July 13, 2023 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, John Moses Browning 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. Here's his story.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
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
(00:31):
and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns introduced in World
War One and which dominated air and land.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Battles in World War II.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
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 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.
(01:21):
He died in nineteen twenty six in the offices of
an industrial complex in Europe that was created on the
basis of his inventions.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
What did he do?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
He's a guy whose machines started World War One and
won World War Two and influenced America and the world
to this day. Who am 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
(01:50):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Go online.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
There are tens of thousands.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
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
(02:23):
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
(02:45):
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 Oarden, Utah when it was a
Mormon on His father had three wives. He and his
brother Matt, who was important to John Broning's career, were
(03:07):
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
(03:28):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Heading west, and over the years he.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Saw every kind of firearm imaginable that he had a
fix repair.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
They built some themselves. So he had a really like
in mini.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Sports, you see some of them 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
(04:14):
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.
(04:36):
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 with you 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,
(04:57):
told me a great story told to her by her
mother about the elderly Browning 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
(05:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
And then he and his brother, one of his half brothers.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
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. Brinning
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
(05:54):
off to factories in the east which would then make them.
They didn't use blueprints. It was 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
(06:17):
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 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
(06:39):
had a support a family as a quick aside. Browning
was interested in a plural marriage. Rachel wasn't, and the
story lying is that when Browning suggested it to her,
she said, over your dead body. But so he started
inventing guns. He and Rache would have ten kids, by
the way, And then a firearm made its way to Winchester,
(07:02):
which was stymy. Winchester was famous for its very original
lever action rifles, but they were trying to develop a
bit of gun and the in house guys couldn't do it.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
And then one of.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
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 on business, stops in Utah
(07:33):
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 lever action rifle in.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
The world, and they buy that.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
I heard of some of fifty thousand dollars, which was
a huge amount of money. Don't think that all these
guns are being made under Winchester's name. No one in
the public knows who designing these firearms. Bronning 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
(08:12):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Thirty thirty lever action rifle still made today.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Over six million have been sold, and people say it's
the rifle that it's.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
Taken more dear than any other rifle in America.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
But he was really just getting started.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
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 twoultimately 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
(09:08):
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,
(10:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
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 trapshooter, very successful one, I might add,
(10:48):
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
(11:09):
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 that A newspaper reporter got into the office.
It's the only account we have a barning at work,
and it describes the inventor pretty excited, going on and saying,
(11:32):
I got this new thing, and it's going to go
a hell winding, he says once he pulls the trigger,
and the writer calls an automatic rifle. Now, automatic rifles
we know today are for good and ill it's the
major combat weapon in the world today.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Ak's ars. They were all gas.
Speaker 5 (11:49):
Operated firearms or Browning had just invented.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
The 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, 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
(12:13):
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
a design Brining invented in eighteen ninety six eighteen ninety seven.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
That's the slide action pistol where.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
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 Broning 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. They only fighted one shot, but they were
called automatic pistols, and there were I'm going to say
(12:53):
over probably two dozen competing concepts at the time, but
Broning's was the only one.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
That it is the basis for.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Not every but virtually all handguns made in the world
today that can be good of 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.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
They had always been getting.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Flat payments, and they wanted royalties on each gun made.
Colt gave them royalties, but cult at that point wasn't producing.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
That many guns. This is around nineteen hundred.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
So Browning and his brother because they meet a guy
at the Colt factory from Philadelphia.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
His name is hart O.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Berg, who's a really zellow kind of guy. He keeps
popping up on all these places across Europe with the
Wright brothers submarine sales. But at this point he Burg
is a firearms engine there and he had been educated
in Liege, Belgium, which had a large armament making industry
going back to fourteen hundred.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
And so he and Burg hit it off. No, why
do they hit it off.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
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
(14:27):
person that Browning ever invited back to Ogden. Bronning really
kept the two sides of his business separate anyway. So
Bronning and Berger become friends. Burg 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
(14:48):
the famous m nineteen eleven, the s item of the
American Army for US eighty five years.
Speaker 5 (14:54):
But the one Bronning likes is this cute little thing.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
It's it's about the 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
(15:23):
people go crazy over his gun and they stop making it,
and that starts a twenty seven to twenty eight year
long relationship between FN and Belgium, and Broning and Browning
would end up spending almost half of every year in Belgium.
He taught himself French.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
He did it, his.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (15:54):
He'd look that up.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
So he was self taught, and he became in 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.
(16:19):
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
(16:42):
or four hundred people in Europe at the time.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
That's a lot of guns. And it created a problem.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
There's a great German report from around nineteen eleven that
says everyone wants to buy a broning and returning from
a culture of the knife, where apprentice would go out,
get a job and buy a fancy knife, and now
they want to go out and buy a gun, preferably
a briding little semi automatic pistol. And the problem was
was that these were new things and they were almost
(17:09):
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,
(17:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
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
(18:03):
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 manufacturer of handguns,
And my goodness, he sold one point four million between
(18:24):
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,
(18:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Again, when we come back more of.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
John Moses Browning's story here on our American stories, and
(19:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
And so the Germans say, what do about this?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Because people didn't appreciate you fire a gun, the bullet will.
Speaker 4 (20:03):
Go for a mile.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
You had guys in Europe and women too, sort of
showing off to their friends and shooting people. You had
people and trains doing tiger practice, not out of any
venal aspect, just because they didn't really understand that they
had a weapon in their hands anyway. Evan also starts
making another Browning design, which is the semi automatic shotgun,
(20:26):
which is a huge popular.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
Thing in America in Europe.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
And the Brownings start becoming very wealthy because they're getting
Worldies 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
Ogden that's still there in Ogden now, and he becomes
head of the school board and he becomes one of
(20:50):
the major folks in.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Ogden. And while Barning, the.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
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,
(21:18):
the arms they chose were John Browning'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 bronding automatic rifle which people are famous, which
(21:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
Only it was.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Far more advanced than any of a couple of versions
that were in Usetern Europe, which were much.
Speaker 5 (21:56):
Larger, heavier, unreliable.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Vented 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 Addy are also issuing
(22:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
His brother Matt must.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Have issued press releases to people about his brother, because
a lot of these artifsts 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 fight is
not new to this era. So one reporter got Bronning
to agree to let.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
Him paraphrase him.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
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,
(23:26):
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.
Speaker 5 (23:33):
Part of the business side of the operation.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
But Browning in nineteen eighteen is asked to invent another
gun for the military. And this gun is probably in
historic terms, it 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
(23:55):
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
(24:16):
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 Browning 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.
Speaker 5 (24:35):
Machine gun the end.
Speaker 4 (24:36):
Two.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Use Bronings guns.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
His guns also armed the British Spitfire and Hurricanes thirty
caliber 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 they're pot
ornaments if you don't have guns in them that work.
(25:18):
And the British had picked Browning's thirty caliber gun because
they were fast 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 were reliable wouldn't jam.
The same thing with Browning's fifty caliber guns. So all
those P fifty one, Mustang's Lightnings, thun the boats, the
B seventeen, the B twenty fours, everything, I mean that
(25:40):
literally is armed with Broning's machine guns.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
But that's not all.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
So the armies out there, and what do they use
their automatic weapons at that time are Broning 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,
which is major factor, and the Thompson submachine gun, which
(26:04):
looks great but actually wasn't all that effective because the
chart of pistol caliber Cottridge, and troops, particularly in the
Pacific would complain it didn't have the power to penetrate vegetation.
And that's why they preferred to Browny because short a
larger Cottridge. But those were the major firearms used by
the American military. So one can honestly say there wasn't
(26:24):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:40):
You know, firearms can save.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
Dependent on ourselves.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
What happened after Bronie's death was 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.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
Mostly made by a.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
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.
(27:33):
And the two fifty calber machine gun is still used by.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
The American Army today and.
Speaker 5 (27:40):
By eighty other countries around the world.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
They had in five attempts to replace it with something
lighter with more controllable recoil, but they've all failed. Bronn
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
(28:04):
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
(28:27):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
And that was a wide they held belief at the time.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
That was, there were books published.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
About the theory that modern technology would make war impractical
and impossible.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
Unfortunately that hasn't proved to be the case.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
And no, indeed technology did not usher in a world
of peace. But what John Moses Browning account for, particularly
for outfitting American soldiers in battle, American planes and British
planes in battle.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Well, it could easily have saved the.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
World from the Nazi menace and Japanese imperial ambitions.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
And what a story.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
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
(29:39):
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 firearm engineering. Ever since he
(30:02):
was a boy in his father's shop. The story of
John Moses Browning here on our American stories
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
(00:31):
and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns introduced in World
War One and which dominated air and land.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Battles in World War II.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
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 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.
(01:21):
He died in nineteen twenty six in the offices of
an industrial complex in Europe that was created on the
basis of his inventions.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
What did he do?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
He's a guy whose machines started World War One and
won World War Two and influenced America and the world
to this day. Who am 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
(01:50):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Go online.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
There are tens of thousands.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
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
(02:23):
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
(02:45):
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 Oarden, Utah when it was a
Mormon on His father had three wives. He and his
brother Matt, who was important to John Broning's career, were
(03:07):
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
(03:28):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Heading west, and over the years he.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Saw every kind of firearm imaginable that he had a
fix repair.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
They built some themselves. So he had a really like
in mini.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Sports, you see some of them 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
(04:14):
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.
(04:36):
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 with you 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,
(04:57):
told me a great story told to her by her
mother about the elderly Browning 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
(05:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
And then he and his brother, one of his half brothers.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
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. Brinning
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
(05:54):
off to factories in the east which would then make them.
They didn't use blueprints. It was 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
(06:17):
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 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
(06:39):
had a support a family as a quick aside. Browning
was interested in a plural marriage. Rachel wasn't, and the
story lying is that when Browning suggested it to her,
she said, over your dead body. But so he started
inventing guns. He and Rache would have ten kids, by
the way, And then a firearm made its way to Winchester,
(07:02):
which was stymy. Winchester was famous for its very original
lever action rifles, but they were trying to develop a
bit of gun and the in house guys couldn't do it.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
And then one of.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
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 on business, stops in Utah
(07:33):
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 lever action rifle in.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
The world, and they buy that.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
I heard of some of fifty thousand dollars, which was
a huge amount of money. Don't think that all these
guns are being made under Winchester's name. No one in
the public knows who designing these firearms. Bronning 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
(08:12):
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.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
Thirty thirty lever action rifle still made today.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Over six million have been sold, and people say it's
the rifle that it's.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
Taken more dear than any other rifle in America.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
But he was really just getting started.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
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 twoultimately 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
(09:08):
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,
(10:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
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 trapshooter, very successful one, I might add,
(10:48):
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
(11:09):
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 that A newspaper reporter got into the office.
It's the only account we have a barning at work,
and it describes the inventor pretty excited, going on and saying,
(11:32):
I got this new thing, and it's going to go
a hell winding, he says once he pulls the trigger,
and the writer calls an automatic rifle. Now, automatic rifles
we know today are for good and ill it's the
major combat weapon in the world today.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Ak's ars. They were all gas.
Speaker 5 (11:49):
Operated firearms or Browning had just invented.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
The 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, 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
(12:13):
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
a design Brining invented in eighteen ninety six eighteen ninety seven.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
That's the slide action pistol where.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
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 Broning 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. They only fighted one shot, but they were
called automatic pistols, and there were I'm going to say
(12:53):
over probably two dozen competing concepts at the time, but
Broning's was the only one.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
That it is the basis for.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Not every but virtually all handguns made in the world
today that can be good of 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.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
They had always been getting.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Flat payments, and they wanted royalties on each gun made.
Colt gave them royalties, but cult at that point wasn't producing.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
That many guns. This is around nineteen hundred.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
So Browning and his brother because they meet a guy
at the Colt factory from Philadelphia.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
His name is hart O.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Berg, who's a really zellow kind of guy. He keeps
popping up on all these places across Europe with the
Wright brothers submarine sales. But at this point he Burg
is a firearms engine there and he had been educated
in Liege, Belgium, which had a large armament making industry
going back to fourteen hundred.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
And so he and Burg hit it off. No, why
do they hit it off.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
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
(14:27):
person that Browning ever invited back to Ogden. Bronning really
kept the two sides of his business separate anyway. So
Bronning and Berger become friends. Burg 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
(14:48):
the famous m nineteen eleven, the s item of the
American Army for US eighty five years.
Speaker 5 (14:54):
But the one Bronning likes is this cute little thing.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
It's it's about the 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
(15:23):
people go crazy over his gun and they stop making it,
and that starts a twenty seven to twenty eight year
long relationship between FN and Belgium, and Broning and Browning
would end up spending almost half of every year in Belgium.
He taught himself French.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
He did it, his.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (15:54):
He'd look that up.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
So he was self taught, and he became in 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.
(16:19):
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
(16:42):
or four hundred people in Europe at the time.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
That's a lot of guns. And it created a problem.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
There's a great German report from around nineteen eleven that
says everyone wants to buy a broning and returning from
a culture of the knife, where apprentice would go out,
get a job and buy a fancy knife, and now
they want to go out and buy a gun, preferably
a briding little semi automatic pistol. And the problem was
was that these were new things and they were almost
(17:09):
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,
(17:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
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
(18:03):
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 manufacturer of handguns,
And my goodness, he sold one point four million between
(18:24):
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,
(18:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Again, when we come back more of.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
John Moses Browning's story here on our American stories, and
(19:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
And so the Germans say, what do about this?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Because people didn't appreciate you fire a gun, the bullet will.
Speaker 4 (20:03):
Go for a mile.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
You had guys in Europe and women too, sort of
showing off to their friends and shooting people. You had
people and trains doing tiger practice, not out of any
venal aspect, just because they didn't really understand that they
had a weapon in their hands anyway. Evan also starts
making another Browning design, which is the semi automatic shotgun,
(20:26):
which is a huge popular.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
Thing in America in Europe.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
And the Brownings start becoming very wealthy because they're getting
Worldies 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
Ogden that's still there in Ogden now, and he becomes
head of the school board and he becomes one of
(20:50):
the major folks in.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Ogden. And while Barning, the.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
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,
(21:18):
the arms they chose were John Browning'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 bronding automatic rifle which people are famous, which
(21:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
Only it was.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Far more advanced than any of a couple of versions
that were in Usetern Europe, which were much.
Speaker 5 (21:56):
Larger, heavier, unreliable.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Vented 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 Addy are also issuing
(22:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
His brother Matt must.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Have issued press releases to people about his brother, because
a lot of these artifsts 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 fight is
not new to this era. So one reporter got Bronning
to agree to let.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
Him paraphrase him.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
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,
(23:26):
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.
Speaker 5 (23:33):
Part of the business side of the operation.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
But Browning in nineteen eighteen is asked to invent another
gun for the military. And this gun is probably in
historic terms, it 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
(23:55):
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
(24:16):
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 Browning 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.
Speaker 5 (24:35):
Machine gun the end.
Speaker 4 (24:36):
Two.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Use Bronings guns.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
His guns also armed the British Spitfire and Hurricanes thirty
caliber 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 they're pot
ornaments if you don't have guns in them that work.
(25:18):
And the British had picked Browning's thirty caliber gun because
they were fast 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 were reliable wouldn't jam.
The same thing with Browning's fifty caliber guns. So all
those P fifty one, Mustang's Lightnings, thun the boats, the
B seventeen, the B twenty fours, everything, I mean that
(25:40):
literally is armed with Broning's machine guns.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
But that's not all.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
So the armies out there, and what do they use
their automatic weapons at that time are Broning 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,
which is major factor, and the Thompson submachine gun, which
(26:04):
looks great but actually wasn't all that effective because the
chart of pistol caliber Cottridge, and troops, particularly in the
Pacific would complain it didn't have the power to penetrate vegetation.
And that's why they preferred to Browny because short a
larger Cottridge. But those were the major firearms used by
the American military. So one can honestly say there wasn't
(26:24):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:40):
You know, firearms can save.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
Dependent on ourselves.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
What happened after Bronie's death was 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.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
Mostly made by a.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
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.
(27:33):
And the two fifty calber machine gun is still used by.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
The American Army today and.
Speaker 5 (27:40):
By eighty other countries around the world.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
They had in five attempts to replace it with something
lighter with more controllable recoil, but they've all failed. Bronn
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
(28:04):
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
(28:27):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
And that was a wide they held belief at the time.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
That was, there were books published.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
About the theory that modern technology would make war impractical
and impossible.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
Unfortunately that hasn't proved to be the case.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
And no, indeed technology did not usher in a world
of peace. But what John Moses Browning account for, particularly
for outfitting American soldiers in battle, American planes and British
planes in battle.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Well, it could easily have saved the.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
World from the Nazi menace and Japanese imperial ambitions.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
And what a story.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
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
(29:39):
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 firearm engineering. Ever since he
(30:02):
was a boy in his father's shop. The story of
John Moses Browning here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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