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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