James Barrington - John Browning - Man and Gunmaker

With the Model 94 established, Winchester introduced the Model 95. This was another Browning lever-action rifle, but this time with a box magazine in front of the trigger guard, which quickly became a popular big-game weapon. Its appeal was rather more limited than that of the lighter and cheaper 94, mainly because of the much more powerful cartridges for which it was chambered — from the .30/40 Krag up to the very powerful .405 — but it nevertheless sold more than four hundred thousand units before being discontinued in 1931.

The weapon was adopted in 1895 by the US Army as the Musket .30 Army Model 1895. Interestingly, the weapon also saw war service as a .30/40 Krag musket with the US Army in the Spanish-American War and, when it was chambered for the 7.62 mm Russian cartridge, almost three hundred thousand were sold to Russia in the early part of the First World War.

With the last weapon Browning designed for Winchester, his career came full circle, for it was another single-shot rifle. It had been requested by Bennett for one reason only — to drive the popular Belgian Flobert .22 from the market. John Browning did not find it a difficult request to comply with, as not only did he have a design for such a rifle, he had five different working models, all of which he sent to Winchester and all of which Bennett bought. Four of the weapons had been designed by Browning in 1892, but the fifth had been completed only a short time prior to Bennett’s request.

It was this version which was chosen to compete with the Flobert, and was introduced by Winchester as the Model 1900, retailing for a mere five dollars. It was entirely successful in competition with the Belgian gun, driving the foreign weapon from the shelves in a single year, and went on to spawn a host of derivations, including a 9 mm shotgun version. All calibres of this model were discontinued in 1946, after almost one and a half million units had been sold.

Interestingly, the four rifles that Winchester bought but didn’t manufacture were all variations on the same theme, and all covered by a single patent. This was one of the simplest designs ever for a firearm, possessing effectively only two moving parts: a combined hammer and trigger, and a single coil spring which acted as both a mainspring and trigger spring. And the reason Bennett bought it was simply to ensure that nobody else could come along and use the concept to start manufacturing a rifle that would undercut even the Model 1900.

Overall, John Browning and Winchester enjoyed a 19-year working relationship, and in the four years between 1884 and 1887, Browning sold no less than twenty different gun designs to Winchester, far more than the company could actually produce commercially. But Bennett purchased everything Browning offered to him, keenly aware that if he didn’t there was nothing to stop Browning striking a deal with another manufacturer. In all, Winchester manufactured and sold seven Browning-designed rifles and three shotguns.

Or, to be absolutely accurate, Bennett bought every weapon Browning offered him until the end of the century, when the tall American produced a radical new weapon design that would cause a permanent rift between him and Bennett.

Despite his numerous rifle designs for Winchester, John Browning was still experimenting in other fields, and in 1898 he began working on the weapon that was to cause his celebrated break with Winchester, and would become the most profitable of all the sporting arms he invented: the automatic shotgun.

It was a difficult time to contemplate such a gun, primarily because shotgun cartridges were still in a transitional stage between black powder and smokeless loads, and the new cartridges proved very inconsistent even in a manually-operated weapon. In an automatic they often failed to eject properly.

Then Browning invented the shock absorber, which effectively cured all his difficulties at one stroke. This tiny component, costing almost nothing to make, reduced the recoil of the weapon, permitted consistent functioning with all loads and, incidentally, gave Browning a total monopoly on the automatic shotgun market until his patent expired. It was to be a further fifty-four years, over half a century, after the introduction of the Browning weapon before another successful autoloader design was marketed, such were the difficulties of developing a mechanism that worked and which did not infringe John Browning’s patents.

In fact, Browning developed two different designs almost simultaneously, and fired both exhaustively before selecting the second one as the better weapon, and it was this version which he took to New Haven in 1899 to show Bennett. On this occasion, Browning left without concluding a deal with Bennett, who was somewhat conservative in his thinking and regarded the radical new weapon with some suspicion, because he much preferred the idea of a pump- or lever-action weapon. Browning also left without the shotgun, which the Winchester engineers were going to study.

Over the succeeding months there was considerable correspondence between Browning and Winchester, as minor changes were made to the design and the patent applications — which Winchester had for some time been making on John Browning’s behalf — were filed. Although filed by Winchester patent attorneys, all the patents were taken out in Browning’s name, and this established procedure undoubtedly became a cause of considerable irritation to Winchester over the following half-century.

By April 1900 Browning was getting irritated with the lack of any positive response from Winchester about the shotgun, and wrote to Bennett requesting a decision, but without receiving a satisfactory answer. Finally, in a somewhat heated meeting at New Haven in 1902, John Browning spelt out his terms. He was so confident that the weapon would be a success that he wanted a huge price outright which was to be an advance on royalties. In all his previous dealings with Bennett, royalties had never been discussed — Winchester invariably bought the weapons outright — and Bennett refused to discuss royalties on this occasion as well. John picked up his shotgun and left. The long and highly profitable relationship he had enjoyed with Winchester was over.

In fairness to Bennett, he was in a difficult position. The automatic shotgun was a revolutionary concept, which worried Winchester. If they bought and produced the weapon, and it was a commercial failure, the reputation of the company would suffer badly, but if it was a success, then the sales of their well-established lever and pump-action shotguns would be hit. As far as Bennett was concerned, the best choice would probably have been to buy the gun but not manufacture it, as he had done with many other of Browning’s designs. But John’s demand for royalties, rather than a straight sale for cash, precluded his taking this course of action.

With the shotgun under his arm, and his anger and irritation dying away, John Browning saw that he had two alternatives. He could either offer the weapon to another major American manufacturer, or he could take it overseas. He opted for the first choice, and arranged a meeting with Marcellus Hartley, the president of Remington Arms. On the afternoon of the appointment, while John waited in his secretary’s office, Marcellus Hartley died of a heart attack.

John Browning’s decision was made for him by factors completely outside his control. He took his shotgun to Europe, and to the youthful FN group in Belgium.

But well before he took this step, Browning had ventured into an entirely new field of weapon design — the machine-gun.

The story is often told how John Browning, while out hunting, fired his gun near some bulrushes, and noted the disturbance this caused in the vegetation some distance away. This sparked his interest in the automatic operation of weapons, and led not only to the automatic shotgun, but also to his automatic pistol and machine-gun designs. The fact that John Browning’s middle name was Moses probably made the tale about the bulrushes almost inevitable, but actually the story is almost true.