John Moses Browning: The Mormon Inventor Behind Modern Pistols and Machine Guns

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. Few people are aware of that John Moses Browning, a tall, modest man born in eighteen fifty five and raised as a Mormon in the American West, invented the mechanism used in virtually all modern pistols. He created the most popular hunting rifles and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns introduced in World War One and which dominated air and land battles in World War Two. Nathan Gorenstein, author of The Guns of John Moses Browning, is here to tell the story of this little known American legend whose impact on history ranks right there with the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

00:01:00
Speaker 2: Sorry about the most important American inventor most of your listeners have never heard of. We grew up knowing about Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford. But missing from that list is another fellow I’d suggest should be on it, John Moses Browning, who was born in eighteen fifty five on the far edge of the American West. He died in nineteen twenty six in the offices of an industrial complex in Europe that was created on the basis of his inventions. What did he do. He’s the guy whose machines started World War One and won World War Two and influenced America and the world to this day. Who am I. My Name’s Nathan Gorenstein. I’ve spent a career as a newspaper reporter and editor and now book author. And I got interested in Browning when I was researching firearms for another book, and I realized that this guy had changed the world, but no one had ever written a serious biography of him. If you go online, there are tens of thousands of books, articles, videos about his firearms, which are ubiquitous, and most of you know them under the names of Colt Winchester, Savage, Remington and in Europe Fabric Nationale, if I can say that French. But all those products didn’t come from the minds of engineers in those companies. They came from this guy from Utah who was born before the telegraph reached his town. So he was a tall man, over six feet, he was balding, and he was unknown outside the world of gun manufacturing until World War One, when America entered the war and Americans finally learned that dear boys, husbands, sons, brothers were going to go to war armed with the weapons invented by one guy who they had never heard of. So who was this fellow. Well, he was born in Ogden, Utah, when it was a Mormon town. His father had three wives. He and his brother Matt, who was important to John Browning’s career, were the offspring of the second wife. Your father, Jonathan Browning, was a blacksmith and gunsmith, and so John who went to work. This was the frontier after a while, so you went to work early. He was at work in his father’s shop at five years old, and this is in eighteen sixty and for the next fifteen years. He got what amounted to a PhD in mechanical engineering and firearms design because his father’s shop was located next to one of the major pioneer trails heading west, and over the years he saw every kind of firearm imaginable that he had a fix repair, They built some themselves. So he had a really like in many sports, you see some of what and do something and they’re really good and you realize that, well, they’re so good because they were doing it from five years old. Well, he was so good because he was doing it from a tiny age. But he had one other advantage that most of us use in a very basic level every day. It’s called spacial recognition spatial rotation, and so we use it every day when we pack a suitcase we have to figure out how things go inside, or we look at a map and we have to figure out how to get somewhere. But Browning’s great gift was that he could think in three dimensions. So think of a Rubik’s cube. It’s this six sided thing with all these colored cubes, and you have to rotate them so they line up well. Most of us find it really hard to do. Browning is the kind of guy because of his mental skills. He could have done that in his head and probably done two or three at the same time. He never used blueprints, he didn’t do working drawings. He didn’t have a computer, he didn’t have a slide wou He had his head. His granddaughter, who is in her nineties now, told me a great story told to her by her mother about the elderly Broning sitting in a chair at night in their house, tapping on his head for hours at a time. It used to drive the mother crazy. But what he was doing was thinking through ideas, so he’d come up with an idea for a firearm, he would make a couple of rough sketches, sort of like his own notes that no one else could read, and then he would cut out templates, flat pieces of metal, maybe cardboard, that he would work in his hands to see how they would interact. And then he and his brother, one of his half brothers. He had a big family who many of them helped him in his business, would stand by basic metal working machines and make each part one at a time. Brining would tell ed, this is a little thicker, this is a little smaller, and they would design enormously complicated metal machines to thousands of an inch tolerances and send them off to factories in the east which would then make them. They didn’t use blueprints, it was just they made a gun. They would test that it would work. You can see them in museums now across the country, and they looked like industrial produced weapons, but they were made in this small workshop in Ogden, Utah, by John Browning and his brothers now. Browning was reluctant to stop designing weapons because he thought that was inventing things. Don’t forget He’s out in the western frontier, where he’s sort of in the middle of nowhere and inventing things were done by the great industrial companies back east, and he felt he was you know, he didn’t want to do it, and his father had to push him to do it. One of the things that encouraged him was that he got married to a woman by the name of Rachel, and he had a support a family as a quick aside. Browning was interested in a plural marriage. Rachel wasn’t, and the storyline is that when Browning suggested it to her, she said, over your dead body. But so he started inventing guns. He and Rachel would have ten kids by the way, And then a firearm made its way to Winchester, which was styby Winchester was famous for its very original liver action rifles, but they were trying to develop a bit of gun and the in house guys couldn’t do it. And then one of their salesman shows up with this really simple but effective, high powered hunting rifle, the exact kind of thing their people couldn’t make because they wanted it to handle a major military contridge, a high powered military contridge. So they buy it from Browning. The head of the company on his way to San Francisco and business stops in Utah and buys it for eight thousand dollars the rights to make the weapon. But Winchester realizes in Browning they have the real deal because he has other ideas, and he shows them one of them, which becomes the most famous, second most famous lover action rifle in the world, and they buy that heard of some of fifty thousand dollars, which was a huge amount of money. Don’t figure all these guns are being made under Winchester’s name. No one in the public knows who’s designing these firearms. Browning doesn’t work for Winchester, but he sells each of them to the company for a set sum of money or else goods to be sold in the sporting goods store that his brother operates in Ogden. So Browning sort of creates the Winchester Rifle Company because at that point they have one old lever action gun. So he creates for them a single short rifle, a lever action rifle, lever action shotgun, pump action shotguns. And then he designed the most popular hunting rifle in America, probably the Winchester thirty thirty lever action rifle still made today. Over six million have been sold, and people say it’s the rifle that it’s taken more dear than any other rifle in America. But he was really just getting started.

00:08:47
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to author Nathan Gorenstein tell the story of John Moses Browning, the man who designed the guns, the firearms that were used in World War One and World War Two simminly allowed us to win World War Two, but also the rifles, the shotguns that we used to defend ourselves and hunt the man who had the ideas that became the guns. By the way, we love to talk about our founders and how they protected intellectual property rights with the patent in Article one of the US Constitution. That’s how forward thinking they were. When we come back the story of John Moses Browning, here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and author Nathan Gorenstein, author of The Guns of John Moses Browning, the remarkable story of the inventor whose firearms changed the world. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:10:26
Speaker 2: He had an enormous curiosity and once he got an idea in his head, he couldn’t stop working on alternatives to the initial idea, on advancements to the idea. So, for example, in eighteen eighty nine, he was out shooting. He was a big trap shooter, very successful one, I might add, and they were all practicing one day and he noticed that the grass which had grown up high around the shooting range was being blown over by the gas pot gas the gunpowder coming out of the front of the rifle. People had recognized that that was energy going out of the gun, and then maybe you could do something with that, and they had been ideas kicked around, but no one had ever made a firearm that tapped the burning gunpowder the gases to produce energy to operate a mechanism or Browning went home and the next day he had a crew prototype made. A newspaper reporter got into the office. It’s the only account we have of Browning at work, and it describes the inventor pretty excited, going on and saying, I got this new thing, and it’s going to go a hell winding, he says, once he pulls the trigger, and the writer caused an automatic rifle. Now, automatic rifles we know today are for good and ill. It’s the major combat weapon in the world today. Ak’s ars. They were all gas operated firearms or Browning had just invented the first one in a day, and he used that basic concept to develop what became the first machine gun purchased by the American military in eighteen ninety five, another gas operated gun that wasn’t only did. At the same time he was doing that, he invented the first semi automatic shotgun, which wild they used today. It made a huge amount of money for him, and then he went on to invent the modern pistol. So every handgun in the world today is essentially based uses as a mechanism the design Broning invented in eighteen ninety six eighteen ninety seven. That’s the slide action pistol where when you go to the movies or a cup show and you see the top of the handgun go back and forth, that’s the slide. That and the internal mechanism of the slide is what Browning invented. There were a lot of competitors, many particularly in Europe, there were lots of inventors trying to make an automatic pistol as they called them. The only fighted one shot, but they were called automatic pistols, and there were I’m going to say over probably two dozen competing concepts at the time, but Broning’s was the only one that left. It is the basis for not airy but virtually all handguns made in the world today that can be good or bed, depending how you feel about it, but no one can deny the historic import of that. At that point, he and his brother realized a couple of things that they weren’t making as much money as they could have because they were getting from Winchester. They had always been getting flat payments, and they wanted royalties on each gun made. Colt gave them royalties, but cult at that point wasn’t producing that many guns. This is around nineteen hundred. So Browning and his brother because they meet a guy at the Colt factory from Philadelphia. His name was heart Oa Burgh, who’s really zellow kind of guy. He keeps popping up on all these places across Europe with the Wright brothers a submarine sales. But at this point he burgs a firearms in you there, and he had been educated in Liege, Belgium, which had a large armament making industry going back to fourteen hundred and so he and Burg hit it off. No, why do they hit it off? Well, they’re in in Yankee, Connecticut. Browning’s a Mormon, and those days Mormons were blasphemous, and Browning himself, who was a Mormon missionary in Georgia, we almost got beat off badlete by a mob. You know, Mormons were bad folks to a lot of people. And Berg was Jewish. So here were the two sort of outside of guys. And they become friends. And Burgh is apparently the only industry person that Browning ever invited back to Ogdeny. Bronni really kept the two sides of his business separate, anyway. So Brinning and Berg become friends. Berg goes back to Belgium and Browning invents the slide action pistol. He invents three of them, actually, and Colt only wants to make one. This is the larger, heavy duty one that they think they can sell to the army. This guy eventually becomes the famous m nineteen eleven, the s item of the American Army for US eighty five years. But the one Bronning likes is this cute little thing. It’s it’s about this. I mean, it’s a gun, but it’s enormously well engineered, and it’s like a little engine in your hand. Colt doesn’t want to make it, and Berg writer, let us say, well, we’ll make it. And at that point FN, that’s Greek Nationale in Belgium had a factory with nothing to make in it. So in eighteen ninety eight Broning travels to Belgium and the FN people go crazy over his gun and they stopped making it, and that starts a twenty seven to twenty eight year long relationship between FN and Belgium, and Browning and Bronning would end up spending almost half of every year in Belgium. He taught himself French. He did it, his granddaughter tells me, by looking up words in a French dictionary. Once he got a couple of words right, he see a word he didn’t understand, look that up, get that translation. If he saw words in the translation he didn’t understand, he’d look that up. So he was self taught and he became a fixtion out of French literature. He grew a goatee and he wore this white Panama hat, and he was Paul, and he was American from the West, and he quite intrigued the Belgians. If there’s a photographs of Browning with a slew of FN engineers and he’s a head taller almost than anybody else there. He was considered a character. But what he did he brought FN and the city of Liege sort of a great industrial fortune because they stopped making his little pistol. They made a couple of different versions, all designed by Browning, and between nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen they sold one and a quarter million of them, and that’s about one handgun for every three or four hundred people in Europe at the time. That’s a lot of guns. And it created a problem. There’s a great German report from around nineteen eleven that says everyone wants to buy a Browning, and returning from a culture of the knife, where apprentice would go out, get a job and buy a fancy knife, now they want to go out and buy a gun, preferably a briding, little semi automic pistol. And the problem was was that these were new things and they were almost like the iPhone of the time. That’s not an exaggeration because people had never seen a little mechanical device like this. Finally made beautifully engineered, and you pull the trigger, and what happened? You got an explosion, You get the brass casing popping out. The slide moves back and forth, and you hold it in your hand. And it became a real popular item among both good people and bad people, I might add. And so the Germans say, what do we do about this? Because people didn’t appreciate you fire or gun the bullet will go for a mile.

00:17:41
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Nathan Gorenstein tell the story of John Moses Browning. And for a while Browning was content selling his ideas and his designs to Winchester. He got a flat fee to Colt, he got a royalty, but Colt didn’t have the volume. And in the end Browning needed a manufacturing home, a place where he could well not keep it all, but keep control of it all and make more money for himself and his family. And he found it in the unlikeliest of places, and found a partner in Europe, in Belgium, of all places, not a place one today associates with a manufacture of handguns, And my goodness, he sold one point four million between nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen, and enormous sum and had enormous influence on all the other manufacturers as well. When we come back, more of this remarkable story of John Moses Browning, And by the way, pick up where you can Nathan Gorenstein’s book The Guns of John Moses Browning, the remarkable story of the inventor whose firearms changed the world. And indeed they did pick it up at a bookstore or an Amazon or the usual suspects. Again, when we come back more of John Moses Browning’s story here on our American stories, and we returned to our American stories and the story of John Moses Browning. Between nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen, Browning sold one and a quarter million of his slide action pistols, what author Nathan Gorenstein called the iPhone of its time. Let’s return to the story.

00:19:58
Speaker 2: And so the Germans say, what do we do about this? Because people didn’t appreciate you fire or gun the bullet will go for a mile. You had guys in Europe and women too, sort of showing off to their friends and shooting people. You had people and trained doing tiger practice, not out of any venal aspects, just because they didn’t really understand that they had a weapon in their hands anyway, and then also starts making another Browning design, which is the semi automatic shotgun, which is a huge popular thing in America in Europe. And the Brownings start becoming very wealthy because they’re getting worlties and all these guns. And back in Ogden, Barning’s brother Matt turns out to be a really good businessman. He becomes a banker, he invests in companies. They build an opera house with a couple of other folks in Wagden that’s still there in Ogden now, and he becomes head of the school board and he becomes one of the major folks in Ogden. And while Barning, the inventor, is well known in his home state, he’s not in the rest of the country. That doesn’t happen until nineteen seventeen, nineteen eighteen, when America enters World War One with an army that has no guns essentially, I mean that’s virtually literally, they had like four hundred machine guns I think, and it was a very small army. So they had to get arms, and the only person, well, the arms they chose were John Barning’s arms. He had created before the army asked for it. Between nineteen hundred and nineteen twelve, on his own, he had created a modern machine gun and a modern automatic rifle. The rifle is the Brarning automatic rifle which people are famous, which is famous for and was used until Vietnam. You see it in World War two movies all the time, and it was the first automatic rifle adopted by the American military and the only one of it. Only it was far more advanced than any of a couple of versions that were in use in Europe, which were much larger, heavier, unreliable. He also ento the thirty caliber machine gun that’s also the machine gun you see in every World War II movie, either with a vented barrel or with a big water covered jacket. So we had these designs sitting there, and so drags them out and they get perfected and they stop building them in huge numbers. I might add. They’re also issuing his nineteen eleven pistol to troops. So this one guy is arming the American military except for rifles, and so he gets all sorts of attention and people want to know who he is, and there were all these profiles written about him. But the interesting thing missing is him. There’s not one quote from Browning in any of these profiles. His brother Matt must have issued press releases to people about his brother, because a lot of these artificsts sort of quote the same anecdotes. But you know they’re asked about, well, why do you make guns? I mean, guns have been controversial with water American history. The pro gun and anti gun fighter is not new to this era. Well, one reporter got Browning to agree to let him paraphrase him, and here’s what Broning said when asked him. He was asked, why didn’t you make automobiles? Browning assured readers that he was a peace loving man who deplored war, indeed, had spent most of his career making sporting arms, but was compelled to answer his nation’s call. So Bronning is now famous. But you know he’s not kid. He’s in his sixties at this point. He is. His son and Matt’s son are taking over part of the business side of the operation. But Broning in nineteen eighteen is asked to invent another gun for the military, and this gun is probably in historic terms, is probably the most his significant invention. The tanks had appeared on the European battlefield, and the American military wanted a machine gun that was powerful enough to penetrate tank armor, so they asked Bronning to to create something that could fire a fifty caliber round. That means a bullet that’s a half inch wide. And so Browning goes to work and he uses as the basis for that design for the machine gun he invented in nineteen hundred. So, I mean, that’s how it advanced his mind work and what he invents. He dies in nineteen twenty six and the gun’s not finished yet. It was so powerful that it was difficult to keep on target, and brown came up with the new recoil system and did other things to try and make a controllable But what he invented is the fifty caliber machine gun the end. Two. Why is that significant? Well, every American airplane in World War Two, every fighter plane, every bomber was armed with Broning’s machine guns. So there wasn’t an air battle fought in World War Two by the Americans that didn’t use Bronings guns. His guns also armed the British Spitfire and Hurricanes thirty guns during the Battle of Britain and eight guns in each spit fire and a hurricane. And the British will tell you that’s what won the Battle of Britain. And there’s a British engineer says, you know, fighter planes are great, but I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially their quot ornaments if you don’t have guns in them that work. And the British had picked Browning’s thirty caliber gun because they were faster and reliable. You know, if a gun jams and the wing of an airplane, you can’t go out and fix it, so you had to have something that would work quickly and that would reliable and wouldn’t jam. The same thing with Browning’s fifty caliber gun. So all those P fifty one, Mustang’s Lightnings, Thunderbolts, the B seventeen, the B twenty fours, everything, I mean that literally is armed with Bronning’s machine guns. But that’s not all. So the armies out there and what do they use their automatic weapons at that time? At Browning’s World War one Browning automatic rifle and this thirty capital machine gun and it’s nineteen eleven pistol and the only other well, there’s two other sort of major weapons, the garand rifle would which is a major factor, and the Thompson submachine gun, which looks great but actually wasn’t all that effective because the short of pistol caliber cartridge, and troops, particularly in the Pacific would complain it didn’t have the power to penetrate vegetation. And that’s why they preferred to Browning because a shot a larger cottridge. But those were the major firearms used by the American military, So one can honestly say there wasn’t a ground battle one that wasn’t one thanks to Browning’s weapons. And again, you know, that’s a major historical impact. You know, there’s not a major historical event in the world that hasn’t been affected by firearms for good or ill. You know, firearms can save a life, take a life, They could feed a family, they can wipe out a species. You know, they occupy a spectrum from good to evil, and what we do with them is sort of depending on ourselves. What happened after Browning’s death was that his son and nephew took over the business and they imported guns and sold them under the Browning name, originally from Belgium, and then eventually from Japan, mostly made by a very good firm in Japan called Moroku and sold by FN. It turned out that in the nineteen seventies FN purchased the Browning Company that’s Fabric Nationale in Belgium, and so the Winchester rifles designed by Browning and the shotguns sold today come from Japan and are owned by FN and Belgium. And the two fifty cab machine gun is still used by the American Army today and by eighty other countries around the world. They had in five attempts to replace it with something lighter with more controlled recoil, but they’ve all failed. Bronni would sometimes be challenged on why he made firearms, and he had a response to that and get it once in one newspaper article where he’s paraphrase and this is what the article says. He replied to the effect that the world’s need of guns still was greatest, that the field of arms invention was infinitely larger yet than that of the motor car. He is, however, an ardent peace advocate, but recognizes the need of preparedness and the fact that generations probably must pass through an error of evolution and the use of force before the nations will be ready by reason of scientific advancement and intellectual culture, to beat their guns into plowshares and the swords into putting books. And that was a wide they held belief at the time. That was through are books published about the theory that modern technology would make war impractically impossible. Unfortunately that hasn’t proved to be the case.

00:28:52
Speaker 1: And no, indeed technology did not usher in a world of peace. But what John Moses Browning accomplished, particularly for outfitting American soldiers in battle, American planes and British planes in battle, well it could easily have saved the world from the Nazi menace and Japanese imperial ambitions. And what a story. This is a terrific job on the production by Greg Hengler and a special thanks to Nathan Gorenstein for sharing the story of John Moses Browning. His book The Guns of John Moses Browning, the remarkable story of the inventor whose firearms change the world, is available in bookstores or wherever you get your books online. And what a story to tell about the inventiveness that started way back in that shop of his fathers at the age of five, We learned this over and over again the Wright brothers, no big PhDs from colleges know theirs, was making their way in a bicycle shop as mechanics. And what we learn here is for fifteen years, as Nathan said, John Moses Browning got a PhD in firearms engineering. Ever since he was a boy in his father’s shop. The story of John Moses Browning here on our American stories