John Moses Browning: The Mormon Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World

On this episode of Our American Stories, few people are aware that John Moses Browning—a tall, modest man born in 1855 and raised as a Mormon in the American West-- invented the mechanism used in virtually all modern pistols, created the most popular hunting rifles and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns introduced in World War I which dominated air and land battles in World War II. Nathan Gorenstein (author of The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World) is here to tell the story of this little-known American legend whose impact on history ranks with that of the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Few people are
aware of the John Moses Browning, a tall, modest man
born on this day 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

(00:31):
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

(00:51):
on history ranks right there with the Wright Brothers, Thomas
Edison and Henry Ford. This is a story 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. As

(01:12):
another fellow I 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 a guy whose machines started World

(01:34):
War One and won World War Two and influence 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,

(01:57):
but no one had ever written a serious for our
good few 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
Breek Naionale if I can say that French. But all

(02:20):
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
into World War One, when America entered the war and

(02:43):
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? While he was born in Arged
in Utah when it was a Mormon town, his father
had three wives. He and his brother Matt, who was

(03:05):
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 an eighteen sixty and for

(03:27):
the next fifteen years he got what amounted to a
PhD in mechanical engineering and firearms to sign 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 fixed repair.
They built some of themselves. So he had a really

(03:51):
like in many sports, you see some of well 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
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 special recognition spatial rotation, and so

(04:15):
we use it every day when we pack a suitcase
we have to figure out how to 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 Rubric's cube. It's it's six sided thing with
all these colored cubes, and you have to rotate them

(04:36):
so they line up. While most of us find it
really hard to do, Browning is a 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 ru. He had his head. His granddaughter, who

(04:57):
is in her nineties now, told me a great story
told her her by her mother about the elderly Brining
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 had come up with an
idea for a firearm. He would make a couple of

(05:19):
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 cordboard, 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

(05:41):
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 intolerances and send them off
to factories in the east which would then make them.
They did us blueprints. It was just they made a gun.

(06:02):
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

(06:24):
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 a 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 to support a family as a quick aside. Browning
was interested in a plural marriage. Rachel wasn't, and the

(06:46):
storyline is that when Brining suggested it to her, she said,
over your dead body. But so he started inventing guns Rachel.
He and Rachel would have ten kids, by the way,
and then a firearm made its way to Winchester, which
was styming. Winchester was famous for its very original lover

(07:07):
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 the people couldn't make because they wanted
it to handle a major military cartridge, a high powered

(07:27):
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

(07:49):
in the world, and they buy that, but unheard of
some of fifty thousand dollars, which was a huge amount
of money. Don't forget all these guns are being made
under Winchester's name, in the public knows who's designing these firearms.
Brining doesn't work for winches So, but he sells each
of them to the company for a set sum of
money or else goods to be sold and the sporting

(08:12):
goods store that his brother operates in Ogden. So Brining
sort of creates the Winchester Rifle Company because at that
point they have one old lever action gun, so he
creates for them single shart 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

(08:35):
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 in the other rifle
in America. But he was really just getting started. And
you've been listening to author Nathan Gorenstein tell the story
of John Moses Browning, the man who designed the guns,

(08:57):
the firearms that were used in World War One, in
World War Two ultimately 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.

(09:20):
That's how forward thinking they were. When we come back
the story of John Moses Browning, born on this day
in eighteen fifty five, here on our American stories, and

(10:09):
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. And
we're telling this story because on this day in eighteen
fifty five, John Moses Browning was born. Let's pick up

(10:31):
where we last left off. 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,

(10:52):
he was out shooting. He was a big trap shooter,
very successful one, I might add, And they were out
practicing one day and he noticed that the grass which
grown up high around the shooting range was being blown
over by the gas podcasts the gunpowder coming out in
the front of the rifle. And many people had recognized
that that was energy going out of the gun, and
then maybe you could do something with that, and they

(11:15):
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 Brining went
home and the next day he had a crew prototype
made that while a newspaper reporter got into the office.
That's the only account we have a Brining at work,

(11:36):
and it describes the inventor pretty excited going on 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 for good to ill. It's the major
combat weapon in the world today. Aks rs. They were
all gas operator firearms or Browning Adjustin went to the

(11:59):
first one in a day, and it used that basic
concept to develop what became the first machine gun purchased
by the American military in eighteen ninety five, and other
gas operated gun that wasn't only did. At the same
time he was doing that, he invented the first semi
automatic shotgun, which Wiley used today. It made a huge

(12:21):
amount of money for him, and then he went on
to invent the modern pistol. So every handgun in the
world today it is essentially based uses as a mechanism
the design Browning invented in eighteen ninety six eighteen ninety seven.
That's the slide action pistol. When you go to the
movies or a cup show and you see the top

(12:41):
of the handgun go back and forth, that's the slide
that in 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
a automatic pistol as they called them. They only fighted
one shot, but they were called automatic pistols, and they
were I'm going to say over it, probably two dozen

(13:03):
competing concepts at the time, but Brnning's was the only
one that lasted. It is the basis for not every
but virtually all handguns made in the world today. That
can be good or bad, 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

(13:25):
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 Colt
at that point wasn't producing that many guns. This is
around nineteen hundred. So Brinning and his brother because they
meet a guy at the Colt factory from Philadelphia. His

(13:47):
name is Hart old Burg, was a really zello kind
of guy. Keeps popping up on all these places across Europe.
With the right brothers at Submarine sales. But at this
point he's Burg is a firearms that here, and he
had been educated in Liege, Belgium, which had a large
armament making industry going back to fourteen hundred, and so

(14:09):
he and Burg hit it off. Now why do they
hit it off, Well, they're in in Yankee, Connecticut. Bronning's
a Mormon, and those days and woman's were blasphemous. And
Bronning himself, who was a Mormon missionary in Georgia, we
almost got enough bathlete by a mob. You know. Womans
were bad folks to a lot of people, and Burg
was Jewish. So here were the two sort of outside

(14:30):
of guys and to become friends. And Burg's apparently the
only industry person that Brinning ever invited back to Ogden.
Bronne really kept the two sides of his business separate, anyway,
So Brining and Burg become friends. Burg goes back to
Belgium and Brinning invents the slide action pistol. He invents
three of them, actually, and Colt only wants to make one.

(14:51):
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 side of the American
Army for US eighty five years. But the one Broning
likes is this cute little things. It's about this. I mean,
it's a gun and it's a machine, but it's enormously
well engineered, and it's like a little engine in your hand.

(15:13):
Coult doesn't want to make it, and Burg writes a
let us say, well, will make it. And at that
point FN, that 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

(15:34):
that starts a twenty seven twenty eight year long relationship
between FN and Belgium, and Browning and Brinning 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 could see a

(15:55):
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 an a fiction out or French literature. He
grew a goatee and he wore this white Panama hat,
and he was Paul, and he's American from the West,
and he quite intrigued the Belgians. If there's a photographs

(16:18):
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

(16:40):
between nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen they sold one on
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

(17:01):
returning from a culture of the knife, where a prentiss
would go out and get a job and buy a
fancy knife, and now they want to go out and
buy a gun, preferably a brining little senior automatic pistol.
And the problem 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

(17:23):
mechanical device like this, finally made beautifully engineered, and you
pull a 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

(17:45):
didn't appreciate you fire a gun, the bullet will go
for a mile. 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 design to Winchester.
He got a flat fee to Colt, he got a royalty,
but Colt didn't have the volume. And in the end

(18:07):
Brownie needed a manufacturing home, a place where he could
well not keep at 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

(18:32):
nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen, and enormous and had enormous
influence on all the other manufactures 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

(18:55):
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 story. Here on our American stories,

(19:38):
and we return to our American stories and the story
of John Moses Browning born on this day in eighteen
fifty five. 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.

(20:00):
Let's return to the story. And so the Germans say,
what do we do about this? Because people didn't appreciate
your fire a 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 aspect, just because they didn't really understand that they

(20:22):
had a weapon in their hands anyway. FPN also starts
making another Bronning design, which is the semi automatic shotgun,
which is a huge popular thing in America in Europe,
and the Bronning side becoming very wealthy because they're getting
world ties and all these guns. And back in Ogden,
Brining's brother Matt, turns out to be a really good businessman.
He becomes a banker, He invest in companies. They build

(20:46):
an opera house with a couple of other folks in
Ogden's 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 Broning, 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

(21:09):
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,

(21:32):
on his own, he had created a modern machine gun
and a modern automatic rifle. The rifle is the Broning
automatic rifle which people are famous, which is famous fun
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

(21:54):
one of it was far more advanced than any of
a couple of versions that were in use in Europe,
which much larger, heavier, unreliable. He also invented the thirty
caliber machine gun. That's also the machine gun you see
in every World War two movie, either with a vented
barrel or with a big water covered jacket. So we
have these designs sitting there, and so he drags them

(22:16):
out and they get perfected, and they stopped building them
in huge numbers, I might add there 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

(22:40):
not one quote from Growning in any of these profiles.
His brother Matt must have issued press releases to people
about his brother, because a lot of these audibles 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 gun an anti gun

(23:01):
fight is not new to this era. So one reporter
got Browning to agree to let him paraphrase him. And
here's what Browning said when asked him. He was asked,
why didn't you make automobiles? Brining assured readers that he
was a peace loving man who deplored war, indeed had
spent most of his career making sporting arms, but was

(23:21):
compelled to answer his nation's call. So Broning is now famous.
And but you know he's not kid. He's in his sixties.
At this point, he has his son and Matt's son
taking over part of the business side of the operation.
But Broning in nineteen eighteen is asked to invent another

(23:41):
gun for the military, and this gun is probably in
historic terms, it's 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 Browning to create something

(24:04):
that could fire a fifty caliber bron That means a
bullet that's a half inch wide. And so Broning 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

(24:25):
the guns not finished yet. It was so powerful that
it was difficult to keep on target. And Brownie came
up with a 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,

(24:46):
every fighter plane, every bomber was armed with Browning's machine guns,
So there wasn't an air battle fought in World War
Two by the Americans that didn't use Browning's guns. His
also armed the British spitfire and hurricanes thirty caliber guns
during the Battle of Britain and eight guns in each

(25:08):
spitfire and a Hurricane, And the British would tell you
that's what won the Battle of Britain. And there's a
British engineer says, you know, fighter planes are great, but
it's on paraphrasing here, but essentially the quote ornaments if
you don't have guns in them that work, And the
British had picked Browning's thirty caliber gun because they were
fast and reliable. You know, if the gun and jams
and the wing of an airplane, you can't go out

(25:29):
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 guns. So all
those P fifty one Mustein's lightnings, Thune, the boats, the
B seventeen, the B twenty four is everything. I mean
that literally is armed with Browning's machine guns. But that's
not all. So the armies out there and what do
they use. They're automatic weapons at that time. At Browning's

(25:52):
World War One Bronning automatic rifle in the thirty calib
of machine gun and it's nineteen eleven pistol and the
only other well, there's two other sort of major weapons,
the ground rifle, which is a major factor, and the
Thomson submachine gun, which looks great but actually wasn't all
that effective because the shot a pistol caliber Cottridge, and troops,

(26:13):
particularly in the Pacific would complain it didn't have the
power to penetrate vegetation, and that's why they preferred the
BRAWNI as a shot a Lodger 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

(26:34):
that's a major historical impact. You know, there's not a
major historical event in the world they 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

(26:55):
with them is sort of dependent on ourselves. What happened
after John 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

(27:17):
in Japan called Morocco and sold by FN. It turned
out that in the nineteen seventies FN purchased the Browning
company that's Fabriek 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

(27:37):
them two fifty calbum machine gun is still used by
the American Army today and by eighty other countries around
the world. They had with five attempts to replace it
with something lighter, with more controlled recoil, but they've all failed.
Browning would sometimes be challenged on why he may firearms,

(28:01):
and he had a response to that, and we get
it once in one newspaper article where his 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

(28:21):
ardent peace advocate, but recognizes the need of preparedness and
the fact that generations probably must pass through an era
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 why they held belief

(28:44):
at the time it was through a books published about
the theory that modern technology would make war impractically impossible.
Unfortunately that has improved to be the case, and no,
indeed technology did not usher in a world of peace.
But what Moses Browning accomplished, particularly for outfitting American soldiers

(29:06):
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

(29:27):
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 father's at the age of five. We
learned this over and over again. The Wright brothers, no

(29:48):
big PhDs from colleges, no theirs, was making their way
in a bicycle shop as mechanics. And what we learned
here is for fifteen years, as Nathan said, John Moses
Browning got a pH d in firearm engineering. Ever since
he was a boy in his father's shop. The story
of John Moses Browning born on this day in eighteen

(30:12):
fifty five. Here on our American Stories