3. JOHN BROWNING — THE EARLY YEARS (1855–1870)
John Moses Browning was born in Ogden, Utah, on January 23 1855, and his brother Matthew Sandifer Browning, John’s life-long friend, confidant and business partner, was born a little under five years later on October 27 1859. From the first, the workshop where his father spent his days fascinated John Browning, and he began working there at the age of six. Within a year, his knowledge was so extensive that he could identify every part of a firearm by both name and function.
His mother educated him well, and by the time he was eight or nine he was not only able to read and write, but could also take orders from customers, recording their personal details and notes of the repair work they required on their weapons. He became so competent that he was often to be found there alone by customers requiring work on guns, and even at that young age he was frequently able not only to diagnose the problem, but also to estimate the length of time it would take his father Jonathan to fix it.
He made his first gun at the age of ten. It was crude in the extreme, consisting of a sawn-off flintlock barrel attached to a roughly-shaped stock by twists of wire, and with a piece of tin around the priming pan. It was fired by thrusting a glowing stick into the powder in the priming pan, John holding and aiming the gun while Matt applied this rudimentary form of ignition.
In John’s defence, it should be emphasized that he and Matt made the entire weapon in a single day when Jonathan was out, and that it did work. The latter fact was proven by the prairie chicken — a type of grouse — on the Browning breakfast table the following morning, ready for his father. When Jonathan finally thought to ask where the birds had come from, John explained about the gun, which Jonathan then asked to see. After studying it for a moment or two, he finally looked at John and suggested that he ought to be able to make a better one at his age — nearly eleven! After breakfast, John took the gun into the workshop and disassembled it. Neither John nor Jonathan ever mentioned the weapon again.
A more convincing demonstration of John Browning’s precocious talent occurred when he was thirteen. A freight driver appeared at the Browning shop with a badly damaged single barrel percussion shotgun; a heavy crate on his wagon had fallen and crushed the middle of the gun, breaking the stock and bending or twisting virtually every other part of it except the barrel, which had suffered only scratches. As Jonathan explained, a repair was possible, but it would be a lengthy process, and would probably cost far more than the weapon was worth. The trader took little convincing, and settled for a reconditioned gun from the Browning stock, but on his way out of the shop he bequeathed the ruined gun to John.
Ruined it may have been as far as the trader was concerned, but he was not looking at it through John’s eyes, nor with John’s gunsmithing experience behind him. Already the boy could weld, braze, drill and tap holes. He could fabricate the simpler parts of weapons and he could disassemble almost any type of gun. To John, the shotgun wasn’t a wreck, it was a challenge.
In his own words, he said: ‘I decided to take the gun apart, piece by piece, down to the last small screw, even though parts were mashed and twisted together. And when I did, finally finishing long after supper that night, the pieces all spread out before me on the bench, I examined each piece and discovered that there wasn’t one that I couldn’t make myself, if I had too. If I had been in school that day, I would have missed a valuable lesson.’
Having reduced the gun to its component parts, in his spare time over the next few weeks he repaired those parts he could, and fabricated new parts where the damage was beyond repair. The job had the tacit consent of the older Browning, despite Jonathan’s initial disapproval. John knew that, for his father had let him cut the wood for the new stock from his precious slab of walnut. And in completing the work, John moved subtly from childhood into manhood. Beforehand, he was just a boy who helped around the shop, an apprentice at best, but afterwards he was a gunsmith in his own right, and was accepted as such by Jonathan.
Many stories have been told about John Moses Browning. Some are total invention, but most have at least a basis in fact. One of these recounts that while still a child John made each of his brothers a gun from parts salvaged from Jonathan’s junk pile. In fact, John Browning knocked together probably dozens of non-functioning weapons out of scrap wood and steel for Matt, but the construction of a real gun was rather more difficult. First of all, Jonathan’s approval had to be obtained and then a suitable barrel found. Every other part of the gun John could make, but not the barrel.
And then a barrel almost fell into his hands. Matt, sweeping in the shop one day, discovered a burlap- wrapped object the size and shape of a gun barrel tucked away in a corner. When he unwrapped it, John found that it
Jonathan burst out laughing, and told John how the barrel had been acquired. A stranger had seen one of Jonathan’s slide rifles and came to the shop carrying the barrel to ask for one to be made for him. As he and Jonathan were discussing the deal, Jonathan’s wife Elisabeth stepped into the shop and asked her husband how the smallpox patients were — the town was suffering from something of an epidemic at the time. Jonathan replied that he’d just returned from seeing them, at which the stranger cried out ‘Smallpox?’ and reached out to take his barrel back from Jonathan. Then he changed his mind and said he’d take a receipt, and then he decided not even to bother with that, and left the shop at a run. Jonathan never saw him again.
John duly made a slide gun in time for Matt’s birthday, and the two boys spent many happy hours hunting in the woods, John with his refurbished shotgun, and Matt with the first slide gun made by John Browning, then a mature fourteen-year old gunsmith. In those days the hunting was invariably for food, not for sport, and the concept of ‘sportsmanship’ was totally foreign. The ideal shot, as far as any hunter then was concerned, was at a sitting target or a flock of birds feeding on the ground. Indeed, this kind of shot became known as a ‘pot shot’, because that was exactly what it was — a shot to fill the cooking pot.
4. THE FIRST GUN
John Browning left school a few months after his fifteenth birthday, and thereafter effectively ran the Browning shop, assisted by his brothers — particularly by Matt — when the need arose, while Jonathan took less of a part. The elder Browning still spent time in the shop, however, and was probably responsible for his son’s first attempt at designing an original weapon.
Then a man in his early twenties, John looked in disgust at the parts of a gun brought in for repair, and remarked casually that he thought he could make a better one himself. To his surprise, his father took him completely seriously, and told him to go ahead and do so.
John’s task was not easy. He had plenty of ideas for the design, but the inadequacies of the Browning machine shop meant that the weapon had to be as simple as he could make it. He started with basic sketches, then produced templates which he altered as ideas and modifications occurred to him, and finally he fabricated the metal parts. Larger components he hand-forged, shaping them on the anvil and trying to get them as near as possible to the final design to avoid the filing and chiselling that would otherwise be necessary. But there was no short-cut in making the receiver; it had to be forged, then drilled, chiselled and filed out: a tiresome and exhausting job. The gun that eventually emerged was a single-shot rifle, lever-action and with an exposed hammer. It was simple, robust and reliable.
It is generally accepted that most successful weapons have taken at least two and often three or more years to progress from the initial idea to the test-firing stage. The time John Browning took to design and construct his rifle is not precisely known, but it was almost certainly less than one year. It is known that he started working on the weapon after his twenty-third birthday on 23 January 1878, and filed an application for a patent on 12 May 1879, the month after he married Rachel Teresa Child.
The patent application itself was also signed by Jonathan Browning as a witness, and must have been filed quite some time after the gun was complete, because of John Browning’s complete lack of knowledge of patent
