Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/554

 Browning, the Gun Wizard

��Old John Browning has produced the finest machine guns for our army ever invented

By Edward C. Grossman

��AMERICA has finer guns in the /-A Browning light and heavy type than any nation nov/ at war. While the members of Congressional military committees vapored and fumed that blue print guns never killed an enemy, and that the unknown Browning gun was an experiment and a doubtful experiment, the officers in the Bureau of Ordnance and the great Browning smiled quietly.

We had about thirteen hundred guns when war broke out, which were of a type ordered abandoned in favor of a better one by the powers that be after the tests at Texas City. When war broke out the Germans were known to have fifty thou- sand machine guns — and the fact is now rather well known that they didn't ad- vertise during 1914 all the war material they had accumulated.

Europe had no light machine gun out- side of the French Hotchkiss and Benet, and they were not entirely satisfactory. When there came over the horizon the light Lewis gun, one of many American machine-gun inventions, the British waxed enthusiastic. The gun worked most of the time, weighed but twenty-six pounds, had a very easily-changed magazine hold- ing forty-seven cartridges, and very suc- cessfully coped with the need of a light machine gun that troops could carry for- ward — or back — in times of need. This did not mean that the Lewis was perfect. It has been known to jam and stop and break parts. Those guns bought, by the United States and sent down to the border did not prove impeccable. In fact all the machine guns, so far, have their weak points in one respect or another. Each new one is, however, nearer perfection. So came the Browning. But we will speak of the man himself.

Who Is Browning?

Let us first trace the record of Johrr Browning, a rare notable without a press agent, an inventor of more successful

���The Mysterious John M. Browning

Who is Browuiiii;? Millions of Ainerieaiis must haveaskcd tlicm- selves that qiicslion when General Cro- zier, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, testified before an in- vestigatingcommittee that he had decided to equip theUnitedStates army with the Brown- i n g machine gun. John Browning has been an inventor of firearms all his life. Shotguns, rifles and pistols .such as Win- chester, Remington. Stevens, and Colt, are all of them John Browning',s invention

��firearms than any man who ever lived, with his identity buried under the names of the great companies making his arms under royalty agreement with him. He is the inventor of nearly all the Winches- ter models from the 1873 model to the fine 1906 rifle; the man who gave the world the Remington autoloading shotgun and the Remington autoloading rifle; the master who perfected the Stevens 12-gage repeating shotgun; the creator of the United States Army's Colt automatic machine gun; the designer of all Colt automatic pistols, from the largest to the smallest; the patentee of the great Gov- ernment .45 automatic pistol, now the hand-gun of our troops, and the man from whom Belgium, long before the war, bought the right to make automatic shot- guns, rifles, and pistols of different cali- bers and models.

In 1914 Browning, the square-jawed, retiring, silent American Yankee, in his plain Yankee store-clothes, was made a Chevalier de I'Ordre de I^eopold and decorated by the King of Belgium on the occasion of the completion of the millionth Browning automatic pistol by the Fab- rique Nationale of Lioge a pistol that ran considerably more than a million in one model and caliber without a change.

John Browning made his first patented gun in 1880. That weapon was th ■

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