James Barrington - John Browning - Man and Gunmaker

The reliance placed upon John Browning by Bennett and the Winchester Company is exemplified by the fact that for almost twenty years no new gun introduced by Winchester was designed by anyone other than Browning. In fact, Bennett bought a total of forty four Browning guns over a period of seventeen years — a larger number of weapons than were patented by all the other inventors working in America in the same period — though only ten of these guns actually reached the production line.

It may seem poor business practice to buy goods which are never intended to be sold, but actually Bennett was ensuring the success of Winchester. By giving John Browning the asking price for any gun he produced, he was effectively giving Winchester a monopoly of Browning’s genius. He was well aware that if he refused to accept a gun, Browning could simply take it to Colt or one of the other major manufacturers, where he would be welcomed with open arms, and Winchester would then face a competitor producing a weapon of a similar quality to its own. As far as Bennett was concerned, the cost of thirty four patents was simply the equivalent of a payment on an insurance policy.

It must be emphasized that all these designs were entirely different. John Browning did not take out separate patents for only minor alterations, and frequently included notes within each patent application confirming that a particular mechanism could be adapted to a different weapon — a shotgun when the patent was for a rifle, and so on. And when each new patent was granted, the task of other firearms inventors in America became that much more difficult.

Bennett had finally agreed with John about the potential for a pump-action shotgun, and the weapon was duly introduced as the Model 93 (later known as the Model 97), and remained in production until 1957. This weapon was extensively used during the First World War, as so-called ‘trench guns’, and issued to those American troops who were demonstrably skilled in trap and skeet shooting. These men used the shotgun to destroy enemy hand grenades in flight, and in one celebrated incident a small force of some 200 US soldiers used devastating massed fire from their Model 97 shotguns at extremely close range to defeat a major assault by German troops.

Another pump-action weapon, the Model 90 .22 rifle, caused a certain amount of embarrassment at the Winchester factory. When Bennett had asked for the gun to be designed, John had been very busy and, breaking with his usual routine of providing a working model, he had sent only a set of detailed drawings.

After a short while, John received a letter from an official of the Winchester Company which recommended that he cease work on the weapon, as an assessment of the drawings by Winchester engineers had shown that the rifle would not function. John read the letter, made a working model of the gun as quickly as he could and sent it straight to Winchester with a terse note stating that, as far as he could see, it worked well enough. The Model 90, and its two later successors the Models 06 and 62, went on to become arguably the most popular .22 pump-action rifles ever produced, selling well over two million units and remaining in production until 1958.

In 1890 another request was made to John Browning by Bennett when the inventor was visiting New Haven with Matt, this time for a rifle similar to the highly acclaimed Model 86, but slightly scaled down to handle the .44/40 round and to replace the ageing Winchester 73. Bennett was clearly in a hurry, and he offered John ten thousand dollars if he could deliver a working model in three months, and fifteen thousand if he could manage it in two months. John thought for a few moments and consulted a calendar. He calculated that it would take him about six days to get back to Ogden and a further six days for the rifle to be sent from Ogden to New Haven. Then he turned to Bennett and told him that he would either have the new rifle in Bennett’s hands within thirty days — but for the sum of twenty thousand dollars — or he would give the gun to him.

Both Bennett and Matt, who was at the interview, were astounded. Bennett quickly recovered and included John’s proposal in his offer, but excluded John’s offer to give him the gun and this was accepted. John spent the journey back to Ogden mentally designing the new rifle. He started work on the receiver the day of his arrival home, began assembly within a week, and had the weapon firing in two weeks. Bennett received it in well under the thirty day period agreed, and sent the cheque for twenty thousand dollars immediately.

It’s worth emphasising just astonishing Browning’s achievement was. In those days, for most firearms manufacturers the normal time between the design of a new weapon appearing on the drawing board to the prototype being available for test-firing was about two years, but John Browning achieved exactly the same result in under a month.

The new rifle appeared in the Winchester catalogue as the Model 92 and continued in production until 1941, with over one million sold. It was often used in Hollywood westerns as a replacement for the earlier Model 73, and was carried in films by actors including John Wayne and Chuck Connors.

A modified version called the Model 53 was introduced in 1924, ceasing production in 1932, after which the Model 65 succeeded it and continued to be sold until 1947. In all, over one million units of the three models were sold.

The most successful Browning-designed Winchester models were the 1887 and 1897 shotguns, the falling-block single-shot Model 1885 and the lever-action rifle Models 1886, 1894 and 1895, most of which are still being manufactured and sold today in one form or another.

1894 was a crucial year in firearms development, for it marked the beginning of the end for black powder weapons with the advent of the new, and very powerful, smokeless powders. Of course, the change was not immediate, for it took some time for old hunters to realize that the small-calibre lightweight rifles then being introduced actually had far more stopping power than their big-calibre weapons. The new .30/30, for example, boasted a muzzle velocity of 2200 feet per second, while the best that the old .50/110 could offer was about 1600 fps. When the much lighter weight of the rifle and its cartridges, the very much greater penetration and the flat trajectory were appreciated, the days of the black powder rifle were numbered.

Every rifle made by Browning for Winchester, from the single-shot onwards, was initially designed to take black powder loads. What is perhaps surprising — though less so bearing in mind Browning’s preoccupation with safe and simple actions — is the fact that every weapon was successfully converted to smokeless powder cartridges by the simple expedient of increasing the tensile strength of the barrel steel. Just how good an indication this is of the inherent strengths of Browning’s designs can be appreciated when it is remembered that the old black powder .32/40 generated a breech pressure of about 25,000 pounds per square inch, while the nearly identical calibre .30/30 smokeless powder load produced almost 40,000 psi.

The first American smokeless powder rifle was, predictably enough, a Browning-designed Winchester, the Model 94. Originally produced in .32/40 and .38/40 black powder models, it was swiftly reintroduced in .30/30 calibre with the same model number. And it was an immediate and lasting success, selling over a million and a half units by 1914 and over two and a half million by 1961. By the end of the twentieth century, well over seven million Model 1894 rifles had been manufactured, far more than any other centre-fire sporting rifle from any manufacturer. It’s often known as the Winchester 30-30, after the most popular cartridge used in it. Winchester advertised it, with not a trace of false modesty, as ‘the most popular hunting rifle ever built — bar none’.