show Bennett. On this occasion, Browning left without concluding a deal with Bennett, who was somewhat conservative in his thinking and regarded the radical new weapon with some suspicion, because he much preferred the idea of a pump- or lever-action weapon. Browning also left without the shotgun, which the Winchester engineers were going to study.
Over the succeeding months there was considerable correspondence between Browning and Winchester, as minor changes were made to the design and the patent applications — which Winchester had for some time been making on John Browning’s behalf — were filed. Although filed by Winchester patent attorneys, all the patents were taken out in Browning’s name, and this established procedure undoubtedly became a cause of considerable irritation to Winchester over the following half-century.
By April 1900 Browning was getting irritated with the lack of any positive response from Winchester about the shotgun, and wrote to Bennett requesting a decision, but without receiving a satisfactory answer. Finally, in a somewhat heated meeting at New Haven in 1902, John Browning spelt out his terms. He was so confident that the weapon would be a success that he wanted a huge price outright which was to be an advance on royalties. In all his previous dealings with Bennett, royalties had never been discussed — Winchester invariably bought the weapons outright — and Bennett refused to discuss royalties on this occasion as well. John picked up his shotgun and left. The long and highly profitable relationship he had enjoyed with Winchester was over.
In fairness to Bennett, he was in a difficult position. The automatic shotgun was a revolutionary concept, which worried Winchester. If they bought and produced the weapon, and it was a commercial failure, the reputation of the company would suffer badly, but if it was a success, then the sales of their well-established lever and pump- action shotguns would be hit. As far as Bennett was concerned, the best choice would probably have been to buy the gun but not manufacture it, as he had done with many other of Browning’s designs. But John’s demand for royalties, rather than a straight sale for cash, precluded his taking this course of action.
With the shotgun under his arm, and his anger and irritation dying away, John Browning saw that he had two alternatives. He could either offer the weapon to another major American manufacturer, or he could take it overseas. He opted for the first choice, and arranged a meeting with Marcellus Hartley, the president of Remington Arms. On the afternoon of the appointment, while John waited in his secretary’s office, Marcellus Hartley died of a heart attack.
John Browning’s decision was made for him by factors completely outside his control. He took his shotgun to Europe, and to the youthful FN group in Belgium.
But well before he took this step, Browning had ventured into an entirely new field of weapon design — the machine-gun.
9. AUTOMATIC WEAPONS DEVELOPMENT
The story is often told how John Browning, while out hunting, fired his gun near some bulrushes, and noted the disturbance this caused in the vegetation some distance away. This sparked his interest in the automatic operation of weapons, and led not only to the automatic shotgun, but also to his automatic pistol and machine-gun designs. The fact that John Browning’s middle name was Moses probably made the tale about the bulrushes almost inevitable, but actually the story is almost true.
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.
10. BROWNING’S PISTOLS — COLT AND FN
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
