, at which the stranger cried out ‘Smallpox?’ and reached out to take his barrel back from Jonathan. Then he changed his mind and said he’d take a receipt, and then he decided not even to bother with that, and left the shop at a run. Jonathan never saw him again.

  John duly made a slide gun in time for Matt’s birthday, and the two boys spent many happy hours hunting in the woods, John with his refurbished shotgun, and Matt with the first slide gun made by John Browning, then a mature fourteen-year old gunsmith. In those days the hunting was invariably for food, not for sport, and the concept of ‘sportsmanship’ was totally foreign. The ideal shot, as far as any hunter then was concerned, was at a sitting target or a flock of birds feeding on the ground. Indeed, this kind of shot became known as a ‘pot shot’, because that was exactly what it was — a shot to fill the cooking pot.

  4. THE FIRST GUN

  John Browning left school a few months after his fifteenth birthday, and thereafter effectively ran the Browning shop, assisted by his brothers — particularly by Matt — when the need arose, while Jonathan took less of a part. The elder Browning still spent t
ime in the shop, however, and was probably responsible for his son’s first attempt at designing an original weapon.

  Then a man in his early twenties, John looked in disgust at the parts of a gun brought in for repair, and remarked casually that he thought he could make a better one himself. To his surprise, his father took him completely seriously, and told him to go ahead and do so.

  John’s task was not easy. He had plenty of ideas for the design, but the inadequacies of the Browning machine shop meant that the weapon had to be as simple as he could make it. He started with basic sketches, then produced templates which he altered as ideas and modifications occurred to him, and finally he fabricated the metal parts. Larger components he hand-forged, shaping them on the anvil and trying to get them as near as possible to the final design to avoid the filing and chiselling that would otherwise be necessary. But there was no short-cut in making the receiver; it had to be forged, then drilled, chiselled and filed out: a tiresome and exhausting job. The gun that eventually emerged was a single-shot rifle, lever-action and with an exposed hammer. It was simple, robust and reliable.

  It is generally accepted that most successful weapons have taken at least two and often three or more years to progress from the initial idea to the test-firing stage. The time John Browning took to design and construct his rifle is not precisely known, but it was almost certainly less than one year. It is known that he started working on the weapon after his twenty-third birthday on 23 January 1878, and filed an application for a patent on 12 May 1879, the month after he married Rachel Teresa Child.

  The patent application itself was also signed by Jonathan Browning as a witness, and must have been filed quite some time after the gun was complete, because of John Browning’s complete lack of knowledge of patent procedure, blueprints and technical drawing, all of which necessitated considerable correspondence with the patent attorney in the east, and mail took a long time to get through. Perhaps the best evidence is the patent model itself, the barrel of which bears the inscription ‘J. M. BROWNING OGDEN U.T. 1878’.