John Browning by James Barrington

Author:James Barrington
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788631792
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

Automatic Weapons Development

The story is often told how John Browning, while out hunting, fired his gun near bulrushes, and noted the disturbance this caused in the rushes 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 bulrushes almost inevitable, but actually the story is almost true.

In fact, 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; he 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 utilised. Ed and Matt were with John for the shoot; he immediately lost interest in the afternoon’s sport, grabbed his brothers and returned to the Browning shop. 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 a hole slightly larger than .44 calibre had been drilled, 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 an idle boast; coming from John, as his brothers knew, it was simply a statement of intent, and by four the following afternoon the world’s first gas-operated rifle was undergoing test-firing. Of course, it was a crude and basic design built on the same old Model 73 John had used the previous day; it relied on muzzle blast to operate a lever – Browning called it a ‘flapper’ – which in turn pulled an actuating rod connected to the repeater mechanism. As far as John was concerned, the gun was a success, because it proved the principle of the mechanism; with that knowledge 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. Further development followed, with two more patents being filed in August 1891; one of these proposed a small turbine

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