John Moses Browning, Economic Influencer.




     When John Moses Browning died November 26, 1926 at the Fabrique Nationale plant in Liège, Belgium attended to by the Company physician and his son, Val, it is arguable that he had been the most successful firearms designer in history and certainly during the first quarter of the twentieth-century. John had traveled to Belgium with his wife Rachel in the Autumn of 1926 to work on his Superposed Shotgun design, having been to Liège on numerous occasions but it was Rachel’s first time accompanying her husband. She would return to the United States with his remains which had had lain in state at the FN Boardroom on December 7th and he would be laid to rest on December 17th in Ogden Utah but having set the stage, let us turn to the beginning.
     John Moses Browning was born January 23rd, 1855 in Ogden, Utah to Mormon parents Jonathan and Elizabeth Browning. Jonathan Browning was originally from Tennessee but had moved to Nauvoo, Illinois and opened a successful gun-repair shop. It was during his time in Nauvoo where Jonathan became familiar with Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons. Following conflict between the Mormons and non-Mormons in Illinois during which Mormon founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were both killed in 1844, the Mormons began a westward exodus in 1846, many of them armed with rifles built or repaired by Jonathan Browning. Jonathan had converted to the Mormon faith and followed, establishing a gun shop in Ogden in 1852 and explains how John was exposed to the firearms trade at an early age.
     The Gale Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, tells of how John Moses “showed interest in his father's work and enjoyed sitting in the shop watching him work. When Browning was six, he made himself a makeshift workbench out of a box and spent hours tinkering with scraps of metal, pretending to work as a gunsmith.” By all accounts, he was a lackluster student, one sporadically attending school until the age of 15, and even then, primarily focused on those things he needed to know to successfully work in the gun business. Despite this, before he had reached his teen years, John Moses had successfully built a rifle and used it to successfully hunt Prairie hens but upon showing the rifle to his father, he was gently chastised and told he should have taken more time with his design, a lesson which would stick with him throughout his life.
     In 1879 John Moses had married Rachel and received the first of his 128 firearms patents, this one for a single shot rifle he and his brother produced out of their shop in Ogden and it was one of these rifles that would bring him to the attention of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in 1883. During an 1883 meeting between John Moses and Winchester Vice President, T.G. Bennett, Oliver Winchester’s son-in-law, John Moses, after conferring with his brother and partner Matt, agreed to sell the rights to produce their rifle to Winchester, as well as first shot at a repeating design John had told Bennett of for the sum of $8,000. This initial bargain was the beginning if a 19 year relationship between Browning and Winchester which would prove profitable for both parties and allow John Moses to shift his focus from manufacturing to his true passion, weapons design.
     By the beginning of the twentieth-century, John had begun working with Colt on designs for a machine gun which Winchester had no interest in supporting. During his time working with Colt John Moses would also develop several semi-automatic handguns, including the famous an long serving Colt Model 1911 family of designs which he developed in response to Army requirements for a new sidearm. In addition to working with Colt John Moses Browning had met Hart Berg of the new Belgian Arms maker Fabrique Nationale at the Colt factory in 1897. He sent a .32 caliber design back with him starting a long relationship between Browning and FN. At the beginning of the twentieth-century John got in a dispute with Winchester over their resistance to producing his design for a semi-automatic Shotgun which led him to end his relationship with them and offer his design to FN. Despite Winchester continued success producing the Browning designs the had already purchased rights to, that Shotgun design would become the Browning Auto-5 or A5, a design which is still in production today and which was also produced by Remington and Savage as well. Unlike Winchester and Colt, FN marketed John Moses Browning designs under the Browning name to include later designs like the Browning Hi-power, considered by many to be the pinnacle of his handgun designs. 
     One historic use of a Browning design was the use of an FN Browning 1910 by Gavrilo Princip to assassinate both Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie on the 28th of June, 1914 in Sarajevo precipitating World War One. During World War One, John Moses Browning would continue to design and perfect military small arms designs based on his ideas and military requirements to include the Browning Automatic Rifle and numerous machine gun designs to include developing the .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun, model M2 in 1918 which still continues, largely in the same form, in service today. While the majority of these arrived too late to see service during the war, they would see a great deal of service in the Second World War and beyond.
     Following WWI, John Moses Browning would continue to work with Colt as well as traveling back and forth between Ogden Utah and Liège, Belgium to continue work on his designs to include the previously mentioned Browning Hi-power for which he applied for a patent on 28 June, 1923 from Ogden which was finally granted 22 February, 1927. The Browning Hi-Power remained in production by FN until FN Herstal announced they would cease production in favor of newer designs in February 2018. 
     During his life John Moses Browning had not only been financially successful in his own right, but had materially benefitted many major American firearms manufacturers as well as helping establish and save Fabrique Nationale which currently manufactures firearms for the U.S. Military and civilian markets with a major plant in Columbia, SC. After his death many of his designs continue to be not only popular, but economically and militarily viable well into the twenty-first century and his design elements can be found in many more. Beyond the manufactures who produced Browning designs during his lifetime, most major American gun makers have produced at least one John Browning design, variants of the 1911 being the most prolific example. Today’s ubiquitous presence of John Moses Browning's designs from the first quarter of the twentieth-century qualifies him as on of the most economically influential figures in America well beyond that time.


 

Bibliography:

Barrington, James. John Browning: Man and Gun Maker. Canelo, 2018.

 

"Browning, John Moses." In Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed., edited by James Craddock, 85-87. Vol. 30. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2010. Gale eBooks (accessed July 15, 2021). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3021400050/GVRL?u=vic_liberty&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=bab15389.

 

Carman, W. Y., A History of Firearms from the Earliest Times to 1914, New York, Dover Publications Inc., 1955.

 

Dougherty, Martin J., Small Arms from the Civil War to the Present Day, New York, Barnes & Noble, 2005.

 

Ezell, Edward Clinton, Small Arms of the World, New York, Stackhouse Books, 1983.

 

Gorenstien, Nathan, The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2021.

 

Hatcher, Major General Julian S. The Book of the Garand, Highland Park, NJ, The Gun Room Press, 1948.
 
John Moses Browning, National Inventors Hall of Fame, 2007.  https://www.invent.org/inductees/john-moses-browning

 

Rose, Alexander, American Rifle: A Biography, New York, Random House Inc., 2008.

 

Scaliger, Charles. “Browning: One Man’s Impact.” New American (08856540) 25, no. 17 (August 17, 2009): 33–38. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=43590571&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

 

Walter, John. The Rifle Story: An Illustrated History from 1756 to the Present Day, St. Paul, MN, MBI Publishing Co., 2006.
 
 

 


 

 



 

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