James Barrington - John Browning - Man and Gunmaker

In reality, the incident occurred in the autumn of 1889 at the weekly shoot of the Ogden Rifle Club at the club range by the river to the east of town. John wasn’t firing at the time but was watching a friend, Will Wright, shoot, and noted the way the muzzle blast caused the movement of a clump of weeds between Wright and the target.

Of course, he had noticed the same thing hundreds of times before, as any hunter would, but on this occasion he suddenly saw it as something else — a form of energy released by the action of firing that was being wasted, but which could be trapped and utilized. Ed and Matt were with John for the shoot, and they recalled that he immediately lost interest in the afternoon’s sport, summoned his brothers and returned to the Browning shop. He knew he had work to do.

In the shop he secured an old .44 Model 73 to a board, took a block of wood through which he had drilled a hole slightly larger than .44 calibre, placed it by the muzzle, lined up the hole with the barrel and fired. The block bounced all over the shop and, as the smoke cleared, John remarked casually to his brothers that they might have a workable machine-gun in ten years. More to the point, he announced that he was going to make a gas-operated gun the following day.

If any man other than John Browning had made such a claim, it would have appeared to be an idle boast, but coming from John, as his brothers well knew, it was simply a statement of intent, and by four o’clock the following afternoon the world’s first gas-operated rifle was undergoing test-firing.

It was a crude and basic design built on the same old black-powder Model 73 John had used the previous day and relied on muzzle blast to operate a simple lever — Browning called it a ‘flapper’ — which in turn pulled an actuating rod connected to the repeater mechanism. But it fired 16 rounds a second fully automatically from a single pull of the trigger. As far as John was concerned, the gun was a success, because it proved the principle of the mechanism. With the knowledge that he had acquired, he had the opportunity to develop the concept into a marketable weapon.

And develop it he did. The Model 73 was followed by a variety of other modified weapons as John Browning explored the new concept, and he filed his first patent application covering gas-operation of a firearm on 6 January 1890. That year, he built a working prototype machine-gun. It appeared rough and unfinished, with no tripod or firing grip, and neither a ventilated barrel nor a water jacket for cooling. But it worked, and worked well, and that was all that mattered.

Further development followed, with two more patents being filed in August 1891. One of these proposed a small turbine to harness the energy of the expanding gases while the other embodied the complete mechanism for the first of John Browning’s machine-guns.

By July 1892 Browning had conceived, and patented, the gas port — a hole drilled into the barrel which allowed the high-pressure gases behind the bullet to operate the weapon’s mechanism — which led indirectly to the automatic shotgun. But first he employed the knowledge he had gained to venture into yet another completely new field of weapon design: the handgun.

His first semi-automatic pistol, patented in 1895, was intended to demonstrate that the gas piston would function effectively in a handgun, which it did. More importantly, though, Browning realized the potential of recoil operation in small weapons, and within a year had filed three crucial patents which effectively covered the development of semi-automatic pistols for decades to come. These embodied the blowback action, the locked-recoil mechanism with a turning lock, and the same system with a pivoting lock.

Crucial to all of his designs was the telescoping bolt, which integrated the bolt and the barrel shroud into a single component now known as the pistol slide. This telescoping bolt design is today found on almost every modern semi-automatic pistol, as well as a number of fully automatic weapons.

John Browning had started work on pistols in 1894, and by July 1895 he was able to demonstrate his first finished design — a .38 calibre gas-operated weapon with an exposed hammer — to officials of Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company at Hartford, Connecticut.

The result was an agreement, signed a year later, permitting Colt to produce Browning pistols on a royalty basis in the United States, and this agreement covered both Browning’s original design and an additional three pistols he had developed in the preceding year. It was one of these three weapons that appeared in 1900 as the .38 ACP Colt Model 1900, the first semi-automatic pistol to be commercially produced in America. This agreement with Colt was to prove as significant as Bennett’s purchase of the Browning single-shot rifle in Ogden, because from 1900 onwards every semi-automatic pistol manufactured by Colt has been based upon a Browning design.

Browning’s agreement with Colt specifically excluded the sale of his pistols outside America, as it was his intention to arrange a separate contract with a European manufacturer. In this context, an extremely fortuitous meeting occurred at the Colt factory in 1897, between John Browning and a man named Hart Berg. Berg was the commercial director of a firm called Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre, located at Liege, in Belgium, and he had travelled over to America to look at some of the most recent innovations in bicycle manufacture.

It may seem odd that the commercial director of an arms factory should be investigating bicycle production, but the FN company at that time was in a far from happy state.

The FN group had been founded in 1889 by ten businessmen in Liege specifically for the manufacture of 150,000 Mauser Model 1889 rifles for the Belgian government. As this venture proved successful, the organization decided to continue working in the armaments field, but after that initial order, no other contracts had been offered to the company. FN had been forced to switch its focus, and had primarily been involved in the making of bicycles, motorcycles and munitions. As Berg explained to John Browning, it was the probably most modern and efficient arms factory anywhere in the world, lacking only weapons to manufacture.

Browning could see the obvious opportunity. He and Berg got on well together, and when Berg returned to Belgium he took with him a light .32 calibre pistol Browning had developed, a draft production contract and considerable enthusiasm for the weapon. His colleagues at FN soon realized the potential of the pistol, as did various European firearms authorities who carefully examined the gun and then test-fired five hundred rounds through it without any stoppages.

Of equal importance as the performance of the pistol was the simplicity of its construction. The Liege experts calculated that setting up for a production run would only require an outlay of around twelve thousand francs, a remarkably modest investment for a new weapon. The eventual selling price of the gun reflected the accuracy of their estimate: it retailed for only thirty francs, while the cartridges for it cost a mere fifty five francs per thousand.

The contract with FN was formalized on 17 July 1897, though production did not start until 1898 and the pistol was not offered for sale until January 1899. This was one year before the introduction of the Colt Model 1900, thus making the FN model the first Browning semi-automatic pistol produced anywhere. It was an immediate Europe-wide success, and not least with the European underworld. Soon after its introduction a group of French criminals armed with Browning pistols held off the forces of the French police, who were armed with revolvers, for several days.