rifle to be sent from Ogden to New Haven. Then he turned to Bennett and told him that he would either have the new rifle in Bennett’s hands within thirty days — but for the sum of twenty thousand dollars — or he would give the gun to him.
Both Bennett and Matt, who was at the interview, were astounded. Bennett quickly recovered and included John’s proposal in his offer, but excluded John’s offer to give him the gun and this was accepted. John spent the journey back to Ogden mentally designing the new rifle. He started work on the receiver the day of his arrival home, began assembly within a week, and had the weapon firing in two weeks. Bennett received it in well under the thirty day period agreed, and sent the cheque for twenty thousand dollars immediately.
It’s worth emphasising just astonishing Browning’s achievement was. In those days, for most firearms manufacturers the normal time between the design of a new weapon appearing on the drawing board to the prototype being available for test-firing was about two years, but John Browning achieved exactly the same result in under a month.
The new rifle appeared in the Winchester catalogue as the Model 92 and continued in production until 1941, with over one million sold. It was often used in Hollywood westerns as a replacement for the earlier Model 73, and was carried in films by actors including John Wayne and Chuck Connors.
A modified version called the Model 53 was introduced in 1924, ceasing production in 1932, after which the Model 65 succeeded it and continued to be sold until 1947. In all, over one million units of the three models were sold.
The most successful Browning-designed Winchester models were the 1887 and 1897 shotguns, the falling- block single-shot Model 1885 and the lever-action rifle Models 1886, 1894 and 1895, most of which are still being manufactured and sold today in one form or another.
7. SMOKELESS POWDERS
1894 was a crucial year in firearms development, for it marked the beginning of the end for black powder weapons with the advent of the new, and very powerful, smokeless powders. Of course, the change was not immediate, for it took some time for old hunters to realize that the small-calibre lightweight rifles then being introduced actually had far more stopping power than their big-calibre weapons. The new .30/30, for example, boasted a muzzle velocity of 2200 feet per second, while the best that the old .50/110 could offer was about 1600 fps. When the much lighter weight of the rifle and its cartridges, the very much greater penetration and the flat trajectory were appreciated, the days of the black powder rifle were numbered.
Every rifle made by Browning for Winchester, from the single-shot onwards, was initially designed to take black powder loads. What is perhaps surprising — though less so bearing in mind Browning’s preoccupation with safe and simple actions — is the fact that every weapon was successfully converted to smokeless powder cartridges by the simple expedient of increasing the tensile strength of the barrel steel. Just how good an indication this is of the inherent strengths of Browning’s designs can be appreciated when it is remembered that the old black powder .32/40 generated a breech pressure of about 25,000 pounds per square inch, while the nearly identical calibre .30/30 smokeless powder load produced almost 40,000 psi.
The first American smokeless powder rifle was, predictably enough, a Browning-designed Winchester, the Model 94. Originally produced in .32/40 and .38/40 black powder models, it was swiftly reintroduced in .30/30 calibre with the same model number. And it was an immediate and lasting success, selling over a million and a half units by 1914 and over two and a half million by 1961. By the end of the twentieth century, well over seven million Model 1894 rifles had been manufactured, far more than any other centre-fire sporting rifle from any manufacturer. It’s often known as the Winchester 30-30, after the most popular cartridge used in it. Winchester advertised it, with not a trace of false modesty, as ‘the most popular hunting rifle ever built — bar none’.
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.
8. THE AUTOMATIC SHOTGUN
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
