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.
Unlike Colt and Winchester, who both produced Browning-designed weapons under their respective trade names, FN from the first used the word ‘Browning’ to designate their pistols, with the result that John’s surname was soon far better known in Europe than in America. Indeed, it was this policy, together with heavy advertising by FN for the pistols, which was largely responsible for the word ‘browning’ entering French common parlance as a synonym for ‘automatic pistol’.
John Browning made his first visit to the FN factory, and to Europe, in 1902, immediately after his break with Winchester. As well as wishing to visit the factory where his pistol was being produced, he wanted to see something of Europe and, just as important, he also wanted to see his automatic shotgun, wrapped and stowed carefully in his cabin on board the liner on which he’d crossed the Atlantic, go into production.
He hadn’t advised the factory that he was arriving, so he was able to spend a week in Paris seeing the sights before continuing on to Liege, where he arrived in February 1902. Berg had left FN in 1898, and John was perhaps a little unsure of the reception he would receive. In fact the director, Henri Frenay, was delighted to see the tall American inventor whose towering genius had literally pulled FN out of the doldrums and set it on course to becoming the largest arms manufacturer in Europe.
John probably hadn’t realized what an enormous difference his .32 pistol had made at the factory, but the days of empty benches and idle workers had gone. With the ever-increasing sales — half a million pistols were to be produced by 1909 — had come full employment and rapid expansion. And the FN company was eager to get into the sporting arms field, so the automatic shotgun was received with something akin to rapture.
As at Winchester, the FN engineers closely scrutinized the weapon, and their enthusiasm for it more than made up for the lukewarm response John had received from Bennett at New Haven. A contract to produce the shotgun was signed in March that year, and John remained in Liege for three months in order to supervise the production of the first models.
Part of the contract with FN was an order for ten thousand units for the technically non-existent Browning Automatic Arms Company. In fact, these were bought by John himself, as a measure of his confidence in his new gun, and were to be sold through Schoverling in America on his behalf. Any doubts harboured by anyone about the potential of the gun — which became known as the Browning Auto 5 — were dispelled when all ten thousand weapons were sold in less than a year. And that was only the start. Since then, the shotgun has been manufactured by Remington, Breda, Savage, Franchi and a number of other firms, and total world sales cannot even be estimated — by 1961 FN alone had produced nearly one and a half million units.
The output from both the FN and Colt factories showed a fairly close parallel in the early part of the twentieth century. Both companies were delighted with the success of the initial Browning designs, and both subsequently marketed a full range of Browning-designed pistols primarily intended for the civilian and police markets. John, however, could see the potential for the military use of certain of his pistols, and he soon began directing his efforts in this direction.
As a result, Colt introduced a Military Model .38 pistol in 1902, the calibre being deliberately chosen to match that of the current official army revolver. This weapon did attract some official interest, but the military opinion was that a more powerful cartridge than the .38 was required, following experiences in the Philippines against the Moro terrorists. This bitter campaign had shown that the comparatively small .38 round simply didn’t possess the one- shot ‘knock-down’ man-stopping capability that was needed for a military sidearm.
In 1905, in response to this requirement, Browning developed a new cartridge — the .45 ACP — that he believed would be more than powerful enough for military use, and submitted that to the Army Ordnance Board together with two pistols, one with a hammer, the other hammerless, and both variants of the same design, for testing. After demonstrations of the weapons by Browning, Colt began commercially manufacturing the hammer model in 1905 and by 1906 the Board was able to examine a production weapon.
Over 1906 and 1907 several different types of semi-automatic pistol, manufactured by Colt, Savage, Luger and other companies, were tested by the American military, but all proved to be unsatisfactory for the rigours of use in combat. The manufacturers were told that new trials would be carried out in 1910, and were requested to improve their designs by that time. During 1909 and 1910 Browning made a number of modifications to the design of his pistol to satisfy the revised brief.
The problem with most of these early semi-automatic pistols was that they were complicated designs, inherently fragile, and liable to jam or malfunction in adverse conditions — and especially the conditions likely to be encountered on the battlefield. The cartridges they fired were also felt to be inadequate as man-stoppers, one of the principal reasons why the American government was looking for a replacement for the official Army revolver.
The final selection trials for the .45 calibre sidearm took place in March 1911, and were rigorous. Each pistol had to fire six thousand rounds, being allowed to cool after each hundred and be cleaned and oiled after every thousand. Then the weapons were to chamber and fire a selection of deformed and abnormal loads, and finally be assessed again after being attacked by acid and with dust inserted into the mechanism. After details of the trial were published, two of the foreign pistols were immediately withdrawn, leaving the Colt with only a single competitor.
The complete trial occupied two days. At the end of that time, the Colt had fired the six thousand rounds without any stoppages, chambered all the odd loads with no difficulty at all and completed the acid and dust tests faultlessly. It was the first time ever that an automatic weapon of any type had achieved a perfect score in a government test, and the feat was not to be equalled until 1917 when a machine-gun — perhaps predictably a weapon also designed by Browning — matched the record.
When the Browning pistol successfully fired its final round, a soldier who had been assisting in loading the multiple magazines exclaimed: ‘She made it, by God.’ When John Browning made his brief acceptance speech after it was announced that his pistol had won, he concurred that he had very little to add to the soldier’s comment.
The Board reported in March, strongly recommending the adoption of the Browning Colt as the official US sidearm, and the recommendation was made official by the Chief of Ordnance of the General Staff and Secretary of War on 29 March 1911. The pistol was renamed the Colt 1911, or the M1911, and remained the official US Services’
