The Guns Of John Moses Browning

A “well-researched and very readable new biography” (The Wall Street Journal) of “the Thomas Edison of guns,” a visionary inventor who designed the modern handgun and whose awe-inspiring array of firearms helped ensure victory in numerous American wars and holds a crucial place in world history. Few people are aware that John Moses Browning—a tall, humble, cerebral man born in 1855 and raised as a Mormon in the American West—was the mind behind many of the world-changing firearms that dominated more than a century of conflict. He invented the design used in virtually all modern pistols, created the most popular hunting rifles and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns that proved decisive not just in World Wars I and II but nearly every major military action since. Yet few in America knew his name until he was into his sixties. Now, author Nathan Gorenstein brings firearms inventor John Moses Browning to vivid life in this riveting and revealing biography. Embodying the tradition of self-made, self-educated geniuses (like Lincoln and Edison), Browning was able to think in three dimensions (he never used blueprints) and his gifted mind produced everything from the famous Winchester “30-30” hunting rifle to the awesomely effective machine guns used by every American aircraft and infantry unit in World War II. The British credited Browning’s guns with helping to win the Battle of Britain. His inventions illustrate both the good and bad of weapons. Sweeping, lively, and brilliantly told, this fascinating book that “gun collectors and historians of armaments will cherish” (Kirkus Reviews) introduces a little-known legend whose impact on history ranks with that of the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.

A biography of the gunsmith behind every firearm manufactured today. John Browning was the most influential gun designer who ever lived. After building his first firearm at aged thirteen, he went on to create a series of radical blueprints for pistols, rifles and machine guns that changed the way wars were fought and streets were policed. But who was the man behind the weapons? How did he manage to revolutionize the way guns worked? And what drove him to keep innovating right through his life? A short must-read for gun collectors, enthusiasts and anyone interested in the history of firearms from bestselling thriller writer James Barrington.

Including Achievements Of John M. Browning.

This is the true tale of two brothers, sons of a successful Jewish contractor, who along with an MIT graduate and a minister's daughter once competed for headlines with John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde. The gang was led by the angry, violent, yet often charismatic Murton Millen, a small-time hoodlum and aspiring race-car driver. With his younger brother, Irv, and later joined by neighborhood buddy and MIT graduate Abe Faber, Murt launched a career of increasingly ambitious robberies. But it was only after his sudden marriage to the beautiful eighteen-year-old Norma Brighton that the gang escalated to murder. Their crime wave climaxed at a Needham, Massachusetts, bank on February 2, 1934, when Murt cut down two local police officers - Francis Haddock and Forbes McLeod - with a Thompson submachine gun stolen from state police. The killings, the dogged investigation by two clever detectives, and the record-setting trial with seventeen psychiatrists were national news. In Depression-era America this Boston saga of sex, ethnicity, and bloodshed made the trio and their "red-headed gun moll" infamous. Gorenstein's account explores the Millen, Faber, and Brighton families and introduces us to cops, psychiatrists, newspaper men and women, and ordinary citizens caught up in the extraordinary Tommy Gun Winter of 1934.

Rarely has one gun changed the face of the firearms industry. Even more uncommon is a gun that changes the way you think about firearms. John Browning's gun did both. As the all-time best-selling over and under shotgun in North America, the Browning Superposed is rich in tradition and unsurpassed in quality craftsmanship. Ned Schwing penetrates the mystique surrounding the Browning Superposed, bringing to light the history behind the last of the high quality, hand-built, and hand-engraved over and under shotguns. Whether you are a Browning Superposed collector, or a hunter who enjoys the look and handling qualities of this great shotgun in the field, or even a trap or skeet shooter who uses the Superposed in competition, this book will bring hours of enjoyment looking back to the glory days of this time-tested firearm.You'll understand how the Superposed was finally put into production by John Browning's son, Val, and you'll sift through the past seventy years' worth of records, drawings, and data of the premier gun company of our time. Included are seventy-eight clear and concise tables and charts analyzing the Browning Superposed by year from 1931 to 1984. Through official sales records of the Superposed, learn how they were made and sold by gauge, model, grade, barrel length, and more.

*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading The Industrial Revolution that unfolded in Western societies at the dawn of the 19th century altered daily life as a rapidly developing paradigm. One historian suggests that in Europe and America, the highest known form of technology was the pipe organ before the rise of factories, steam drive combustion, and railway and communication breakthroughs built upon the mastery of electricity and transformed the standard processes of society. Such a rapid alteration of the prevailing world seemingly took place in a historical instant that propelled technology all the way to the age of powered flight. No less affected were the technological accomplishments that cast their influence over the wars so rampant in Europe through the past centuries. Military weapons benefited from various upgrades and innovations, even as the soldiers and generals remained confined within Napoleonic tactics while struggling to learn about the new principles of physics and engineering. Technological advancement within the field of mechanical engineering experienced a golden age in the 19th century. Virtually every profession that worked in the traditional materials of wood and metal developed a capacity for precision and functionality hitherto unknown. In the arena of portable weaponry for both the military and civilian population, several new inventions with endless variations redefined American and international habits of sport and war, not to mention exploration and frontier survival. The traditional musket had changed little through the previous century, and the insatiable quest for a repeat-firing mechanism remained as the arms industry's highest goal. The world knew that someone would find the solution and that future wars would occur, granting the nation to solve the riddle supremacy on the battlefield. The results of this pursuit were ushered in by several luminaries on the heels of an industrial revolution that had reshaped British industrial technology only a few decades prior. By the late 19th century, the nature of war weaponry, new naval paradigms and the first imaginings of aviation as a primary component of battle required yet another leap in technology. One single artisan arose from among many talents to meet the new challenge at a high level, far from the prestigious pistol and rifle factories of Connecticut. John Moses Browning was raised in what was at the time the "Wild West" of the Utah Country. His educational upbringing was both sparse and basic, but through the impetus of his father's gun-making business, he would become the greatest mind of the arms industry's modern age. Where Colt labored over one solitary concept that eventually led him to the modern repeating revolver, Browning's instinct proved able to visualize concepts far above his formal training and follow them through to a number of diverse and functional weapons. Although Winchester emerged into the greatest salesman of the modern repeating rifle and gathered early designers such as Benjamin Tyler Henry to his workshops, he was no inventor. Talents such as that of Browning were to be absorbed by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in order to maintain an ongoing superiority in product lines and sales numbers. The major weapons manufacturers soon realized that there was no talent equal to that of the Utah frontiersman, and in time he was employed by all the top gun-makers in the United States and Europe, including Fabrique Nationale in Belgium. There, he was granted well-deserved respect and the right to see his inventions find the light of day, sought after for so long. The breadth of Browning's mechanical brilliance is evidenced by the reality that his designs from the pre-World War I era are still in production, and many are considered to be among the finest available models more than a century later.

John Bainbridge, Jr.'s Gun Barons is a narrative history of six charismatic and idiosyncratic men who changed the course of American history through the invention and refinement of repeating weapons. Love them or hate them, guns are woven deeply into the American soul. Names like Colt, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and Remington are legendary. Yet few people are aware of the roles these men played at a crucial time in United States history, from westward expansion in the 1840s, through the Civil War, and into the dawn of the Gilded Age. Through personal drive and fueled by bloodshed, they helped propel the young country into the forefront of the world's industrial powers. Their creations helped save a nation divided, while planting seeds that would divide the country again a century later. Their inventions embodied an intoxicating thread of American individualism—part fiction, part reality—that remains the foundation of modern gun culture. They promoted guns not only for the soldier, but for the Everyman, and also made themselves wealthy beyond their most fevered dreams. Gun Barons captures how their bold inventiveness dwelled in the psyche of an entire people, not just in the minds of men who made firearm fortunes. Whether we revere these larger-than-life men or vilify them, they helped forge the American character.